Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Daily Douchebag: BALB/c mice
DOB: the strain originated when Halsey Bagg purchased a pair of albino mice from a mouse dealer in Ohio in 1913
Occupation: I'd say "guinea pigs," but since they're mice, I'll say "experimental subjects"
Hometown: Memorial Hospital, New York via Ohio
Current residence: my lab's infrequently used chemical fume hood so J-Sexy and SisterChristian won't bitch about my rodents stinking up the lab
Douchebaggery: No matter what a grad student works on, whether it be yeast, worms, flies, cells, viruses, bacteria, mice, rats, monkeys, or whatever else, there's one thing that everyone has to do which is the scourge of our existence: a timecourse experiment. This involves setting up whatever you're doing and taking samples at different times afterward, usually as inconveniently as possible. In my case, this means infecting mice with virus and dissecting out their respiratory tracts, then making smoothies out of them with my trusty power tissue homogenizer. It's the time of my life. There's nothing more entertaining and delightful than spending a very long day whipping up infected tracheal homogenates. It's better than sex. It's...also apparently opposite day.
I had to get up this morning at 4:30 a.m. to start an epic experiment involving
I shouldn't complain too much because this was the lot I cast when I signed up to do mousework in a virology lab. Lengthy timecourses are part of the package. When I get this experiment to work and can demonstrate that rhinovirus is growing in my mice, I will get to write a banging first-author paper and graduate. However, I'm seriously annoyed because I could have been working on this experiment months ago if it weren't for the stupid mice. My mice are housed in what's called a barrier facility. This means that there are certain procedures and controls in place to prevent outbreaks of mouse diseases. Obviously, when you have thousands of mice all living in close proximity, epidemics can be devastating. Unfortunately, my stupid mice decided to go and get mouse hepatitis virus anyway because some dipshit wasn't following barrier protocol, and I had to stop breeding them for three months to clear out the epidemic. While this wasn't ALL bad (I got some face time with this hot veterinarian, and spent it dropping sexy virus talk all over his fine ass), it really set my work back. Then, when I begged the hot DVM to let me resume breeding and he grudgingly gave me permission, my mice were all old and not at the height of fecundity. Mice only reproduce until they're about a year old, and many of my breeding pairs were eight or nine months old, so the females were disinterested in the old, fat males they were caged with. The few pairs who still apparently had an active sex life produced small litters. I had to use what remained of my young, virile, experiment-worthy mice to set up new breeding cages, thus making me wait another few weeks for sires to rape the dams in estrus and produce some pups for me to experiment on.
Finally, after a month of trying to get my mice to get down and get pregs and not eat their young, I managed to scrounge enough mice together to do half of this lousy experiment. Hopefully enough of the recently born mice will avoid consumption by their mothers long enough to be weaned and participate in the other half of this experiment next week. With my luck, there will probably be an outbreak of mousepox in the barrier and all my mousework will be delayed another six months. I swear these bastards are conspiring to keep me in grad school via epidemics of every disease EXCEPT human rhinovirus and a refusal to reproduce like the rodents with nothing better to do that they are. It's pretty sad that I'm being outwitted by a strain of witless vermin inbred via twenty-six generations of brother-sister mating. Pretty sad, indeed.
Labels: Daily Douchebag, epidemic geekery, grad school bullshit, mice, Rxxx Sxxxxxx, science, viruses rule
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