Maybe the Mice Slipped Them a Mickey … ?
In a news item that dates back to late August but was just reported on in Sunday’s Boston Herald, a half dozen staff and students at Harvard Medical School became ill after they drank coffee from a vending machine that had been laced with sodium azide, a preservative that is commonly used in laboratories. The story reported that all the afflicted worked in a laboratory where they torment mice in immune system experiments.
While we would never wish poisoning upon any living being (talk about a painful way to go) it does have us wondering if karma might be at work again.
Recent publications from Harvard Medical School faculty members included experiments in which mice had 25 percent of their skin burned off by placing them in 190-plus-degree water and were then injected with increasingly large doses of E. coli to see at which point 50 percent of the animals would die. In another experiment, mice were injected with cancerous cells to induce the growth of colorectal tumors and then injected with a herpes virus to see how it affected the cancer. At the end of the experiment, the animals who didn’t die during the study were killed and dissected.
It does look like some of the animal torturers experimenters at Harvard have gotten a taste of their own medicine—literally. Let this be a lesson to you, Harvard: Never underestimate the fury of a mouse scorned.
Written by Alisa Mullins
