If there’s a hell, mice will eat my balls

While writing to a friend this evening, I realized that the high point of my research career was growing mouse ears in a petri dish. No, I wasn’t the guy who grew a human ear on a mouse’s back — not even close. Growing recognizable mouse ears in tissue culture was good enough for me.

Mouse fanciers, please read no farther. Even you gerbil fans might give this a second thought. Those of you who consider mice to be vermin and snake food may read on.

Follow me below the cut for mouse ear pix, plus a bonus pic I found while rifling through my slides.

First, I ought to explain the title to this post. You can’t simply mix a few chemicals together et voila, mouse ears! Takes a mouse to make mouse ears, or more specifically, takes mouse fetuses to make mouse ears. I had to kill, excuse me, sacrifice a pregnant mouse, cut the fetuses from her womb, and dissect each fetus. My goal: a tiny disc of tissue comprising the first and second branchial arches.

Now you know why hordes of angry mother mice will eat my balls in hell.

Branchial arches are the fetal equivalent of gills. In fish, some of the branchial arches really do turn into gills. In mammals, the first and second branchial arches develop into jaws, tongue, and ears. We wondered whether the first and second branchial arches could continue developing independent of the rest of the fetus. In other words, does the tissue have all it takes to continue development, or does it require signals from the fetus around it?

Here’s a section through one of “my” ears. The pic on the left is a tissue culture ear, while the pic on the right is a normal fetal ear. What’s that? I can’t hear you! Ooh and aaah a little louder, please.

Please remember what I said the other day about having all the younger Dougs inside me like matryoshka dolls. Deep, deep down is the 6-year-old scientist who loved mixing shit together. That Doug came up with the idea of treating his mouse ears with a known teratogen, retinoic acid.

Teratogen: a drug that causes developmental malformations. Retinoic acid: a particularly nasty teratogen. That’s why docs hate prescribing the acne drug Retin-A to women who still have their ovaries.

This is what happens to my tissue culture lumps (AKA ‘explants’) if you treat them with retinoic acid:

The lower right-hand corner is a normal explant. Note eensy weensy mouse ears, not to mention the eensy weensy tongue. ‘C’ has been treated with a low dose of retinoic acid, ‘B’ an intermediate dose, and ‘A’ a high dose. And here are sections of a similar progression:

All very cool, but did it add anything to the corpus of Knowledge? Nah. Everyone knows retinoic acid effs up branchial arch development. And this was my best work.

I wonder how much research is like this. Cool (at least to the bloke doing it) but essentially meaningless. How much crap needs to get done in order to counterbalance the good stuff?

Maybe that was my true purpose in science. I was a statistical necessity, the crap-producer without which the Jonas Salks and Christiaan Barnards of the world couldn’t do their thing. I suppose you should all be very grateful to me for this.

As promised, here’s that other pic I found among my slides. Guessing, here: I’m 19 and I’m wearing my favorite “body shirt.” Wish I’d had a bod to put in that body shirt!

I miss that early me, even if he was, in many ways, a creep. But that’s another story for another day.

D.