Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]

I thought the HN crowd would appreciate this story I wrote about the keeper of a university's lab animals. In reporting articles about science, and being a biology-watcher generally, I’ve had an uneasy time squaring my enthusiasm for cutting-edge biomedical research with the fact that this research so regularly involves breeding animals just to give them diseases and kill them. This is done as humanely as possible, of course.

The contrast hit me most vividly during the pandemic when I was writing an article about the immune system. [1] One of the scientists I spoke to told me about putting hamsters on warming plates, picking them up gently — in general, caring for and about them — and then feeling grief at their deaths. But of course understanding the immune response during infection with covid was a worthy cause. I felt no judgement towards this scientist; they are in a difficult position.

There was another more direct bit of inspiration, when I read this article [2], in 2023, about the toll that caring for laboratory animals could take on people’s mental health:

> Besides the symptoms Sessions experienced, those who handle lab animals may face insomnia, chronic physical ailments, zombielike lack of empathy, and, in extreme cases, severe depression, substance abuse, and thoughts of suicide. As many as nine in 10 people in the profession will suffer from compassion fatigue at some point during their careers, according to recent research, more than twice the rate of those who work in hospital intensive care units. It’s one of the leading reasons animal care workers quit.

That left an impression on me, and also armed me with a character: the forgotten-about, somewhat miserable vivarium worker.

The story obviously takes many liberties with fact — it is fiction — but I also tried to ground it in reality, and stuff that you might think I made up (the guillotine, the crazy VR sphere in the first paragraph), I did not.

I hope you enjoy! If nothing else I expect you’ll appreciate the illustrations, done by my friend Ben Smith [3].

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-the-corona...

[2]: https://www.science.org/content/article/suffering-silence-ca...

[3]: https://www.stephenbonesproductions.com/

Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
jsomers.net

I really enjoyed this. Thanks!

Vivarium workers are so important. And yeah, both they and a lot of students suffer a lot of grief rooted in a necessary but empathetically hard part of their job.

This was honestly an extremely tough read for me. Very well written, and beautiful nonetheless. Some of this only can come from someone who’s walked in that world before.

I have a lot of PTSD from my doctoral work with mice. My gut reaction to the FDA starting to move away from animal models is, “thank god.”

> She would have died having never seen the sky.

It’s too much to bear.