Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
jsomers.netI 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...
A beautifully-written and moving story; thanks for posting it. Have you written any other fiction? I couldn't see it (or even this one) in the list of writing on your frontpage.
Wholeheartedly approve your reading list, by the way. O Caledonia in particular is an under-recognized gem; I've never seen anyone else capture the awesomeness of squirrels the way she does:
> Calm and tranced she walked up through the beeches again and saw two red squirrels leaping along their sinuous branches; they leapt and curvetted, stopped dead, flourished their tails and were off again, swift and smooth, fleeting like light up the trunks, so bright and merry and joyous that she wanted to shriek with delight.
You see awesomeness in a squirrel, I see a pest to eradicate.
It seems perfectly in character that your response would be so sparse while your interlocutor was so evocative.
Your story does a great job at highlighting the small but profound every-day experiences of working in a lab with living beings as test subjects. It's hard to put into words the strength of wonder you can acquire for life working as a scientist or animal handler -- you have immense depth of understanding of the microscopic scale biology while simultaneously seeing it at work in real time in the whole animal (or society of animals) on the macro scale. It's the biology equivalent to the "pale blue dot" sentiment.
The only similar deep, profound awe at life I've had outside of the lab was when my son was born. This might be the most common way people achieve this state of being. In all honesty this was one of the best parts of lab work. For me it happened every day; you're reminded of the insane complexity and the high degree of frailty of life. The terribly large power difference between yourself and a small animal in your hand. The deep similarities between humans and other animals, and at the same time, the worlds of difference. For me these experiences in the lab day after day put many other things in life on a lower rung, for better or for worse (like sustaining grad student pay and living conditions perhaps). But I wouldn't trade having that experience for anything.
Your story hints at this beautifully, and I hope others get the chance to feel that feeling.
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.
I kept waiting for Chekhov’s gun (the sphere) to be fired.. but then the story ended.
I enjoyed it, to be sure, but I guess I went in expecting it to be more Stross-y.
It has a distinct lack of anti-evangelical rants to be Stross-y.
I'm a big fan of Charles Stross.
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.”
I really enjoyed this. Thanks!
[flagged]
This is the comment that you go personal attack-y on?
> This is done as humanely as possible, of course.
As humanely as possible within the constraints of time, budget, and "I really want to know what happens when I do X to these animals" I guess.
It's amazing what kind of things we can sweep away with a quick "it's for [my assumption of] the greater good".
Thank you, your story was excellent.
> She would have died having never seen the sky.
It’s too much to bear.
The story has a really tragic implication though...
It strongly hints that millions will die in pain from the knowledge that the post-doc "lost" and that the other rats in the cohort died in vain.
I disagree. Replicating and dying is the nature of animal life. Breaking the cycle would eventually flood the world with immortal life that would have to eventually almost exclusively feed on each other, since everything else has been grazed off.