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Vice Blog

BERLIN - EXPERIMENTS IN DEPRESSION

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.

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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.