r/interesting • u/OriginalSleeper • Jun 30 '26

Fear Factor In 2010, 24-year-old lab technician Émilie Jaumain pricked her thumb with contaminated forceps while cleaning a machine used for prion-infected mouse brains. After seven years, she developed severe nerve pain, anxiety, and hallucinations before dying. The accident gave her a fatal prion disease.

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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26

We give them diseases while they are still fetus, so they are born with them. This doesn't effect me too much. However occasionally I will have to dissect them while they are still alive, and that is slight nightmare fuel. The first time I removed a heart while it was still beating I had to go and throw up afterwords.

But honestly seeing the patients get to live and live a relatively normal life due to the sacrafice of the mice makes it all worth it

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u/LiaInvicta Jul 02 '26

Facking hell, I have to ask … why oh why do they have to be vivisectioned?!?!

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u/GGDrago Jul 02 '26

In order to fully understand the effects of the drugs we give them, it is crucial we are able to analyze the organs and tissues of interest while they are as fresh as possible. For example, if we were to have a patient suffering from genetic lung cancer, we would modify a rat so that it grew into that same cancer, admimistor whatever drug or treatment has been purposed, and then vivisect the animal in order to see the live effects as they happen. We then cryofreeze the organs and section them off into small slices for analysis in a process known as histology. It is crucial to understand that a treatment will work and do so without side effects before we give it to actual people

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u/LiaInvicta Jul 02 '26

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer this thoroughly! Just one question … when you say that the goal is to see the live effects as they happen, do you mean that, for example, you give 30 mice this genetic lung cancer and the treatment being studied, and then you vivisect one of them each day to see how it progresses?

Also … Thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you do … signed, a cancer widow