Imagine, for a moment, a time when the coronavirus is eradicated. There are therapies and a vaccine. Lives are spared. People will ask, How did we get here? The answer may turn on a decision, made early this year, to send sixteen vials of mouse sperm to Mount Desert Island, Maine. Much of the island is a national park, with granite peaks and rocky beaches. Tucked into the landscape is the Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit founded, in 1929, to conduct biomedical research. It is the largest distributor of genetically engineered laboratory mice in the country, with a mouse repository that contains more than eleven thousand specimens.
On February 3rd, COVID-19 was not yet officially a pandemic. There were three hundred and sixty-two reported deaths—all but one of them in China—when Cat Lutz, the director of the mouse repository, got an e-mail from a colleague who works at another Jackson facility, in Shanghai, and lives in Wuhan, the outbreak’s epicenter. When the authorities locked down his city, he was stuck at home. “It was just terrifying,” Lutz recalled. “He said, ‘I am thinking about what we can do.’ He had started combing through the literature.”
Both scientists knew that the novel coronavirus would not make a conventional lab mouse ill—a severe obstacle to the development of a treatment. The medical community needed a mouse that was genetically modified with a human feature added to its lung cells, so that the virus would affect it. Years earlier, three American research teams had engineered such a mouse in response to SARS. One of the teams, co-led by Stanley Perlman, a virologist at the University of Iowa, had published a paper about its animal in 2007. SARS had receded, the authors noted, but the need to study coronaviruses had not. “It still remains a potential threat,” they warned.
“That day, we called Stan Perlman to see if he would donate his mice, and he said yes,” Lutz recalled. Those animals were no longer living, but Perlman’s team had frozen their sperm. Two vials arrived within days, followed by fourteen more. “We basically decided to use every last drop,” Lutz said. At Jackson, the sperm was rushed to a “dirty room,” where it was washed of potential contaminants. Then, using I.V.F., the laboratory began the process of generating twelve hundred transgenic mouse pups.
With each passing week, the coronavirus crisis became more acute. Lutz’s daughter fled Manhattan for Maine. As cities shut down, Jackson technicians were not only racing to produce mice for COVID-19—they were also swamped with requests to cryopreserve genetically modified mice used to study other diseases. Universities were shuttering labs whose work was not related to the pandemic, and research animals were poised to die by the thousands.
“We sent trucks around the country,” Lutz said. She was standing in Jackson’s cryopreservation room, beside twelve large steel vats. As she looked into one of the open containers, cold mist floated upward from inside it. “It’s like a Halloween lab, because there is a lot of liquid nitrogen,” she said. A technician was extracting vials of sperm from the vat. “She is wearing a lot of protective gear, because liquid nitrogen can burn you,” Lutz explained. “She is going to transfer those into this larger vat.”
Lutz headed to an office where a computer displayed a video feed of a breeding room—a super-secure sterile environment with racks of mouse cages and an “air shower,” to wash particles from clothing before entry. After the twelve hundred I.V.F. mouse pups were created, they were bred to produce more, with the expectation that demand would be enormous. Mice reproduce quickly, but the months required to build up a large enough colony were agonizing, as scientists barraged Lutz with impatient pleas. “People were calling, saying, ‘I knew your father, I knew your brother, we went to graduate school together, don’t you remember me?’ ” she recalled. “They would pull out any relationship.”
By mid-June, Lutz was finally ready to ship. Trucks were leaving Mount Desert Island every week, and travelling to medical researchers around the world. She stopped at a loading dock to oversee a shipment for Boston. Technicians in protective gear were standing at a conveyor belt, ferrying rows of semi-opaque plastic boxes—each housing mice designed for COVID-19—out of the building. They were transferring them into an eighteen-wheeler. As they worked, it was possible to see outlines of the mice scurrying around inside. Lutz headed out, and the truck departed. “We all recognize the sacrifice of these animals,” she said. “If you work here long enough, you develop a sense of gratitude.” ♦
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