Building a New House (for a Mouse)

Mickey Mouse began life in a steamboat. Mighty Mouse just flew around. Danger Mouse inhabited a red phone booth. Basil lived on Baker Street, and Jerry sneaked into a hole in the wall, hiding from Tom the cat.

But at Harvard, mice are treated in a far more deluxe fashion. A $1.6 million facility currently under construction in the Biological Labs will hold approximately 11,000 of the small furry rodents and attend to every want from decor--the halogen look--to health concerns--the facility will be completely virus-free.

The new "mouse house" was begun nine months ago and will likely be completed near October 28, according to Charles J. Ciotti, director of administration of the Bio Labs.

Its final form is already taking shape, however, and it bears more than a casual resemblance to the set of Star Trek.

Flourescently-lit hallways branching off into rooms for cages are painted a pristine white--any chips or cracks in the paint would make the facility fail frequent inspections--and, once the facility is operational, no one will be able to enter except through a disinfecting "shower lock."

Street clothes are prohibited, and there is an eating room for humans spending days in the netherworld of the mice. Huge rooms will hold nothing but preciselyarranged rows of caged mice.

These arrangements are not left to chance, either, according to Ciotti and Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Director of Animal Facilities George P. Deegan. Claustrophobic mice will receive get no special dispensations, since the space between cages is strictly mandated, as is the size and type of wire and number of mice per cage.

And neither will gourmand mice will have any fun: No hamburger option for them. The only nutrition they'll receive is a high-class "prepared irradiated mouse diet" prepared to keep all mice healthy and free of infection.

Mouse bathrooms aren't available either, but cages will be cleaned twice a week and "many tons" of waste will be bagged and exported from the facility, say Ciotti and Deegan.

And like the Starship Enterprise's hidden control rooms, there is a huge amount of machinery--though apparently no warp drive--involved in maintaining the artificial world of the 11,000 furry animals.

The facility will be kept at exactly 70 degrees Fahrenheit and air must be circulated through it 15 times per hour--compared with most offices' 1.5 air changes per hour. The tangles of wires, pipes and engines involved are kept hidden.

Even the cleaning of the cages will be strictly regulated. The racks will be washed on an exactly 180-degree rinse cycle, and all 3,500 cages will be cleaned twice a week. "You could drive a Toyota in there," Deegan says of the rack-washing room.

The building process is made even more complex by the location of the facility, according to Ciotti. An existing Bio Labs greenhouse had to be demolished and two new ceilings--one below the mouse house-in-progress and one above it--built. On top of the upper ceiling, a new greenhouse is being constructed.

"It's a very complicated little building," says Ciotti. "Every aspect of taking care of animals is inspected."

But unfortunately for Andrew P. McMahon and Elizabeth J. Robertson, two newly-tenured professors of cellular and developmental biology, the facility should have been completed earlier.

"It's way behind schedule," says McMahon. "No one can tell me when it's going to be finished."

And for researchers whose delicate experiments depend on such a facility and the rodents it supports, such delays are no joke. McMahon and Robertson must commute to the larger Medical School mouse facilities in Boston, which house 30-40,000 mice.

"We're sort of twiddling our thumbs," says McMahon. "To do experiments when you have to commute five miles each way is not the ideal situation."

The two professors were tenured as a team in the spring of 1992, and a new mouse facility on the FAS side of the Charles River was definitely part of the package, McMahon says. "Neither of us of course would come unless there was a first-class mouse facility," he says.

Mice are the best experimental option because their physiology and in utero developmental processes have many similarities to that of humans, McMahon says. Mice also breed quickly and in fairly large litters, shortening experimental periods.

But at present, the research is on hiatus, waiting for the complex mass of wires, scaffolding and hidden machinery sitting on top of the Bio Labs to become a complete facility.

Inspectors from the City of Cambridge arrive unannounced about four times a year, he says, as do National Institutes of Health inspectors.

And the exactness of the construction is also important because small glitches can endanger any experiment. Deegan recalls one professor, who, for reasons still unexplained, lost his frogs and with them an experiment in progress. Perfect maintenance with delicate balances is necessary for Harvard's legions of experimental guinea pigs, rats, ants and toads as well, he says.

But amid the high-tech, spotless feeling of an advanced scientific laboratory there will be a small, poignant reminder of the everyday: Mousetraps will be stationed around the facility to prevent "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH"-like breakouts so that none of the valuable subjects can escape.