Bryan, *I'm interested!*
Continuing... On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Bryan Bishop <kanz...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 6:25 AM, Steve Richfield wrote: > >> Note my prior posting explaining my inability even to find a source of >> "used" mice for kids to use in high-school anti-aging experiments, all while >> university labs are now killing their vast numbers of such mice. So long as >> things remain THIS broken, anything that isn't part of the solution simply >> becomes a part of the very big problem, AIs included. > > > You might be inerested in this- I've been putting together an > adopt-a-lab-rat program that is actually an adoption program for lab mice. ... then it is an adopt-a-mouse program? I don't know if you are a *Pinky and the Brain* fan, but calling your project something like *The Pinky Project* would be catchy. In some cases mice that are used as a control group in experiments are then > discarded at the end of the program because, honestly, their lifetime is > over more or less, so the idea is that some people might be interested in > "adopting" these mice. I had several discussions with the folks at the U of W whose job it was to euthanize those mice. Their worries seemed to center in two areas: 1. Financial liability, e.g. a mouse bites a kid, whose finger becomes infected and... 2. Social liability, e.g. some kids who are torturing them put their videos on the Internet. Of course, you can also just pony up the $15 and get one from Jackson Labs. Not the last time I checked. They are very careful NOT to sell them to exactly the same population that I intend to supply them to - high-school kids. I expect that if I became a middleman, that they would simply stop selling to me. Even I would have a hard time purchasing them, because they only sell to genuine LABS. I haven't fully launced adopt-a-lab-rat yet because I am still trying to > figure out how to avoid ending up in a situation where I have hundreds of > rats and rodents running around my apartment and I get the short end of the > stick (oops). > *What is your present situation and projections? How big a volume could you supply? What are their approximate ages? Do they have really good documentation? Were they used in any way that might compromise anti-aging experiments, e.g. raised in a nicer-than-usual-laboratory environment? Do you have any liability concerns as discussed above? * Mice in the wild live ~4 years. Lab mice live ~2 years. If you take a young lab mouse and do everything you can to extend its life, you can approach 4 years. If you take an older lab mouse and do everything you can, you double the REMAINDER of their life, e.g. starting with a one-year-old mouse, you could get it to live ~3 years. How much better (or worse) than this you do is the basis for judging by the Methuselah Mouse people. Hence, really good documentation is needed to establish when they were born, and when they left a laboratory environment. Tattoos or tags link the mouse to the paperwork. If I/you/we are to get kids to compete to develop better anti-aging methods, the mice need to be documented well enough to PROVE beyond a shadow of a doubt that they did what they claimed they did. Steve ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
