Chapter 24
June stood still at the podium, going through her PowerPoint. She spoke without intonation or emotion. She was going over the new figures she had made that morning. She looked at her advisor.
An older woman in her 60s and then at the stone wall behind her. Still relatively young to be the primary investigator. Her "peers" filled the room. They were also at the disposal of the lab and worked on projects for the PI. But June knew there was nobody in the room that was rooting for her. They didn't care if her experiments proved anything. To them, she was their competition for publications and money. To her peers, they were curious about how she collected data or what imaging she used so they could mimic it. Advik was sitting in the back corner watching her. Even knowing his eyes were on her, triggered her fears. His presence made her want to run out the door. She didn't want to know what he thought of her. June sent invisible waves of hate in his direction without ever looking in that direction.
There are few women in science in her position. Her advisor stuck to academics long enough to get to a position where she ran her own lab. She had started where June was now. June admired and sought her out when she was applying for work. When June was first interviewed, the two of them sat in her corner office with a prime view of Baltimore. On her walls framed articles, she had published. A framed cover of Scientific American. The cover wrote, "Women Breaking the Glass Ceiling." June wanted to be like her. Innovative, a leader, someone was pushing the world forward. At the end of the interview, her advisor told June, "You remind me of myself."
Now years later, June hadn't met with her in months. Only at these presentations did she have to prove that her lab should keep funding her project. Their relationship was non-existent. Those words meant close to nothing. Her secretary would say she's in meetings. Or she had to fly to China or some conference unexpectedly. After a while, June found that this lab had the least female participants even though the boss was a woman.
Her advisor didn't look up when June talked. She was on her phone. She would look at the screen then write down a note on her paper. It took her advisor 45 years before she was able to get independent funding from the NIH. As far as June knew from lab gossip, their advisor was almost more brutal than her male counterparts.
"How do you think she got her? You have to be ruthless to get anything done in this line of work." Advik once told her.
"Questions?" June asked the room when she got to her last slide.
"You have made it farther than I expected you would. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised you are quite competent..." June's advisor started.
"Thank you," June said, sighing in relief. But she spoke too soon, and her advisor held up her hand.
"But you should try to be a little more ambitious with this project. You and I both know that you can do more than this. Take this a step further. Sacrifice the mice you have now. Do the organ harvest, test for the right proteins, and compare them to the treatment group. If the results are significant, re-run the experiment with a new group of mice and increase treatment." She said.
"I can do that. But will I be able to publish my thesis by the deadline at the end of the year?" June asked. She was calculating the number of weekends she'd have to come in to re-run her entire project before the end of the year.
"No, probably not. But that is a non-issue. You can always present your thesis to the committee next summer. I'm sure by then it will be excellent. Something I'd be proud to put my name on as your advisor." She said. "Do you have an issue with that?"
June shook her head. She didn't have words. It didn't sound like she had an option. She unplugged her laptop and sat in an empty row. She focused on keeping her face locked. By now, she was a professional at pretending that everything was okay.
June wouldn't graduate on time. June wouldn't have her thesis done in the spring. It wasn't good enough. She'd have to extend her time here in hell for another 4-6 months.
June knew she shouldn't dare complain. People would say that she's lucky even to be here. That there were thousands of applicants waiting to take her spot. Yet June felt like she was doing all the things she should be. The frustration dug in. Three years of sacrifice. Day in and out for this career. She was sleeping in her car, giving up anything that resembled a life. She sent her stipend money home to her parents to help pay the bills. She demeaned herself worth going on dates with strangers so she could get a decent meal. Always telling herself, "Only a little longer than it'll be worth it."
June didn't quit. She didn't give up after she was raped in undergrad. She didn't change her career goals when her father got sick. She figured out ways to make it work. She told herself she needed to be resilient through failure. To finish what she started. To show her parents that their sacrifice was worth it. But now, all her hard work and suffering seemed like it was for nothing.
June quietly left out the back when Advik transitioned to present. She took the elevator down to the basement floor, where the mice were kept. Walking down the hallway, it resembled a hospital floor. The fluorescent lights were so bright they washed everything in a ghostish color. The windows in the hallway showed into rooms. June looked at the ghastly scenes in each window. Workers were shoveling red bags of mice carcasses into the incinerator. The next room was where they assembled new cages adding in fresh pellets and food. A man poured the old container over, dropping the mice from one cell into the new one. The mice pooped and slept and ate in the same area. The worker poured the old pellets into the trash and throwing the bins into the wash.
June entered the storage room. Inside were 8 feet tall storage shelves on wheels—a grid of 8 X 10 cages. The front held marked yellow cards to identify each cage. The way the mice were stacked meant, the only light came from the side of the containers. The room had the shelves organized for optimized occupancy. A small room contained ten shelves lined like bookcases. June was now numb to the sound of the scurrying and mice shrieking.
Her eyes looked for her name on the labels. Thousands of other experimental lab mice were on this floor. June pulled her boxes of mice from the shelves and placed them on a rolling cart. She moved them into a room across the hall with an open lab hood- made of sharp cold steel.
June set up everything she needed.
A jar of ketamine, a needle, scissors, a scalpel, blunt tweezers. June took out a blood-stained plastic tub and placed a styrofoam tray inside of it. She stabbed half a dozen dresser headpins in the styrofoam. She kept on one side of the hood a bag of 15mL clean tubes, a glass beaker of preserving liquid, a sharpie. She put the dialysis machine on the other side of the hood. She attached the long tubes to the device. One end in a jar of cold water on ice. June twisted a needle onto one end of a tube and pinned it down to the board.
June had killed and harvested organs of close to 800 lab mice. She didn't like to keep count. But for each mouse, as she shot them up with ketamine and waited for them to sleep, she said a small prayer for them in her head. Science should respect any life at any level. She prayed that their sacrifice was worth it.
June hated this part. It was one of the aspects of her job that she would never get used to.
June used the headpins to skewer the mice through its palms and feet. She pulled each limb to the corner of the styrofoam board so it would be stretched its stomach facing her.
June cut down straight from the center of its neck to its bottom. A horizontal line near its throat, across its stomach, and two diagonal lines by its hips to the centerline. Blood oozed out, and she pushed the styrofoam board down, so it was slanted, allowing the blood to pool in the basin. The incisions created eight different flaps that she folded back to expose the body. June used the pins to hold the folds pinned into the mice.
He was still breathing. Dozing off leaving his body on ketamine, the mouse was still alive at this point. It's organs exposed. It's heart beating fast—a micro version of the human body. June dropped the scalpel and picked up the needle connected to the tube to the dialysis machine. It was essential to do this part quickly to try and reduce pain.
June used one hand with tweezers to pinch the heart. She stabbed the mouse on the bottom right side of the heart to create a hole with her other hand. Blood started pouring fast. She turned on the dialysis machine, and water flushed into the mouse's heart. The water used the circulatory system and pathways that blood usually would. Water flushed to each capillary and moved through each organ and muscle fiber. Then June switched the ice water beaker near the machine with a beaker of fixing solution.
June watched as the life slipped out of the mouse. His body turned cold, and the water that ran down the board into the basin turned clear. She shut off the machine and removed the water tube. It was protocol. Scientists everywhere harvested organs this way with this method for years. The purpose of the dialysis is to fixate the tissue quickly. So the cells in the brain and organs didn't have time to change after death.
The mouse organs looked pale. The heart a dark brown deflated sac, its stomach lining a pale grey tube. June only needed the brain. Yet, she would have to spend an extra hour on each mouse, gathering the other organs and cleaning them. Their lab was to hold onto all the organs from each mice used. A freezer dedicated to organs for the experiments, in case the lab needed them for different experiments.
When the stomach and heart were hollow, she washed the organs in sugar water. Then dropped them into the tubes with their mouse code and date marked on the side. She unpinned the light mouse and flipped him onto his stomach. She made an incision on his forehead and cracked the skull picking it off. The skull was hard, but it felt like she was chipping off-dry paint. After a few tugs, it pulled apart. The part June hated the most was peeling off the skin by the mouse's eyes and nose. It felt like torture to her. She needed to get underneath the brain so she wouldn't damage it. She used a blunted end and peeled the brain and spinal cord from the base of the skull. She was using the scalpel to carve out the spine. She grabbed a red bag and placed the carcass in it.
June placed the brain in the sugar water. She pulled it up to the lab hood, and through the glass, she looked closely at the little pink brain the size of a raisin. She could see where she had made a small injection of stem cells before. She would spend the next month analyzing this brain and many others, looking for anything to show that the last few years weren't an incredible waste of time.