by Peg Lewis

Created on: June 28, 2008

In the summer of 1963, I had a job at Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in their mouse lab. The task at hand was to find a cure for childhood leukemia.

My first few days on the job as a lab tech, I had to learn how to inject mice. Mice are small and fast, so in the days before the job began I had run through several improbable scenarios for how mouse injections were accomplished. None of them were close to the truth.

I watched as one of the senior techs showed me how. Ten mice in a cage, a plastic container the size of a large shoebox, were to be the victims of my novice efforts. The senior tech reached in a grabbed one by the tail. It spread-eagled in the air. She aimed it for the screen top of the box, now sitting on the counter. The mouse grabbed hold with its front claws. Still holding the tail, she reached up and grabbed it by the nape of its neck, flipped it over belly-up, still in her grasp, and inserted a tiny hypodermic needle into its fat tummy, then tossed it into another cage. It seemed unharmed.

My immediate task was to do the same with the remaining 9 mice, which took me maybe an hour. Or maybe more. After I realized the trick was to grab the mouse with the left hand while armed with the syringe and ready to jab with the right, I was able to do it well enough to move onto the main floor and get to work.

The mice in this lab, some thousands of them, were bred to be very susceptible to a mouse version of leukemia quite similar to some human childhood leukemias. We could be pretty sure that if we injected them with leukemia cells, they would catch the disease. Then it was our task - or rather the task of the real scientists on the team - to find some substance that would cure them.

These scientists, who were doctors, were really motivated by the project. They had many patients there at Sloan-Kettering who were gravely ill from leukemia, most of them children. They wanted us, even the summer lab techs, to get some perspective on our work, so once a month we went to the clinic and helped out there, where the sick children came for treatment, assessment, and bone marrow tests.

My first day in the clinic was a real eye-opener. By then I had been injecting sick mice, had watched some die and some get well, and had settled into a mechanical routine of doing my job.

As I stood at the door of the clinic and waited for an assignment, I saw for the first time why we were so busy several floors above. I saw children and parents sitting and waiting their

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