• Question: what do you do when your finished training the mice

    Asked by 487nepk28 to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 14 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Kerrianne Harrington

      Kerrianne Harrington answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      Training mice to make optical fibre hasn’t been easy, I’ll tell you that! A lot of the problems is that they can’t reach things, so perhaps I’ll build them a tiny ladder first. When we’re all finished we’ll go to the pub to celebrate.

      I’m playing, of course 🙂 I have yet to train any mice. I used to own mice as pets when I was at school, hopefully that might count?

    • Photo: Ed Bracey

      Ed Bracey answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      When we’re finished with our experiments, we put them to sleep.
      Legally we have to do this, the Home Office requires it.
      We can’t release them into the wild because they’d get eaten very quickly and also because some of them have genetic mutations that we don’t want spreading to mice in the wild.
      So we do it painlessly and quickly, by giving them an anaesthetic gas.
      Still, I don’t find this easy to do at all.

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