Most notable thing I did:
Put two 22 day old GAD67-GFP knock-in mice to sleep, perfused its brain and sliced it (the brain) up.
How I felt:
Awful
My actual thoughts when anesthetizing the mouse:
These mice are Aquarius. Not the point. Please be asleep mousie, don't feel pain. I'm sorry.
What was running through my head when I was opening it up:
Don't wake up. Ack! It's pumping heart is tiny. Where's the right atrium? Now Eva, make the incision at the left ventricle carefully, all the way through to the left atrium, don't pierce anything else. The mouse should not have died in vain.
Upon draining its blood supply, I perfused the mouse with saline and a fixative. I watched its liver turn from red to yellow. The mouse was stiff at the end of it all and its brain well fixed. So the task of harvesting the brain began. Skull-membrane separation etc. The end result, a white, kidney bean-sized blob of brain immersed gently in media and coronal slices in the order of microns were made.
I was to study the pituitary cortex, hippocampus, neocortex and possibly the olfactory tubercle for the first phase of my work. The brain is beautiful. The hippocampus (even when viewed without staining, with the naked eye) is ethereal. A set of angel wings suspended delicately in the middle of the slice.
More unrelated thoughts that strayed into a stranger neighborhood:
Since we believe that we have the right to breed animals for lab experimentation for bettering our species, we must be fair about it. If a "higher" species were breeding humans and experimenting on us in the same way, I should not complain. I can't. Believe you me, I would like it not a bit but to think that we alone had a mandated right over all other creatures would be unjust.
