Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

I think most of us have a keen interest in any new scientific studies that appear, especially those that are relevant to our health. I was thinking about all the research that has been done, and as I did, I thought about how the star of many of these studies goes relatively unnoticed and certainly under appreciated. Who is that, you ask? The poor unheralded lab rat! These, and other animals like them are often called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice with not so much as even a byline in the credits.

Animals in the Laboratory

I first learned about the use of animals in research as a child. Dr. J-Senior told me about the various projects he did and the animals he used in these. Sometimes I got to go with him to work, and I had the fun of playing with guinea pigs before either of us was aware of the fate that awaited them. When I found out, I often asked why they had to be sacrificed for the results. A perfect example of kids should be seen and not heard, I am sure.

I was further initiated into this scientific methodology when I worked as a lab assistant while in college. I was assigned to assist two graduate students whose bright idea was to test for a particular phenomena called the calcio-traumatic line. It seems that a “line” is created in the dentin of a forming tooth during periods of altered growth due to a traumatic episode experienced by the individual.

These creative guys decided that they would traumatize the rats with various methods that would make waterboarding look like a walk in the park. They took the rats on several near death excursions, then sacrificed them and looked at their previously growing teeth to see if a line was formed.

I just read a recent study that involved looking into early life stress as a predictor of cardiovascular disease. The study used a proven model of chronic behavioral stress, separating rat pups from their mother three hours daily for two weeks.

When these traumatized rats — to say nothing of their traumatized mothers — reached adulthood, an infusion of the hormone angiotensin II resulted in rapid and dramatic increases in all key stress indicators in animals that experienced this separation. “They cannot adapt to stress as well as a normal animal does,” Dr. Pollock said. “Within a
few days, for example, blood pressure was nearly twice as high in the animals that experienced early life stress.”

Did this really need to be studied? Don’t you think that being an abandoned child would lead to significant emotional scaring to say nothing about how it would effect the mother’s concerns about their daily kidnapped offspring?

I wondered if there has ever been an experiment on rats where they were treated to a club med vacation and studied to see how their happy markers were elevated. Actually, there was one study in the hippie days of the 60′s, not surprisingly, when they used lab rats to study what was termed happiness. Unfortunately, it was a Tim Burton version of that emotion, electrically created by implanted electrodes in the rat’s brain pleasure center — previously identified with the use of cocaine — where the poor addicted rat could repeatedly hit a bar and self pleasure itself.

Now recently I did see a story about a lab rat flying a plane! That sounded promising. Under further investigation, however, it wasn’t exactly an accurate headline. It seems that they cultured brain cells from a killed rat and taught this Franken-brain to fly a plane on a flight simulator. Scientists at the University of Florida taught the brain — grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo — to fly an F-22 jet simulator.

“When we first hooked them up, the plane crashed all the time,” Dr. DeMarse said. “But over time, the neural network slowly adapts as the brain learns to control the pitch and roll off the aircraft. After a while, it produces a nice, straight and level trajectory.”

I wonder, if my neural cells were used, would they fly as well, and how well would I fly with them missing!

Saving the Day

I was once asked if I were a cartoon character who would I be? Other than a short stint as a superhero, thanks to the generosity of CalorieLab, my choice was Mighty Mouse. Of the reasons I gave was, besides his saving the day, as a mouse he could be in all kinds of cool laboratory experiments. I think I would like to revisit that thought as Mighty Mouse wearing my STUDY THIS shirt, and save the day by letting a few scientists experience their own research protocol and see how well they like it.

There has been an ongoing discussion among scientists as to the value of human research using animal models. I may be in the minority, but I do not feel with all the other tools available to perform research that the use of animals is as vital as some may think. Early in my career I did a few studies, which also used laboratory animals, but I was bothered by this and soon stopped the practice. There is a cruelty aspect that concerns me, and I now feel it is unnecessary to do research on animals to study the human condition, because significant results can be obtained by other means.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 and is filed under Dr. J will see you now. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Permalink.