Do you want to make a mouse happy? Because nothing makes a mouse happier than a fruit loop. You give a mouse a fruit loop? Oh man, it's like watching a human eat a car tire. Bethany Brookshire is an author and journalist. And while plenty of people see mice as pests, she is a special place for them in her heart. They eat it all in one sitting. They end and they're like measurably larger than when they began. And then they just flop off in the cage just leaping off. And wait, that's just a single fruit loop, right? It's so cute, yes, yes. Bethany doesn't know about the fruit loop thing because she keeps mice as pets. She knows about this stuff because in a previous life, she used to work as a biomedical pharmacologist studying treatments for things like chronic depression and ADHD. And so I would give them their little injections and most of the injections are given in their little bellies. So you just pick them up in one hand and you tuck the tail with your pinky because otherwise they'll get it in the way. And you just give them a little quick shot and then you put them back in. And I would do this at the beginning and at the end of every day. And when I was doing experiments, it would depend on the experiment. So sometimes I would have animals that had been receiving treatment and then I would have behavioral experiments that I would do. I put mice in mazes. That is a thing that real scientists do. That is a thing that we do. More than two dozen Nobel Prizes have been awarded for discoveries that relied on mouse studies. Countless drugs saving countless human lives were tested first on mice. Different studies and statements have pegged the total number of U.S. lab rodents at somewhere between 10 and 110 million animals. And maybe none of this is very surprising, but have you ever wondered where they all come from? Like, where does the lab get a lab mouse? There's a catalog and you can just go and say, I would like a mouse with this particular receptor knocked out and they might have it. How do they ship them to you, by the way? They kind of look like KFC containers. Really? Like, you know those round chicken buckets? Yeah. They look exactly like that. Do you just get it in the mail? Like, is it just like UPS just pulls up with a KFC container full of mice? Usually it's a palette. Like it's a big palette. But yeah. I'm Nate Hedgie and today on Outside In, we are talking all about mice. Specifically, the careful invention of the world's most popular model organism, the lab mouse. We'll talk about what they are, why they're so important in the world of science, and get a peek inside one of the places where the world's most relied upon lab mice are bread and sold every year. We're at about 13,000 strains we're distributing right now, with different mutations, different genetic backgrounds, all of that. So it's quite a big operation. Did you ever wrestle with kind of the ethical questions that ever make you feel uneasy? Constantly. Stay with us. I'm Chris Morgan. Join me on the next season of The Wild as we bring you up close to extraordinary creatures that are finding ways to adapt and thrive in their fast-changing world. From the Jaguar, trying to navigate a giant steel border wall, to the Hummingbird, searching for its next meal of nectar calories. Oh, I've got a hummingbird in my hand. That is magical. We unravel the mysteries of the natural world and find hope in the most unexpected places. Listen to The Wild with Chris Morgan wherever you get your podcasts. Right now, a guide dog puppy is taking her very first steps. One day, she'll help someone with sight loss live a full and independent life. Find the crossing best. Good girl. When you sponsor a puppy with guide dogs, you're there for it all. Her wobbly walks, her first harness, the life-changing partnership. It's more than a donation. It's the start of a life-changing story. Search, sponsor a guide dog puppy. And be part of a story you'll be proud to share. Guide dogs. Welcome back. I'm Nate Hedgie, and this is Outside In. Today, there are a few different species of rodents used in labs. Brown rats and deer mice, for example. But most of them belong to what is arguably the most successful species of them all. Musc, musculus. The house mouse. From the instant we had houses, we had house mice. That's Bethany again, now speaking in her role as a science journalist and the author of the book Pests, How Humans Create Animal Villains. So this was in the Levant, in an area that's now Israel, Palestine, Jordan, etc. And this area was the place where kind of humans first tried out housekeeping, just trying it on, building these permanent structures. And yet, they had mice. Since that fateful introduction, people have had a complicated relationship with mice. Mostly, we see them as pests, to be caught or killed or at least chewed away. But throughout history, they've also been worshipped, revered, or kept as pets. And in the 1800s, people in Britain and the United States started breeding mice, just like we do with cats and dogs. Can you actually explain what a mouse fancy is? So the mouse fancy is breeding mice for show. There's one called like a Russian blue, and it has long blue-grey fur. There's like nice little names for the different colors of, and like different fur types. There is definitely a mouse that has curly fur. It's like a tiny, incredibly stupid-looking poodle. One of the biggest breeders in the biz was named Abby Lathrop. Around the turn of the 20th century, she was breeding more than 10,000 fancy mice out of her farm in Massachusetts. She was meticulous in her work. She kept extensive records of what each mouse breed looked like and how they behaved. This became handy when some of her mice developed skin lesions. It was cancer. Before I go on, I should explain that before the invention of the lab mouse, a lot of scientific experiments were conducted on dogs. You remember that study about Pavlov's response? The experiment we were told about in middle school, where scientists conditioned doggos to drool for food when they rang a bell? Well, it wasn't as cute as you might have imagined, because those studies involved operating on live canines. They basically were opening up dog stomachs in order to see whether or not they were salivating and whether or not acid was being produced in their stomachs. This, by the way, is Karen Rader. And I'm a professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University. Back in the early 1900s, operating on animals for research was called vivisection. And the animal activists in those days, the PETA, if you will, were called anti-vivisectionists. This was a time of rapid scientific growth. We were just discovering the principles of genetics, evolution, and medicine. But the public didn't love the idea that gaining knowledge required the dissection of puppies and bunnies. Mice, on the other hand, to most people, they were just pests. When you label something a pest, you say that animal has no value. You say it's okay to do whatever you need to do to get rid of that animal. And now they have this huge value in the research that we do with them. But that value would not be possible without us hating them in the first place. All right, back to those mice with skin lesions. So Abby Lathrop showed her mice to scientists, and they found that some breeds were getting cancer more or less than others. That meant that, like different colored coats or curly hair, predisposition to cancer was something that was being passed down from generation to generation. And that's where the father of the lab mouse finally comes into the story. That story begins with Clarence Cook Little. Karen Rader wrote a whole book about how lab mice came to be, and she spends most of it talking about this guy, C.C. Little. Some would say he was outgoing and visionary and entrepreneurial. Others would say he was stubborn and had an administrative style that was very brash and clashed with many people. So he was, like most of us, a mixed bag. In the 1910s, C.C. Little was a track runner and aspiring zoologist at Harvard. He thought mice were the future of animal research. And what he wanted to do was study the genetics of mammals. So within that framework, what he decided he was going to do was try to use mice to understand human heredity. He did this the same way that mouse fanciers did. Through inbreeding. By mating each round of mice with close relatives, they could isolate traits and learn more about how they were passed down. It's basically the analog form of genetic modification. You don't need crisper or any special equipment of any kind, really. All you need to do is pick who mates with who. So Little got to work. And by the 1920s, he bred his first strain from Abbey Leithrop's fancy mice. And he named it the C57BL6. A couple of things about C57BL6 or Black 6 as it's often called. It's got a dark brown coat. It displays a trait called barboring, where dominant males will pluck fur or whiskers off of other mice. Also, it likes alcohol and is more susceptible to morphine addiction than other strains of mice. But probably the most important thing you should know about the Black 6 is that it is one of the most popular, most widely used strains of lab mice in the world. And that's in part thanks to the automotive industry. After college, C.C. Little went on to become president of the University of Maine. And while he was there, he rubbed shoulders with some of the folks vacationing in the famous town of Bar Harbor. Among them was Roscoe B. Jackson, president of the Hudson Motor Company. He introduced Little to other big shots like Edzel Ford. The son of Henry Ford and the head of Ford Motorworks. And Richard Weber, who was the head of the now defunct JL Hudson department stores. They were all guys who specialized in mass production. And they saw potential in C.C. Little's mice. Just like how cars were being churned out in Uber Efficient Assembly lines, they envisioned a lab where you could bring the principles of mass production to science by pumping out genetically modified mice. So the automakers helped C.C. Little fund a brand new lab, the Jackson Laboratory. Now, if pumping out mice via assembly line, which is just a metaphor by the way, that's not how they actually do it. If that sounds a little dystopian to you, you're not alone. Because behind the invention of the lab mouse is an undeniable fact. C.C. Little was a leading eugenicist. He believed that the selective breeding programs he used for mice could also improve the quality of human beings as a species. And in 1928, he delivered an address at the Third Race Betterment Conference in Battle Creek, Michigan, sponsored by Kellogg. That's John Harvey Kellogg, the guy who patented that famous cereal. Although I should say that it was his brother who went on to found the company we all know today. Anyways, this was a conference with talks like the menace of the melting pot myth and race betterment. What can we do about it? And he said, quote, many people are born more or less effective in one or another of their constitutional elements. And in the correction of these deficiencies, we are to make real advances, unquote. Now, C.C. Little didn't just speak at this conference. He was the president of the conference. That makes him a key American leader for a global movement that promoted forced sterilization programs in the US and other countries and inspired the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. There was no scientific basis for the eugenics movement. It's been discredited repeatedly by scientists as a thin veil for ableism, bigotry, and white supremacy. C.C. Little himself backed away from his views of eugenics during World War II as the Holocaust showed the extent of the destruction, xenophobia, and hate that eugenics values fuel. But people haven't forgotten his connection to the movement, which is why a couple of buildings named after C.C. Little have been renamed over the past few years. But where scientists would eventually turn against the eugenics movement for humans, the same principles are central to the very concept of C.C. Little's lab mouse. Yeah, and that was actually one of the selling points when C.C. Little went to sell mice to the public and most particularly to scientists. The idea that you could create these rigorously controlled experiments that kind of take the scientific method to a really, really extreme place where we can carefully control for so many variables and only change the things that we want to see. Little sold the idea of the lab mouse to a wider scientific community on at least three basic premises. One of them was that mice offered researchers unparalleled control over their experiments. So much of science is trying to eliminate variables, and inbred lab mice are a practically unlimited source of genetically similar test subjects. Pitch number two, humans needed mice to help find cures for diseases. Diseases like cancer, which scientists at the time didn't know much about. Throughout the teens and twenties, cancer was becoming both a publicly and a scientifically interesting disease. So it was actually Roscoe B. Jackson. Again, that was one of C.C. Little's biggest donors who pushed Little to understand that there were public health aspects to doing research on mice and mouse cancers. And he even promised him that might be a way to get more funds because everyone has had a friend or family member touched by the disease of cancer. And finally, C.C. Little convinced the scientific community and the public at large that mice were the perfect lab animal because, well, because they were mice. In 1937, he wrote a fiery piece in the scientific American called A New Deal for Mice. Goes like this. Do you like mice? Of course you don't. Useless vermin, disgusting little beast, or something worse is what you are likely to think as you physically or mentally climb a chair. So with that colorful image in place as the starting point, he said, let me be the attorney for the defense and tell you how mice in their involvement with science have been positively transformed. At first, all this PR work was in the service of the Jackson Laboratory's research arm, which was studying cancer and mammalian genetics. But when the Great Depression hit, donors drastically cut their contributions. And C.C. Little had to think of something else to keep the research going. I think he really wanted to find the causes for cancer. But the raw truth of the economics at Jackson at that time was they needed to sell mice if they were going to stay alive. So in the end, it was financial hardship that prompted a kind of consumer-centered ethos and almost completely took over the lab's original goal of breeding and using inbred mice to solve genetic riddles that went beyond cancer. In other words, the Jackson Laboratory, or JAX Lab for short, became the number one source of inbred lab mice. They developed new strains with traits specifically designed for different kinds of research. They sold them to universities and private labs around the country by the KFC bucket load. Mice became a kind of scientific bandwagon. That's a term that sociologists use to talk about the ways that research areas become hot. C.C. Little eventually moved on from the Jackson Laboratory to work with the tobacco industry. But there is no question that his mission worked. The JAX Lab created a whole new paradigm in scientific research. In the 1990s, a JAX representative claimed their lab mice accounted for 95% of all lab mice worldwide. Today, researchers from across the world can order them online. There are strains ideal for researching Alzheimer's, ALS, type 2 diabetes. You can buy lab mice young or pre-aged, or you can buy frozen mouse embryos or frozen mouse sperm. And without them, we would be decades behind where we are now in science and medicine. Organ transplants? Made possible because of research on JAX mice. The COVID vaccine. If it weren't for JAX, we wouldn't have gotten it for another five or six months. But all those advances come at a cost. One that many people would prefer not to think that much about. Did you ever wrestle with the ethical questions about using mice? Did it ever make you feel uneasy? Constantly. That's Bethany Brookshire again. And I've never met a scientist who does not think about that. And what about it made you uneasy or question it? Well, we work with hundreds of mice. Those mice do not live past the end of that experiment. So you've had to kill mice before? Yes. How do you kill the mice? So there are several ways. You have to keep in mind that mice are not covered under the animal welfare act. They're covered under a different piece of legislation. But there are laws around what you can and cannot do. And every experiment that I ever did, what went through something called an IACUC, which is an internal animal care and use committee. And this is a group of people that are gathered by the university. They are volunteer. And some of them are scientists. Some of them are administrators. And there's always at least one member of the public. Apparently, that's really big among clergy. Like almost everyone in the clergy has served on an IACUC. It's like a thing that they do. Yeah. And so every time I wanted to do an experiment with animals, I had to write up a full application for the IACUC. I had to submit it and say, this is what I'm going to do. If I do surgery on these animals, here is how I'm going to take away their pain. Here is how I'm going to anesthetize them for surgery. Here's what I'm going to do during recovery for surgery to make them feel better. Here is how I'm going to acceptably sacrifice my animals. And for what reason? And so there are a couple of approved ways in which you can sacrifice mice. The ways that I am most familiar with are chambers with CO2, which are very fast. And the one that I usually did, which is called cervical dislocation, that's breaking its neck. That is what I had to do because I needed their blood samples. And I also had to extract the brain and take brain samples. So I would be racing around, you know, kind of dissecting out this brain very, very quickly. Yeah. What was your kind of process? How would you break the neck? Scissors. Scissors. Okay. Yeah. You just put the scissors on the back of the mouse's neck behind the head, and then you pull the tail up. Okay. Really fast. Bethany would do what she could to make their lives better, as all labs are required to do. But that extra care, the compassion, the fruit loops, all of that only went so far to fight off her feelings. It never goes away. And for many people, when they're first learning, when they're in graduate school or even undergrad, it can be really, really emotionally very upsetting, sometimes even traumatizing. And when I would train students about this, and I would always try to prepare them and say like, here's what's going to happen. You need to recognize that what we're doing is tough, and it's ethically fraught. And I just want to note that scientists are not unfeeling monsters about this sort of thing. After the break, we send one of our producers inside the lab that started it all, the Jackson Laboratory. We'll be right back. Right now, a guide dog puppy is taking her very first steps. One day, she'll help someone with sight loss live a full and independent life. Find the crossing best. Good girl. When you sponsor a puppy with guide dogs, you're there for it all. Her wobbly walks, her first harness, the life changing partnership. It's more than a donation. It's the start of a life changing story. Search, sponsor a guide dog puppy and be part of a story you'll be proud to share. Guide dogs. Right now, a guide dog puppy is taking her very first steps. One day, she'll help someone with sight loss live a full and independent life. Find the crossing best. Good girl. When you sponsor a puppy with guide dogs, you're there for it all. Her wobbly walks, her first harness, the life changing partnership. It's more than a donation. It's the start of a life changing story. Search, sponsor a guide dog puppy and be part of a story you'll be proud to share. Guide dogs. Wait, wait, wait, don't skip this. Don't skip this. Don't skip this. This is not an ad. This is me, Nate, and I'm here to tell you that it is yet again time to open up the outside inbox to listener questions. We have been getting the most random submissions lately. Like can bobcats get hairballs or why does warm dirt smell so good? But we need more questions. So please send us the weirdest wackiest questions about science and the natural world that you can think of. It is super easy. You can call our hot line at 1-844-GO-AUTER or even better, send us a voice memo to outsideinradio at nhpr.org. Okay, back to the show. This is Outside In. I'm Nate Hedgie. Today, the Jackson Laboratory is still one of the biggest providers of lab mice in the world. But it's not quite what it was a few decades ago. And its founder, the eugenicist C.C. Little, no longer has his name on any of the buildings. But we wanted to know what does it actually look like inside the Jackson Lab? So we sent our producer, Jung Yoon-Han, to Bar Harbor, Maine to find out. And I'm walking to visitors entrance. Acadia National Park is one of the go-to summer spots in New England. But in one little corner of the park, you might notice a faint odor mixing in with the sea breeze. It smells a little weird. I don't know. It smells like a pet store. We're outside. This is, of course, the headquarters of Jackson Laboratory. And it's huge. 169 acres, huge. We try to blend in so much that people won't be like, you know, what is that big thing doing? Or, you know, and if they do know the mice, they tend to be really excited. Because, you know, all I worked with was mice and everything like that when I was in grad school or, you know, whatever. And so it's pretty fun. This is Mark Warner, Associate Director of Research Communications at JAX. So we have a lot of, like, neuroscience in this building. But they're also aging in cancer research, stem cell research. Inside, it almost looked like a really fancy university science building with state-of-the-art lab benches, equipment, and specialized research wings. Is that a fitness? Are those, is that a fitness center? Yeah, it's named after Douglas Coleman, who was an early metabolism researcher, and he found leptin. Jackson Labs is still a two-part operation. On the one hand, they do a lot of their own scientific work, studies on things like Alzheimer's and rare diseases like Huntington's. This is the East Research Building. We name things very prosaically here. This is the East Research Building and over... They collaborate with lots of different organizations and once even set mice into space to research muscle mass and bone density. On the other hand, they're still supporting that work through the breeding and sale of different strains of lab mice. We're at about 13,000 strains we're distributing right now. Yeah, so 13,000 strains of mice. So with different mutations, different genetic backgrounds, all of that. So it's quite a big operation. The scale here is pretty staggering. Jackson's nearly a dozen facilities in three different countries. In 2021, they reported over $350 million in revenue from, quote, genetic resources. That money dwarfs what Jackson makes every year from research grants and contributions and whole areas of the campus are dedicated to housing and taking care of their animals. Okay, so what are we looking at? So it's a large silo-looking thing, probably a few stories high, and it's a container that holds wood pellets like pellet stoves. Exactly the same thing. You can smell the wood. I can smell it, yeah. Yeah, and so what people think mice smell like actually smells like the cages and the bedding. And so when they're sterilizing the bedding for the mice, because it all gets sterilized in huge autoclaves, it smells like wood too. So sometimes there's an ambience around here. Let's just put it that way. An ambience of what? Of mice, of the wood shavings, of the chow. They sterilize the chow. Chow? The mouse food. So what do mice eat? Chow. Like a lot of details about how Jack's Labs operates, the folks here wouldn't tell me exactly what that means. What do you feed mice? So our mice are fed commercially available diets. That's Kristen Blanchett. She runs quality control programs at Jack's. I don't know if you want me to just, obviously we can't disclose the product just because for proprietary reasons. Proprietary reasons also kept me from peeking at something I really wanted to see, which is the place where they keep the mice called a vivarium. Like I don't want to go into like super, super detail for you because it's hard to explain without seeing it. If I did have access though, I'd have to go through a full-on air shower, put on PPE, and sanitize everything. It's to keep the mice safe from outside germs. There are housing racks with cages that have the animals plus supplies in the rooms and then there are also environmental factors that are monitored. So we're talking about light cycles, temperature and humidity and all of that goes into ensuring that the animals are cared for appropriately. I didn't even think about light. They don't like light? Well, nobody wants to have light 24 hours a day. So we set light cycles for them so that they can stay with them, stay in their circadian rhythm. But given all this tight security, I was surprised when the folks at Jack suggested I visit this one room, the biobank. So welcome to the biobank. There aren't any mice that live here, but there's lots of mouse DNA. Rachel Pelletier is one of the people who work with these huge four or five foot tall tanks. These tanks hold lichronitrogen. Some tanks hold samples with embryos and other tanks hold sperm. There could be a combination of both. Jack takes these samples and does something called cryopreservation with them, which means they keep samples at really low temperatures, as low as negative 320 degrees Fahrenheit. They preserve these strains so that scientists across the world can grab them when they actually need them. Lab mice only live about two years. Embryos, like diamonds, are forever. So a big benefit of cryopreservation is being able to freeze down mouse models, and then that allows us to not have to take care of mice on the shelf. And then we can go ahead and pull those samples out of lichronitrogen once we have research that we want to use those models for again. So if you do the math, we're going to look inside a tank 25. Each tank is 92 racks. Each rack holds four boxes. Each box holds 48 cassettes. And each box are five straws. So that's a total of 88,320 straws per tank. And those straws each have around four to five samples of embryos or sperms. So we have frozen 5.6 million embryos, about 10,000 of the 12,000 strains we distribute exist only as frozen material. Wow. So when a lab makes a request for a specific strain of a mouse, they'll go on Jack's website, which lists all the different breeds they have in a virtual catalog and pick up the right sample. Then Jack opens up the biobank and they'll have the sperm, fertilize the embryo, and let it grow in a petri dish. And they wait until it's doubled to a certain size. Yes, they're very fragile. You have to be really gentle through embryo handling. We do mouth pipetting. So we would put the mouthpiece in our mouth and actually breathe in, suck in, to be able to pick up the embryos into the very tip of that pasture pipet. And then you just roll it around like using like mouth suction? Yes, exactly. Yeah. Whoa. And then through embryo transfer, we can put those into pseudo pregnant females as well. Pseudo pregnant females. Females that have been mated with a male that has had a vasectomy. So that kind of tricks the female's body to think that she just mated naturally with a male and that she's going to become pregnant. Okay. And then we would go ahead and do the embryo transfer surgery. And we would put those collected embryos that have been created through IVF into the overduct of the female. Got it. Got it. It's fascinating. I was an IVF baby. Well, actually, I think my sister was and then I came a year later. So that's amazing. I love that. Yeah. Earlier in the episode, we talked about all the advantages to using mice as test subjects. That we can inbred them, eliminate variables, or engineer them to be susceptible to cancer or diabetes. Today, there's another big reason to keep using mice for research. Inertia. The reason that lab mice are so valuable now is because of the hundred plus years of research that's gone on all over the world to understand these little creatures. This is Nadia Rosenthal. She directs Jack's research side of the company's work. Nadia says without those mice, it would have taken scientists way longer to find really crucial scientific discoveries that have directly benefited humans. You're going to be waiting a very long time to see how a particular genetic change is going to affect a primate when they're the equivalent of 30 or 40 years old, when, for instance, someone who has Huntington's disease may come down with the disease at a late onset. In a mouse, you can do that in months. And so this shortened lifespan is extremely useful when you're looking at adult onset disease. We make all these justifications to tell ourselves that it's necessary to use mice for research. But is it right? A few years ago, there were a number of negative headlines about the forced swim test, where mice are dropped into water tanks to see how long they'll try to stay afloat. It's a test used to study depression, but animal rights activists and some scientists say it's unnecessary, cruel, and basically bad science. And there are even more scientific drawbacks. Some say that the clean, sterilized nature of labs doesn't represent the real world, that studying lab mice gives us an incomplete picture of whatever we're studying. Another pitfall of the inbred mice model, really a pitfall of the entire concept that CC Little championed all those years ago, is that all these mice are different. Even if they have the same color or some of the same habits, every black six mouse is its own unique self. And that diversity, it's actually a gift. So what the scientists here at the Jackson Laboratory have spent the last two decades really working on hard, is to actually go backwards and look at the way in which mice are diverse within the actual species, rather than to try to make every mouse the same as every other mouse. The reason we're doing this is because we want to try to model the human diversity that we're seeing in populations around the world in our mouse model. All that makes sense to me, but there's something I still can't quite square about how we talk about lab mice. It's like once they were vermin, but now they've been redeemed as heroes, as useful to society. There's even this big bronze statue in Siberia dedicated to the lab mouse. It's wearing a lab coat and glasses and knitting a double helix. But they didn't sign up for this. They didn't ask for a statue. They don't even know what a statue is. These kinds of celebrations feel like they're more for us than it is for them. It's our strange way of saying thank you for a choice they never made, but one that we've thrusted on them. When I sat down with Jackson's CEO, Lon Cardin, I asked him if there's a world where there's no such thing as a lab mouse. Kind of on this line, it might be a little bit touchy, but do you think we'll ever get rid of using mice in scientific research? It may seem a touchy question, but it's one I get asked just about every day. I don't. I don't see a world. I spent the last 15 years of my life in industry trying to make drugs for diseases, and I think it would be at this time and in the foreseeable future hugely irresponsible to put an investigational drug into a human without having tested that in a whole organism, whether it's a mouse or something else. I think that would assume we know so much more about human biology and how the body works than we really do. So I think what will happen is the way we use mice will change, but they're not going away. Yeah, I mean, a lot of that is about us being dominant, right? Again, here's former lab researcher and current science journalist, Bethany Brookshire. And it's really interesting because I talked to a lot of ethicists for my book, and one of them said, like, it doesn't matter what ethical system you've ascribed to, if you put an ethicist in a chair and you won't make them leave until they answer the question in a burning building, who are you going to save? A baby or a kitten? Every single ethical system cracks and picks the baby. In the end, we choose our own species and we do things for the benefit of our own species. And I don't know if that is biological. I don't know. Like, that's not my job. But I do think, you know, in the end, we're here to benefit ourselves. And that sometimes means that we use other animals. This episode was produced by Jung Yoon-Hwan. It was mixed and edited by Taylor Quimby with Help From Me, Nate Hedgie. Our team also includes Justine Parody and Felix Poon. Our executive producer is Rebecca Levoie. Have you ever worked with lab mice or other model organisms? Tell us about your experience or what you thought about this episode. Our email is outsidein at nhpr.org. We always love hearing from you. Music from Blue Dot Sessions, Spring Gang and El Flaco Collective. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Outside In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio. Music We all need advice, but it's not always clear who to ask, even in 2026. Enter how to. The Longstanding Advice Show and Ambient Award nominated Best Personal Growth Podcast that's back with new episodes and a new host, who? Me, Mike Peska. Each week I tackle a listener question, ranging from travel to finance to relationships and beyond, with help from a world-class expert, you know, someone who actually very much knows what they're talking about. 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