TRANSGENIC EMBRYO IMPLANTATION: Snaking into Foster Female, Pseudo-Pregnant, Donor Mother, Surrogates

This was one of the heights of the residency. My request was honored. My visit to witness mouse embryo implantation was obscure, nuanced and a true experience. Mouse embryo implantation is done after the fertilization and the grading of embryos, after the microinjection of the transgene construct or the CRISPR guide, usually after cryopreservation and thawing of the developing transgenic embryos.

Hormone injected pseudo-pregnant mice are given anesthesia for an operation. This is also called vivisection. Foster Female mice are opened up and the embryos are injected with a hypodermic into their uterus, actually into one of their dual uterine horns. The embryos are implanted into a surrogate mother mouse. The donor uterine horn allows for mutant implantation into the wall of the uterus to further the gestation.

Beyond the Barrier

To start with I gained access to the ABSL-2, biological level 2 area of the Animal Facility. This area is usually for animal caretakers only. Entry is called ‘Beyond the Barrier’ as you are meant to dispose of your everyday clothing and objects, bathe and wear sterile disposable clothing. I was not allowed to bring my cell phone, a camera, my notepad or a pen. I left all that with my wallet, my wedding ring and my keys with my clothing in a locker. These barrier access rooms are like an airlock. Most of the cleanliness is to protect the animals from contamination by you. Not only are there surgeries being done and recoveries in process, but some of the mice are immunodeficient, sick in other ways (see: disease posting) and/or in delicate transgenic model trails that involve cures not yet tested.

Some of the aseptic protections are for the animal’s safety and resemble any doctor or nurse’s prep for surgery in any hospital in the world. But, some of the ritual cleansing is also to ensure experimental repeatability by reducing variability. In this case, it is your body’s surface microbiome that is the potential for loose skewing of the experimental data locus, self quarantine to protect others and other’s data. I showered and washed my hands all the way to the elbows three times. I then put on the special pants, socks, bootie shoes, shirt, hairnet, mask and gloves. I sprayed my id card and gloves with alcohol. Then I entered The Barrier.

Surgeon, Nurse, Anesthesiologist

M. was there to greet me and walk me down the hall to the operation room. Surgery is vivisection. I say this quite simply but it is no simple issue for some. I was surprised to come to terms with this surgery so well. It is perhaps the details that make the difference. The surgery is familiar as it is much like a human surgery. I was very impressed with the skill set, the craft of the process and the care involved. The process was done in a way that was as pain free as possible, elegantly procedural in pace (neither rushed nor dawdling) and with an immense knowledge set calmly applied. Mid-surgery I turned to M. and said, you are a surgeon and an anesthesiologist all at once. She said yes and added that she was a nurse to her mice as well.

The Pseudo-Pregnant Surrogate is entered into a clear plexiglass gas chamber and given a general anesthesia. Then the mouse is removed and put onto a sterile surgical field. The sterile surgical field si also a heating pad so the mouse is warm and cosy during surgery. A face mask is attached to the nose and mouth area of the donor mother to continue general anesthesia. Eye drops are applied to keep the foster female from having dry eye as the ability to blink is lost in the anesthetized state. A rectangular area on the side of the mouse between the ribs and the thigh is shaved. I literally watched the shaving done. This is from memory. No notebooks, no photos. It was a disposable razor. M. was very tidy with the hair. The area is then washed and wiped with alcohol and then washed and wiped again with betadine. The area is not prepared for incision. The next step is a subcutaneous (under the skin) injection with a painkiller like novocaine… insuring complete numbness of the area. While the analgesic takes effect, the hypodermic is loaded with mouse embryos.

The Snake by John Steinbeck

There is a short story titled The Snake by John Steinbeck and a recording of it from 1937 can be found online for streaming only, link below. I had the feeling I was re-enacting the story in the lab with the Scientist, but the gender roles were partially reversed and I wasn’t sure who was haunting who. The story tells about a young scientist who works collecting, killing and selling specimens and organism by-products in a little independent laboratory on the ocean next to the Monterey Bay sardine canneries of Norther California. From starfish embryology to rattle snake venom to embalmed cats, to mounted octopi, he is a scientist dealing in death and anatomy, reproduction and dissection. There is euthanasia and feeding, fresh death and timed stages of developing new life. The story is about a woman who comes to his lab to observe. She is chilling to him in her quiet interest in his male rattle snake. She seems to be a snake woman and she makes a haunted request. She wants to buy the male rattlesnake and leave him in the lab but occasionally come to look at him or feed him. And she wants to feed the snake a live rat as part of the purchase and see the snake strike the rat with venom and then be swallowed whole.

The woman’s request, her dark eyes, her seeming cold bloodedness and her emulation of the snake’s moves makes the young male scientist afraid. He feels like she has paid him as a sort of pimp to negotiate an uncanny relation between a non-scientist human and a process that should not be read as a sadistic sport or an aberrant circus of thrill killing. Nonetheless, he accepts the money and puts the snake and the rat together in a tank. The scientist tries to cover the feeling of being part of the show, the feeling of being included in some deep wrongness, some sick infinity that makes him flush with rising blood in the face and feel the snake, like a surgeon, has no aberrant mourning, the woman like the snake is not interested in his teaching, explaining, detailing. The shielding falls away and the everyday becomes transgressive. He avoids her eyes, he avoids looking at her mouth while the snake and the woman weave their heads back and forth. The snake strikes and kisses the corpse and then swallows the rat whole with a jaw, throat, jaw throat rhythm. The sexual innuendo of the cold blooded yet unscientific woman outsider is not lost on the young scientist. He briefly considers his lonely solitude, perhaps killing her snake, praying if he could find a god to pray to, which he cannot. He concludes that he will continue to ignore her if she comes again, to not pay her with attention. But, she never comes to visit again and her disappearance becomes a sort of never ending obsession for her return, to meet her in the street, to look for her everywhere and see her sometimes as an apparition, to see her in others, misidentified, to see her on the wind.

The Snake by John Steinbeck, read by the author, original audio file from a reel to reel tape, recorded in 1937, Salinas Public Library, Salinas, California, Online, Stream Only: LINK HERE https://archive.org/details/csal_000048

Re-enacting The Snake by John Steinbeck

In this case it was a visiting artist with prurient interests visiting as a non-scientist to the surgical field. Observing but not allowed to touch, the IVF implantation of mutant embryos into a psuedo-pregnant mouse mother is witnessed by the bioartist in residence. This is after proof by artist of the ability to handle, the partial desensitization: to euthanasia, performing fresh dead dissection, engaging the process of fresh dead cesarean section, executing transgenic embryo dissection and primary embryo ‘parts’ acquisition for tissue culture and organoid culturing… i.e. neural ganglia… etc. But here the psychosexual symbolic is not just about killing and eating but also about mating and breeding. And, I am the woman visiting the scientist in the re-enactment of the story.

Gore’s Anatomy: the Untrained Eye and the Illegibility of the Visceral

The procedure was done by M., a lovely scientist. Both M. and I are engaged as spooky interlopers. Like in the short story, The Snake, I was the obscure witness and I was sometimes looking at M. not the mouse, as she made the first incision through the skin and the second incision through the muscle. M found the ovary and the ampule and the uterine horn. She showed me, but my untrained eye could only see gore. I could not see what she saw, even as she dabbed blood away with a piece of gauze. I could not see any anatomical forms. My mind made out only abstract red enigma.

Finally, I am invited to observe mouse IVF embryo Implantation and it is the gaping maw of the inside of a body, all viscera, no structure. I am struck blind, my eye is not trained to see the specialized anatomy in the biomess. M. finds the ovary with a tweezer and clamps the ovary and tapes the clamp to the sterile field. Stay in place. This holds the incision open and she turns to me.

Hands-On, Hands-Off and somethings in-between.

I had been in similar situations like this, all dolled up as a research surgeon or euthanasiatrix and not allowed to help… all gloved up and no where to go. No hands-on vivisection is allowed by law without a license. Its not happening without the proper training and the right reasons. I had asked to be allowed to assist in any legal way possible during the process. So, when M. asked me do go to the cabinet and bring her a hypodermic syringe for embryo loading and injection, i was pleased to have a role. I returned to M. with the hypo and passed it to her. This was my hands-on moment. She is mouth pipetting the transgenic mouse embryos into a glass needle under the microscope. I stand behind her left shoulder, she is sitting, I am standing. The silence is deafening.

Mouth Pipetting

Throughout my residency I was consistently amazed at the use of mouth pipetting as an accepted part of mouse embryo handling. In any of the 20+ labs I have inhabited as an artist, mouth pipetting has always been taboo, forbidden, warned against and even conceptually demonized. But, here it is accepted practice. I have kept a few of the lab’s home made, DIY mouth pipettes as trophies. Consistently, I would just take pause to see the mouth pipetting of live mouse embryos, but this time it was M. and we were in surgery and she was mouth pipetting embryos, developing embryos and prepping them for implantation… with her mouth.

I was also in the process of offering to purchase the commercial services of i3S to produce some transgenic art mice breeds, a lineage of unneeded and non-disease model based production following much of the same protocols. I was told that unless I had third party clearance of my animal housing and care facility, my art mice would have to be kept at i3S. So, there is this pregnant pause.

The keepers and the caretakers and the artist, beyond the barrier, exposing the ovary, finding the ampule or, in humans, the fallopian tube, snipping it, taking the loaded glass needly of the mouth pipette that is now filled with 10-12 mutant germline mouse embryos living and mouth pipetting them, blowing them into the needle of the hypodermic, injecting the embryos into the ampula.

And there is M. again with the super crafty, specialized skills, suturing ornate tiny stitches, microfine suturing of the muscle, and then again taking the time to do it right, tweezers and suturing needles and nearly invisible threads to close the exterior skin. After the wound is closed twice, a third level of containment of the wound involves a sort of glue that is added to the sutured wound and sealed closed. This is to prevent the mice from scratching at the wound and tearing open the stitches. This to me implies that there is a skill set, a working knowledge of the organism, the animal is known, metabolically, behaviorally, intimately.

The Mouse will heal, hold these embryos and either birth them as new strains or be euthanized and have them taken for regenerative embryo work. It is now time to turn off the anesthesia. M. turns to me and asks, would I like to turn off the gas. It is non-invasive and I suppose it is a kind act but i am really willing to do whatever she will accept, hungry for engagement, to follow her rules on or off protocol. I turn off the gas and the Mouse, the Surrogate Womb Female, Pseudo-Donor Mother, now pregnant with a brood of an other’s product oriented kin, she begins to awaken.

Seemingly drunk, awakening from amnesia and silly with some sort of hungry celebratory body language, she eats and drinks and explores her housing with newfound relish… as with many near death experiences, anesthesia provides some stimulus that can be temporarily life affirming. Awakening from amnesia is akin to anamnesis and so a feeling of overarched comprehension can ensue.

Aftercare

We check on the grimace scale and our mom with our baby pups is recovering from surgery well. That evening there is a mating. Newly implanted Pseudo-Pregnant Donor Surrogates need to mate for the proper swelling of the ampula and the uterine horn’s receptivity to be high efficiency. So, she is mated with a sterile male… vasectomised or with the testes removed. The male must be sterile to ensure all the babies are for the company not from some willy-nilly hanky-panky. But the mating act, though not reproductive, must occur to stimulate the body, to fool it into swallowing the human-techno repro-parenting detour. And, I leave out the barrier, sending my sterile personal protective clothing for lab laundry or incineration. I leave Porto later that day in a fugue of bittersweetness and yearning.

An aside on LGTBQ+ use of Foster Female, Pseudo-Pregnant Donor Mother, Surrogates?

There is no nuanced talk or practice of understanding sex and gender of non-humans in a reproductive animal facility. There is only male and female. You are either fertile or you are dead. There is use of mice that have been given vasectomies, but they are used as reproductive tools to stimulate ovulation or embryo implantation. On the other hand, the instrumentalisations of fertility have an obscure commonality (for different purposes and identities) as some of the same hormones utilized by the trans-community are used in reproductive technology and the goal of making mutants is also about difference production. This commonality and the fundamentally queer process of mechanizing reproduction outside of a gendered body, opens up ways that trans-people of the breeder curious variety can get some traction in the IVF community. Many IVF clinics are LGTBQ+ friendly. The commercialization of baby production and the blind reproductive frenzy produced by Fertility Clinics can be both an abuse of authority and a queer friendly space equal identity opportunity, if children is your goal.

Of course the use of mostly cis and often economically underprivileged, predominantly cis women’s bodies, often international women of color ,as non-mouse, semi-humanized surrogates in a competitive womb implantation market makes for unusually harsh usury that belies any intersectionality and just makes babies for straight, gay, bisexual or group marriage couples who, if they don’t want to be bothered to carry or are not born to it, can outsource the embodied dangers, pain and labour to others. Surrogate mothers are left with few rights to their offspring, even though, through the placenta, the blood of the birth mother and the fetal blood cells are entangled at best if not a permanent part of each organism for the lifetime or even congenitally in both directions.

AI – Artificial Infantilism: Photos Blocked but DALL-E reaction is also censored…

I was not allowed to take pictures or even bring a camera beyond the barrier. So I generated some imagery collaborating with the proprietary AI system Dall-E. I thought Dall-E representation might be a stand-in for potentially PR unfriendly documentation. But the Dall-E system is also Rated G (G is for General all ages audience). It is time to worry about more than AI and Privacy. The future of human cognitive maturity is at stake. The urge for profit seems equate to a maturity break. Unless you are actively consuming or producing porn, it is currently a public relations nightmare to expose potential clients to anything except a 12 years old or under media platform. No violence, politics or sex is allowed. No nudity. Safety and harm reduction is equated with a devolved version of the definition of safety. We are at the point of stopping racism, sexism, homophobia and capitalist greed by simply allowing our platforms to erase that in words, images and video clips. The trouble is not gone, it is censored to the point of Artificial Infantilism (AI). Being overly conservative to ‘protect the children’ is a standard PR ploy offering generic happy alignments and assuming the emotional landscape of most users is 12 years old and under. This super stoopid version of safety where nonG-rated AI is not happening may set humanity in all it’s biodiversity and behavioral integrity into a bias downward spiral against adulthood. Beware the military, industrial, media complex’s ‘no nipples’ platform immaturity engines.