THE INTIMACY OF LABORATORY ENCOUNTERS
Successful encounters with lab animals require significant training and practice. This springs in large part from the realities that one must follow strict protocols when managing, handling, and working around experimental subjects, and that learning takes time and can take a toll on both animal and researcher (Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007; Friese and Clarke 2012; Macdonald 2014). Lack of familiarity with other species plays a significant role too. Whereas nearly all animal technicians and lab veterinarians I have interviewed grew up around animals (who might have been house pets, hunting breeds, or livestock), few researchers could make such claims. In turn, whereas animal technicians and veterinarians gravitate to lab work because they are inspired by a deep affection for non-human species, researchers are drawn to their work because of the science itself. And although many of their respective activities overlap, an animal technician’s primary concerns are animal care and enrichment, while a researcher’s is mastering approaches that facilitate the generation of quality data.
Animal research entails a specialized set of skills that ultimately shapes one’s professional arc as a scientist. Such mastery never really rests for long in a stable state. One may claim this is so because no two animals are really alike, but research ethics plays a significant role too. To draw on the language of the Three Rs—replacement, reduction, and refinement—quality animal research is constantly undergoing change, and these guiding concepts are equally relevant to research design, species preference, and experimental activities. At the onset of their careers, lab researchers must master a two-pronged approach to animal experiments: as they master specialized skills, they must also learn to do so with emotional detachment. Not unlike novice clinicians, strong sympathetic responses of queasiness, sorrow, guilt, or fear signal that one lacks the emotional backbone to work productively in a lab environment.
Although lay readers might assume that seasoned researchers become hardened to animal welfare, my findings demonstrate the opposite. Instead, my data demonstrate that the most experienced lab personnel often prove to be the most empathetic toward the animals with whom they work. In the words of one senior lab director, he eventually learned over the decades to “to think like a monkey,” a sensibility he strives to impart to his graduate students. This affective register, however, is easily overlooked because it tends to be embedded in the mundane, patterned behaviors of quotidian laboratory practices. Close attention to researchers’ thoughts and actions nevertheless reveals how presumably standardized, orthodox routines can also offer compelling evidence of still other eclectic, contradictory, and affective thought and action. With this in mind I ask: How does one learn to master emotional detachment? How might this affective order shift over time? In turn, how do ideas about the morality of animal welfare transform lab space or enable researchers to expand the boundaries of care that correspond to mandated codes of conduct? Of what significance, too, are hierarchies of species preference in shaping human sentiments toward lab animals? In answer, I offer case examples from my research. I begin with the experiences of an entry-level lab assistant, followed by examples involving more seasoned researchers.
Mastering Detachment
Alicia, a studious and serious Anglo twenty-two-year-old with brassy red hair, recently graduated from a four-year private college in the Midwest with high honors in biology and neuroscience. Although she originally imagined attending medical school and becoming either a pediatrician or obstetrician, by the end of her sophomore year she realized how much she enjoyed the task-oriented culture of the science lab. While interning for a summer in the sleepy emergency room of her rural hometown’s community hospital, she reached the conclusion that she “lacks the enthusiasm needed for a cheerful bedside manner,” a sentiment I have encountered elsewhere among bioengineers who describe their own professional trajectories as being shaped by the self-realization that each of them “is not a people person” (Sharp 2013). Following graduation, Alicia moved not far from her college to a large cosmopolitan city that is well known as a medical research hub. She applied for half a dozen entry-level lab technician jobs at three separate private research universities, and she had the luxury of choosing among several offers. In the end, she opted for a position that would enable her to acquire “hands-on experience with rodents” so that she could “work [her] way up the evolutionary chain” because, to date, her lab experience was “limited to microorganisms.” Although she found this previous research “fascinating in terms of the science,” she felt that involvement with rodents meant “testing whether she liked working with mammalian vertebrates”; also, this would help her decide what her next career move should be. Like the majority of researchers I encounter, she did not grow up with animals. As she explained, “my parents are both chemists and neither one of them likes pets very much, so we never had any.” By the time I met her, she had been fully engaged in a mouse lab for the past nine months, and she had found that she “loves the work.”
Alicia spends nearly all of her hours each day in a vast vivarium, a cavernous, windowless room that, she estimates, “houses close to nine thousand mice” who are associated with a range of university labs engaged in diverse projects. Her activities confine her to a small corner of the vivarium, where she tends to several hundred animals associated with research on various cancers conducted by her lab’s principal investigator (PI or lab director) and his graduate and postdoctoral students. Alicia has been busy mastering selective breeding techniques, in which approximately one-fourth of the offspring in each litter bear the desired traits; the remaining pups are “culled” or “sacked” (from “sac,” a diminutive form of “sacrifice,” or the term commonly used in laboratories for euthanizing animals). She described the learning process to me as follows:
ALICIA: On my first day I learned all of this mouse stuff. The guy I was replacing was leaving [for graduate school], and he taught me how to pick up and handle a mouse [she demonstrates how to do so, as if she is holding an invisible animal by the base of the tail]. At first they’d run away from me. I finally learned how to just reach in and grab them and pick them up. It took me a long time to be able to do this—now I look back on it and wonder why it took me so long—now it seems so obvious to me how to do it. I now regularly do tail snips [for DNA samples] and toe clippings [for numbering]. It took me a long time to learn the numbering—I’d have to go look at my spreadsheets, memorize what to do, and say it over and over to myself as I walked over to where the mice were. Now I can do it without worrying—I know the system now.
LS: How did you feel at first about doing this to the mice [that is, clipping off their toes and tips of tails]?
ALICIA: I’d screw up and do more pain [to them] than necessary. I’d think, “This sucks—these mice have to put up with me as I learn.” It’s very unintuitive.
LS: Can you explain the numbering system to me?
ALICIA: I’ve clipped to 3551. We only clip for the last two numbers. We have a spreadsheet. 3551 tells us parentage, D.O.B. [date of birth], age—today is day 1—sex, genotype. And then it’s set up by cage—we have a cage list. All cages have names. For example, one refers to a knock-out gene; another a black background [referring to the mouse’s coat and colony]. I work with a black mouse. I can make a homogenous background [meaning, she can breed mice so some are born all black. She then describes other codes that designate still other genetic traits.] It takes a mouse six weeks