So in case you were wondering what I do when I pack up my Josef Mengele-brand little steel tray of pokey-things and traipse upstairs to the Animal Facility to spread woe and sow terror among the four-footed, PETA has recently cobbled a lovely
comic book together to explain things for you. I especially enjoy using my Dr. Octopus needle/scissors decapitation machine. Thanks, Fisher Scientific! Got a free t-shirt with that order. We are really lucky: Not since Maus has anyone harnessed the power of the comic book to set the record straight on true atrocity.
I was pretty off yesterday after getting back to work. I should've stayed there only until maybe 6 but I lingered until 10 and went home to be a vegetable. It doesn't take much to depress me, and finding out my landlord is screwing me over along with dropping 500 on a tow and the too much sun I got in the towyard really did it. My bike is like 700 pounds and really wipes you out to move it around by yourself, and that kind of activity usually makes me feel better but knowing it's just another shackle now kind of turned the whole gig into a bummer.
But I don't want to get any medicine for anything because drugs are always bad for you (I'm sure that was the title for my dissertation to the pharmacology dept). Actually I don't want to have any mental health treatments in my medical records and I have a rather profound distrust of mental health professionals (except for my good friend
silversledge and his wife but only because I know them personally). I never felt so miserable as after I moved here though: the people are the worst and maybe I'll never get why. I want to forget I ever came here when my time is done, and go to another area. Maybe the West coast or maybe Europa Europa. I have a year to decide. I had a headhunter call me at work a week or so ago to see if I was interested in leaving academia to get a job in an industry position. I told her to call me back in a year. I should have reached through the phone and began begging her to throw me one of those golden parachutes I hear so much about so I can fly away like Mary Poppins' umbrella.
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Animal research isn't only done for the purposes of determining safe drug dosages and interactions though. Animal models are used to determine if complex biological hypotheses are 'physiological', that is to say are actually the way things work in life, and not just in the unique cell lines scientists work with most of the time. Things often look like they are true in little dishes but in real animals with real bodies, the rest of the regulatory systems exert their influence and often it isn't much like the dish-hypotheses.
For instance we have mice which are 'knockouts', which means they lack, from conception, a particular gene. I have cells from these mice which do as well and we could restrict our work to the cells, which live forever. But only in the mice could my boss discover that the lack of that gene allows them to develop a rare bladder disease, and only in these mice could I discover a few weeks ago that their pheromone regulation may be profoundly disordered.