Of Mice and Men

"Wee, sleekit, cow-rin’, tim’rous beastie," apostrophized Robert Burns in his paean to a mouse, "O what a panic’s in thy breastie!"

Well, I’ll tell you what panic is in its breastie; it’s those scientists and researchers hard at it again to replicate the Spanish Inquisition in today’s mousedom.

Since 1995, when Athena Neurosciences -- a small biotech company now part of Elan Pharmaceuticals of Dublin, Calif. -- first achieved scientific renown with the development of the transgenic mouse for the study of Alzheimer’s, every mouse with its paws on the pulse of current events has felt polarized to attract catastrophe. Nobody knows exactly what a transgenic mouse is, but from the mouse’s viewpoint, any benefits accruing to the title are illusory.

What has the wind up in mouse support groups is the Elan company’s latest discovery in Alzheimer research. Alzheimer’s, characterized by progressive dementia and incapacitation, affects 4 million Americans and costs the nation $100 billion a year according to the July 8, 1999, New York Times. The man whose face I shave each morning and who now bears more than a passing resemblance to Geppetto, Pinocchio’s father, was discomfited to learn that the longer people live, the more likely they are to develop symptoms of the disease. Without straining too much, I imagine I detect the swish of Father Time’s scythe in the anteroom.

Too intricate to warrant recapitulating in detail what the Elan bonanza is, the gist of the discovery with the meringue sluiced off is that researchers genetically altered mice so they developed the plaque-like deposits commonly found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. The mice were told that they were entered in some Special Olympics for maze solving, otherwise they would have called in sick.

Through some labyrinthine steps, researchers developed a vaccine that, injected into the mice, eradicated the plaques, improved the condition of damaged neurons and reduced inflammation in surrounding tissue. When the White Coats vaccinated young healthy mice, the mice grew up without developing the plaques at all. It was an occasion for infusions of expensive champagne and dollops of imported caviar, provided it could be successfully run past the accounting department.

These mice were almost as euphoric as Dr. Steven DeKosky, head of the Alzheimer’s disease research center at the University of Pittsburgh, who exulted, "The biggest issue is the use of immunization. It’s very clever to have tried that." Agreed. We would never have thought of it ourselves.

While all involved are busy expatiating on the significance of this discovery, it remains to be seen if the compound (a synthetic form of the beta-amyloid peptide) will produce the same effects in people.

As Gertrude Stein once sagely remarked, "A mouse is a mouse is a mouse, but only an ignatz equates it with a hominoid and never the twain shall meet." Her medication was changed shortly thereafter, but the essence of her wisdom is still valid; it is impossible to accurately assess memory loss or cognitive ability in mice. In other words, a mouse in its normal state is hard to differentiate from an Alzheimer’s mouse, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The mice of my acquaintance lead a very circumscribed life. Outside of having noses in a constant state of agitation, their days are spent beyond the reach of the Internal Revenue Service and nuclear fission, on some seventh astral plane, exclusively devoted to eating, sleeping and pooping. Their response to the encomiums resulting from Elan’s research is a plea to just continue in the same vein. Spokesmen for the mice wish it known, however, that they, individually and as a genus, are sick and tired of all this experimentation without representation. A couple of months ago it was the implanting of tooth buds in their kidneys; who knows what Homeric sacrifices they’ll be called upon to perform next.

Despite all the expository flapdoodle issued to justify the use of mice as experimental animals, the mice feel they were cozened into their predicament and they have offered a substitute list of candidates they feel better suited for the purposes of experiments. These include members of certain cults who believe the world will terminate in January and intransigent residents on Death Row who have been enjoying Lucullan viands at the public trough for more than 10 years.

Additionally, the mice believe that any scientist who sufficiently believes in the transcendent importance of what he’s doing should be willing to volunteer for the experiment himself, even if he risks going down like a poled ox. There’s a certain poetic justice there -- Bobby Burns would have liked it.