WISE journal entry #6

Name: Leah Gerald

Entry: #6 (2/29/2012)

WISE Week: 3

Written on Date:3/4/2012

Mentor: Sagar


today I did not expect what happened to happen. I walked in, and my mentor was dissecting a little mouse on what looked like an operation table to me. I'm a bit squeamish, and I didn't see this coming, so that was a real shocker for me. these mice were part of there experiment though, he wasn't just doing this for fun. they had mice which they inserted some cancer cells in earlier, and they needed to take the brains out so they could look at the results. they hadn't planned on taking them out on that day, but because some of the mice were dying before they expected, they wanted to extract the brains from the still alive mice before they became useless. so that day consisted of a lot of mice deaths, which took a great deal of time. first, they had to weigh the mouse so they could know how much anesthesia to give them. then, once they gave the mouse the anesthesia, Sagar would put them on a foil table in this section off to the side and pin them down. once pinned down, he has to pump saline solution into the right atrium (sorry if I'm wrong) and drain the blood from the left atrium, so there will not be any blood in the brain when they take it out, and they can clearly see what they are looking for. once that is done, they add some formalin so that the cells will preserve and can sit for a while without decomposing and stuff. they had to repeat this process with several mice, so this day was very much a watching day. I didn't want to have any part with the process with these mice, so I didn't look at the mice as much as I could, but every once in a while I'd try to sneak a peak to help desensitize myself. after a while I could look at the mouse without feeling sick, so I'd say that was my progress for the day.