It's not easy being a lab rat. What's worse still is being a lab rat used for practice -- undergoing endless manhandling, injections and intubations, just so lab techs can get hands-on training. Is there no god?
To help ease the hard life of the lab rat, Craig Jones plans to release a furry, fully jointed rat mannequin, code-named "Squeekums," later this year as the newest training model in his Rescue Critters line. While Squeekums will never replace the live rats used in lab testing, it will allow technicians to learn how to handle rodents -- including safely inserting IVs and placing endotracheal tubes -- before they ever touch a real one.
Being able to help reduce the use of live animals in education and training drives Rescue Critters' president, Jones, to create the most lifelike animal training models on the market.
It's the plastic innards that make the mannequins viable stand-ins for living animals or cadavers. Disposable lungs expand the chest like a real patient's as they fill with air. An IV bag runs artificial blood into models' replica veins, allowing users to insert a needle and either inject or draw fluids.
IT'S difficult not to react viscerally to the images -- repeatedly shown on television, in newspapers and on YouTube -- of rats scurrying about the KFC/Taco Bell restaurant in New York City's Greenwich Village at night, like villains in a twisted children's book. Throughout history, after all, rats have been associated with plague and pestilence. From works of literature like Dostoyevsky's "Notes From Underground" to psychoanalytic texts like Freud's case study "The Rat Man," the symbolism of rats is uniformly negative. In metaphor, to smell a rat is to sense that something is amiss, and a snitch is called simply a rat. Rats have few fans.
But maybe we should pause to ask whether rats are the proper focus of our fears. Bubonic plague is not a public health issue in Greenwich Village, and the Centers for Disease Control report that, despite widespread superstition, rats have never been shown to carry rabies. It has been estimated that there are anywhere from one to nine rats per New Yorker. When late at night I walk my dog on my quiet Carnegie Hill block, I often hear rodents spelunking through the trash receptacles (my dog seems not to notice them).
In a landmark 2001 study, Wilson showed that rats formed complex memories for sequences of events experienced while they were awake, and that these memories were replayed while they slept--perhaps reflecting the animal equivalent of dreaming. Because these replayed memories were detected in the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain, the researchers were not able to determine whether they were accompanied by the type of sensory experience that we associate with dreams--in particular, the presence of visual imagery.
In the latest experiment, by recording brain activity simultaneously in the hippocampus and the visual cortex, Wilson and Ji demonstrated that replayed memories did, in fact, contain the visual images that were present during the running experience.
