My South Korean buddy, who I’m going to just call D., studied neuroscience in Germany, but because no one (assuming you don’t want to end up in jail or be forced to avoid your home country forever) can escape the mandatory two-year army service in South Korea, he’s currently doing research with tiny white mice on behalf of the Korean Army. Like all other male Koreans, he had to endure the hardcore basic training in which one is allowed to eat, take a piss, or go for any other human need only when the supervisor feels like allowing it, but now he’s occupied with the torture of cute little rodents.

Vice: What are you researching right now?
D: At the moment I’m killing thousands of mice just to find out whether acupuncture can heal depression.

The mouse is drugged and they slice it open to flush its entire body with phosphate buffers while the heart is still beating.  

So you’re researching brains in the name of the army?
Exactly, it’s because I have too much brains myself to just salute, march, and shoot all day. Plus, I’m too old. Most people who sign up for the army have to dedicate themselves to it for like two years minimum.

Can you give me some more details?
I’m working for a federal institute that gets millions of research grants every year and we’re trying to find out how good acupuncture works and what its effects on the brain are. I’m actually looking into the correlation of acupuncture and depression. Do you know how to research depression in mice?

It’s utterly important that the rat is still alive because the heartbeat makes sure the buffer flushes the entire body. 

I have no fucking clue…
Well, there are about five different methods that are mostly based on behavioral experiments. You can pull the little guys up on their tails for example. They’re fidgeting and fidgeting and fidgeting to free themselves. They squeal and fidget and tweak. At some point they resign and stop fighting it. Then they don’t even care about being released anymore, they give up on everything and the researcher is happy because he induced depression in his “samples.” 

So the whole thing doesn’t take long, does it?
Well, it actually takes hours and sometimes you have to do that stuff for days in a row. I get depressed myself doing it sometimes.

Not that I want you to be depressed, but that would make things kind of even, you know? So what’s next in the torture repertoire?
You throw the mice into a bucket with water. They swim, swim, swim, and swim for their lives until they realize there’s no hope really and then they retreat to moving as little as necessary to barely stay on top on the surface. They swallow tons of water and become depressed. Then you wrap them up in plastic wrap, you know the kind you’d use in your kitchen. They can’t move the slightest bit and pretty much look like whipped cream just before you’re frosting a cake with it. If you apply too much pressure their eyes pop and then it’s all white and red, from the blood you know. If they survive this, they’re definitely depressed afterwards.

That is really sick. What else do you do to the poor little buggers?
Sometimes you pen mice with other aggressive mice that attack every other animal around them. They get bullied, bitten, and tortured, and then at some point they become all freaked out and sit in a corner all paralyzed by fear. The funny thing is when you pen them together with normal mice after that, they don’t care anymore. They stay as depressed as they are and don’t interact with the others. It’s like they’ve given up faith in their own species or something.

OK, OK, I’m getting the picture of how to rip mice off all the joy they might possibly ever feel. So what’s next after you got them depressed?
That’s where the acupuncture part comes in. We poke the poor things with acupuncture needles. Afterwards, we slit open their hearts, open their skulls, and extract the brains—to compare our two sample groups.

Can you tell if they’re still depressed after acupuncture by taking a look at their brains?
Yeah, I’m checking for neurological differences between their brains.

Why can’t you just watch their behavior?
Behavioral monitoring can never be as exact as immunohistochemistry.

Mmh, yeah, I really hope your “army service” won’t take much longer; I can’t help feeling that it’s not exactly a good influence on you. Or the mice.

E. RAFSHA