Özgün Erdogan studies how tumors develop. Her work may help other scientists develop treatments for diseases like pancreatic cancer. But ever since the coronavirus pandemic hit, she has been struggling to carry out that research without many of her most vital tools: mice.
The pandemic largely shut down the Duke University cancer lab where Erdogan works as a postdoctoral associate. With her university minimizing animal-care time and her next experiment aborted, she had to euthanize the genetically modified rodents she’d been breeding for that study, killing about 168 mice in one day.
As Erdogan copes with a setback that will take months to recover from — a wrenching position for a scientist just starting her career — she’s also fielding criticism from animal-rights activists. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals called out her mouse-culling in a message to its million Twitter followers: “Sad to have killed a bunch of animals? What if you never did it again?”
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
The pandemic is curtailing all but the most critical lab research. Many scientists are responding by sacrificing mice as they shelve studies and seek to reduce work for the animal-care staff members who must risk their health to look out for the mice and other animals that colleges still possess. The euthanization, along with the broader lab slowdown, will very likely be a blow to research on diseases and disorders like cancer, autism, diabetes, and epilepsy. It has also become a rallying cry for animal-rights groups, who are spotlighting the carnage to call for an end to animal testing.
“It’s very opportunistic of them,” says Erdogan, who was offended by PETA’s tweet. “Yes, maybe some of the experiments are not essential right now. But these experiments are essential in terms of building knowledge around cancer. Especially in my field, without mouse work, we won’t be able to have any drugs that could go into human trials.”
Over recent weeks, in social-media posts and interviews with Science magazine, researchers at Harvard, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pennsylvania, and a range of other institutions have lamented the euthanizations.
It’s happened before, in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Ike. Chris Dulla, a Tufts University neuroscientist, says the only comparable event he could recall was Hurricane Sandy, when thousands of rodents drowned at a New York University research center.
“But that was one institution, and now this is like every institution all across the country,” says Dulla, an epilepsy researcher who had to sacrifice more than 500 mice, or roughly 80 percent of his colony, when his lab closed. From a personal standpoint, he says, “it’s devastating.”
Animal-rights activists are seizing on that devastation to drive home a simple question: How can universities claim animals are vital to research, while now classifying so many of them as expendable?
Whenever a lab scientist tweets about killing animals, or a university official issues guidance about euthanizing them, PETA activists log that utterance into a spreadsheet. They respond with their own barrage of tweets, public letters, and media interviews demanding an end to what they see as cruel, wasteful, and ineffective research.
Before the pandemic, lab mice weren’t exactly living the life of Stuart Little, sailboating in Central Park. Their brief existences can be brutal. Researchers induce cancer in their bodies to study tumors, damage their brains to study epilepsy, and cause heart attacks to test how drugs help them heal. Scientists may churn through generations of mice to produce strains with the specific genetic profiles needed for their experiments.
University scientists and animal-care officials characterize the euthanization of some animals as regrettable but necessary.
There is going to be so much really important research that just doesn’t happen now because these animals were euthanized.
“The whole reason these animals exist is to advance human health,” says Jennifer K. Pullium, senior director of NYU’s division of comparative medicine, the medical-school group responsible for research animals. “And if having them around would risk human health, meaning you have to have people coming in when we’re supposed to be social-distancing, it kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?”
PETA also urges universities to tell the public, whose tax dollars pay for much animal research, how many animals are dying.
“As Covid-19 continues to spread, we are fearing that universities are going to choose secrecy over transparency to hide what they’re doing to animals in laboratories,” says Shalin Gala, PETA’s vice president for international laboratory methods.
On its website and in an interview with The Chronicle, PETA criticized the University of California at San Diego for having closed public access to the animal-research section of its “Covid-19 Continuity of Research” webpage after the group highlighted a part of that site that referenced “culling nonessential animals.” (As of Thursday afternoon, it required a password for access.)
Researchers and animal-care officials at some institutions limit what they’ll say publicly about the challenge of caring for animals during the pandemic. Stanford, Texas A&M, and Yale Universities, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, were among those that declined or did not respond to interview requests from The Chronicle. Some issued brief statements or pointed to general information online.
Animal-care officials at other colleges spoke about their general pandemic-response strategies. But some would not provide their written pandemic guidance to researchers. Nor would they specify how many animals were being euthanized, saying that they either did not have that information or did not want to release it.
One of the animal-care officials talking the most is Eric K. Hutchinson, director of research-animal resources at the Johns Hopkins University. He has provided local and national reporters with a stream of updates about his “grim work.”
Hutchinson oversees a staff of roughly 100 veterinarians, technicians, administrators, and cage-washing personnel. Research animals at Hopkins, he says, include thousands of mice, hundreds of nonhuman primates (such as marmosets and baboons), plus a smattering of many other species (such as bats, pigs, fish, frogs, and rabbits). The animals live in several large facilities, known as vivariums, and go to hundreds of scientific labs for experiments.
Hutchinson says he is taking “extreme measures” to preserve the health of his staff and to make sure that the animals can still get care, should many of those caregivers get sick. He divides workers into groups whose shifts don’t overlap. That way, if there’s a Covid-19 outbreak among one group, others can keep going.
He says that, while he is not dictating that mouse colonies be reduced by a certain percentage, he is expediting the killing of hundreds of mice considered “extraneous.”
Hutchinson won’t go into detail about his university’s mouse-population figures. The numbers fluctuate. And the university, he says, is “under basically constant scrutiny by animal-rights activists.”
“We don’t divulge information, specific information, that we don’t have to,” he says. “We try to strike a balance between providing information to the public” while also “being careful about providing information that could then be used to target our researchers.”
Even his use of the adjective “extraneous” became the focus of an attack by PETA, which published the pandemic guidance he sent to Hopkins animal researchers on its blog post about the “killing spree” in labs. Hopkins scientists have endured worse in the past, Hutchinson says. Activists have targeted their homes for protests and recently blanketed a researcher’s neighborhood with “propaganda” that featured “a bunch of made-up nonsense” about his “evil” practices, he says.
Hutchinson adds that extraneous mice are those produced during normal research breeding that don’t have a particular gene a scientist is studying. They also include mice made for studies abruptly postponed because scientists must stay out of labs. Normally, he says, surplus mice can be given to other labs. Now they can’t.
Similarly, NYU’s Pullium says that rodents most likely to be euthanized are those involved in short-term experiments that can’t be completed because of social-distancing measures.
The mice are generally killed by gassing with carbon dioxide, Hutchinson says. At this point, he adds, it would be surprising if any college was actively reducing colonies of animals other than mice, which make up the bulk of research animals at most institutions.
Karen L. Bales, a psychology professor at the University of California at Davis, rejects the idea that scientists’ euthanizing mice means they’ve been doing a lot of noncritical research. Bales, whose university is being sued by PETA for access to videos of monkey experiments, studies the neuroscience of social behavior in monkeys and rodents, which is important to understanding conditions like autism and schizophrenia. She called the cessation of most lab research a “gut punch” and speculates that American biomedical research will fall behind by two years.
“There is going to be so much really important research that just doesn’t happen now because these animals were euthanized and because of the slowdown because of Covid-19 altogether,” Bales says. She adds, “It’s essentially a tragedy that animals are having to be euthanized without having gotten to get the experimental data from them.”
Consider the case of Dulla, the Tufts researcher who lost more than 500 mice.
Dulla runs a 10-person lab studying mechanisms that create seizures and transform an injured brain into an epileptic one. He and his colleagues damage the brains of mice to mimic injuries, such as concussions, that put human beings at risk of epilepsy. Their research involves identifying molecules that could be targeted with anticonvulsive or anti-inflammatory drugs.
Dulla estimates that it will take nine months to a year to get back to where he was when the pandemic shuttered his lab. That’s partly due to how much work it takes to produce his mice. His rodent studies involve manipulating the ways that cells communicate and detect activity from their neighbors. He sometimes must breed around six generations of mice — each taking up to six weeks — to get the ones with the specific genetic profile he needs.
He says the euthanizing, while necessary, felt “wasteful” and “traumatic.”
But he’s an established scholar who can ride this out. The situation is more difficult for people like Erdogan, the Duke postdoc.
Her cancer research, before the pandemic, was an intricately timed operation. She hoped to begin her new study, finish her old one, publish a paper based on that study, get a grant based on the paper, and compete for faculty jobs based on her publications and grant.
All of that is in upheaval, a stress worsened by the hasty way that her lab had to be shut down. She had to close everything down — finishing what work she could, freezing cell lines, and euthanizing the 168 mice — in a matter of days. She could hang on to only a stock of mouse strains that aren’t available commercially, as well as some tumor studies that had been going on for months.
“The next five, six months of experiments — they’re all gone,” she says. “I don’t have them anymore.”
