uh oh... dont like messing with animals!!! HELP!!!

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DarkChild

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I have a confession... I really dislike experimenting on animals in the lab, not because I'm ethically against it, but because I'm squimish. I really dont like touching rats, mice... monkeys. ugh. I used to work in a leech lab, and I really hated dissecting those things...
two questions:

1) Am I the only one who feels this way, and will I eventually get over it? (2 years in a leech lab and I still hate those things - have you actually seen a full grown leech!!! ugh! aksjdhaksdad. yuck. and they really do eat blood... and only blood... and they're too stupid to stop eating, so they just eat until they vomit it up... AND THEN KEEP EATING). I'm interested in neuroscience... a lot of work involves things like mice and monkeys and cutting mice heads off.... I dont know if I can handle that.

2) How ammenable are most MSTP programs to switching PhDs from one field to another. can I get in through a neuro program and then move into a biochemistry, cell biology, biomedical engineering PhD... just something that doesnt require a lot of contact with lab animals.

appreciate the help guys and dolls.

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you're not bound to anything at all - as long as its a subject covered by the stipend. many people end up switching fields, and the mstp's seem perfectly amenable to that. the rats gave us the plague ... never forget;)
 
You should be fine, there are TONS of cell bio, biochem labs that use tissue culture cell lines only...no actual animals! I work in a cell cycle lab and while we do a lot of work with xenopus laevis, there are some people in the lab who strictly do tissue culture and never touch the frogs. Not to mention yeast labs, drosophila, c. elegans...you may still be able to do neuro work in a couple of these systems as well. Plus, not many scientists I know have stuck with the exact same field or model organism they started out working in or using, there are so many options and MSTP programs offer many of them. blah, blah...ok back to the frogs ;)
 
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My research has been done in a Drosophila lab. You can learn an amazing amount from those little critters, you have a ton of genetic tools with them, and they don't scream in pain or bite you.

I once talked to a guy who did research on mosquitos. To get them to grow the best, you feed them human blood. The researchers would put their arms in the mosquito cages and just sit there for a while. He hasn't been bothered by a mosquito bite outside since.
That's still not as nuts as the guy who proved H. pylori can grow in the stomach by DRINKING some.
 
Originally posted by jot
you're not bound to anything at all - as long as its a subject covered by the stipend. many people end up switching fields, and the mstp's seem perfectly amenable to that. the rats gave us the plague ... never forget;)


....they've saved more lives than 9-1-1 (taken from www.fbresearch.org)
 
I worked with E.coli, rats and dogs.

As far as rats go, I really like those fuzzy little creatures. I know I'm nuts, but I always wanted to take one as a pet. Maybe now that my professor's LOR is out, I will :D
I did however get a tetanus shot some two years ago when I started working with them - at first I didn't know why the PI told me to. Then, when I started doing all the surgeries, it quickly came to me. I promise, for the first couple of months, I got bit on a weekly basis, and I mean literally. It came to a point where I didn't even mind....:oops:

Anyway, as people have said, it's not necessary to work with 'bigger' (see my bio professor cringe) animals to do good research.

S.
 
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