Killing Cats

Killing Cats

When I went back to school in the spring of 1972, my parents handed me an assistantship in a research project that was going on at Massachusetts General Hospital. My parents were friends with a professor whose boyfriend was a medical student; this student had been working in a laboratory there and wanted someone to replace him as an assistant. The research was in neurophysiology, and it involved using very thin electrodes inserted into the brains of cats to pick up activity in certain nerve centers within the brain.

This work was complex and morbid. We would take a young cat that had been raised in a cage at the laboratory animal compound in a big room in the basement that had cages of dogs, rabbits, and a few other mammals that were there to be used in various research projects. The men who worked in the big room were called Dieners, which is German for ‘servant’, and I was told to be very careful to be respectful of them because they were sensitive.

The cat would be given an intraperitoneal (that is, in the stomach) injection of a fast acting anesthetic like Pentothal. In a couple of minutes, the cat would fall sound asleep and we would then perform a cutdown (cut through the skin to expose a vein) and insert an intravenous line. This line was used to infuse a paralyzing agent, Flaxedil, and a saline/glucose mixture that kept the cat hydrated.
After the cutdown, we would open the cat up at the neck and perform a tracheostomy (insert a plastic breathing tube into the trachea after cutting it open.) The “trach” tube would be connected to an air pump that breathed for the cat, since the Flaxedil stopped the cat’s breathing muscles as well.
Finally, the cat’s head was placed in a large adjustable metal device that supported it on two prongs inserted in the ears and a clamp that held its jaw. The skin over the top of the skull was cut lengthwise and small holes were drilled over the needle insertion sites. The needle was then run on a stereotactic vise (a vise on which precisely measured movements can be made) down into the brain until we picked up a signal from a nerve center that responded to light. The cat was placed in a large box with a translucent screen in front of its eyes and measured lines of light were projected on the screen, moving across in a slow, measured fashion, or moving up and down in the same measured fashion. The light source was adjustable from a long line to a small spot.
The desired nerve centers responded to the light in a repetitive fashion: as the line of light moved across the screen, at a certain spot the nerve would start firing, then after the beam of light had passed, stop firing again. The best nerves we located would respond to the light like a bull’s eye: there would be a round area within which the nerve would fire repeatedly, but in the center of this area the nerve would suddenly stop firing altogether for a moment.
These nerve centers represented cells within the lateral geniculate body, a kidney bean shaped area in the brain within which were the neuron cell bodies that passed along visual impulses from the optic nerve and the eye to centers in the occiput or rear of the brain that processed visual information. These neurons were organized and specialized to fire only at a light impulse that appeared in a small area of the visual field, and the individual neurons collectively built a picture of the cat’s visual field.
We also inserted electrodes into the median raphe, the general activating center of the brain. Small electrical impulses in this area would alert the cat or wake it up.
We recorded the electrical impulses we received from the electrodes that we inserted into the lateral geniculate body onto a large tape recorder that we could play back afterwards to remind us of specific activity that we had picked up at definite times after light beams stimulated it or electrical stimulation of the median raphe occurred.
When we had located a cell that appeared to have the right behavior, a bull’s eye shaped reaction to light, we would infuse LSD-25 into the cat’s vein and record the cell’s reaction, which usually lasted two or three hours. Most often, the cell’s activity would increase but its sensitivity to light would decrease.
In the first few cats we did this procedure on, we did not use any anesthetic. After I figured out what was happening from the cat’s perspective, I realized that it would be awake but paralyzed and possibly suffering. I insisted that they find some sort of anesthetic and they began to use nitrous oxide through an anesthesia machine; a mixture of 80% nitrous oxide and 20 % oxygen was produced by the machine, and this was pumped into the cat’s lungs by the ventilator.
After dosing the cat with nitrous oxide, an inhalation anesthetic that induced a light coma, we would record impulses from the cat’s brain for 24 to 72 hours, depending on how long the cat survived. Eventually the cat would die, from side effects of the anesthesia or malnutrition (we fed them intravenously with glucose but it wasn’t adequate for prolonged survival.)
We then infused glutaraldehyde as a preservative into the cat’s brain, cut it out and sent the preserved brain to be sliced for microscopic examination. This would show us the needle tracts and whether we had reached the desired location within the brain.
Between the fall of 1972 and the spring and summer of 1973, I participated as an assistant in about twenty or thirty of these procedures, each ending with the death of the cat and its preservation in glutaraldehyde for microscopic examination.
In the summer of 1973, our cats started dying prematurely and we discovered that the anesthesia machine had a crack in the output valve that was allowing the cats to be slowly suffocated.
In the fall of 1973 and into 1974, the lab moved into a different building and I didn’t do any more cat procedures. I analyzed the data we had gathered and performed statistical tests on it. Eventually I produced a report which was turned into a paper published in the Proceedings of something or other.
In the spring of 1973, possibly in February or March, I adopted one of the cats from the lab cages and took it back to my dorm room. It promptly took shits randomly all over the place and I had to clean these things up. The next day I took the cat back to the lab and a few weeks later, I used that cat in an experiment where I anesthetized it and cut out its lateral geniculate body for evaluation of the amount of serotonin in it by another laboratory. I then turned up the nitrous oxide to 100% and disposed of the cat a few minutes later after its heart stopped beating.
I was dating a girl named Mei-Ling Ma in the spring of 1973 and I took her on a visit to the laboratory. She took a job in a lab a floor above us where there was a hospital unit.
The lab became a place where I did unauthorized experiments, and in the summer of 1973 I took an ounce of marijuana and extracted the cannabinoids with ether, concentrating them in a smaller portion. I did the experiment late at night and put a sign up on the door to warn the night watchman that I was working that night.
When I went home I forgot to take the sign down. I remembered after I went home and turned around, and went back to the lab and took the sign down. After I took it down, it was already 7 in the morning, and I sat down at the bench to look at some specimens under the microscope. I was looking through the scope when the head of the lab came in, a few minutes before 8 in the morning. He saw me working at the microscope and assumed that I had been there examining specimens for some time. He told me to go home and get some sleep, which I did.
The process of experimenting on cats disgusted me after a while and I think I felt guilty about it too. When I went to medical school I was offered a position in a lab that did experiments on cats; this time they kept the cats alive indefinitely and they seemed to be doing well. They installed plastic domes in place of their skulls and took small samples of cerebrospinal fluid periodically to measure serotonin levels. This was some of the pioneering research that was being done on serotonin in the brain. I turned down the offer to work in that lab in medical school. If I had accepted the offer, I could have paid my way through medical school. Instead I turned to a National Health Service scholarship and obligated myself to serve for four years in an underprivileged area in return for a generous scholarship and stipend.
That was a major turning point in my life, in which I abandoned research in favor of primary practice in an underserved area.