Pondering Rats over Tacos

Most everyone wants to be involved with projects that are not just fun, but ones that can have a positive impact on something, usually that something being humanity. I have questioned that basic premise, while all the while getting the most satisfaction with those types of endeavors. I denied this during a vegetarian phase, a semi Buddhist phase, and more recently a fatalistic phase, where I thought that humanity was doomed any way. None of these were extremely mature responses to that bizarre situation of being human, where we are all creatures of evaluations rules, while at the same time having some extra neo cortex which has us contemplating that same evolution. A kind of visceral conundrum of this sort occurred to me yesterday  during one very common event; a Mexican meal.

I am the CEO of a start-up company that makes microscopes. These microscopes are currently used for semi conductors, which is terrific, but I am also happy to see when there is some interest for them in medical science. That is, those fatalist moments mostly fade away with the thought of curing disease. Our microscope won’t cure anything of course, but it could be used to help, and yesterday we looked at using them for a really ground breaking neuroscience application. When analyzing the sample we would be imaging with our microscope, we (my dad and I) saw that they were 40 micron slivers of rat brains, and we would specifically be looking at neurons in the hippocampus, the region most associated with the processing of memory. The research involved could save human lives, while sacrificing a few rat lives. I live in a world of research, where animal models are an important reality. It is our human survival instinct, combined with our human intellect, which can also be tainted by our human compassion. The odd thing that happened to me yesterday was not at the lab, but rather at dinner with my Dad at a Mexican restaurant after. We were both ecstatic that our instrument would be used for something of importance. Dad said to me something though, which I was thinking, even at the same time both of us knowing that it was illogical. He said “isn’t it a little creepy to think of the rat?” I said, “of course not. It is not creepy at all”, but truthfully I knew what he was saying. He wasn’t condemning the research. In fact he thought that the research was impressive and important. He was not against using lab animals, as he knows they are valuable. What he was saying is something that is felt more than reasoned. We were not looking at a dead rat, we were looking at a microscopic section of the interior of a rat brain, and somehow that filled us with some kind of emotional, creepy, empathetic or something all together impossible to define. This conversation was occurring while we took a bite of our chicken tacos, thinking nothing of the chicken who died for no purpose at all, considering that we could have just as easily eaten a cheese taco.

What this all means to me is that the research and the creepiness are both part of the greatness of being alive. It also speaks to the fact that for scientists like ourselves, we connect life's importance to those neurons. This is as close to the soul of the rat as we could see, and to see it at high resolution is somehow profound.

Now to get on with the work, or see the same soul in meat of a burrito, and we will be making even greater progress as humans.