Pulling Back the Curtains on a Chinese Research Lab

As a participant in the Flagship program, I am required to have a Chinese native language tutor. These tutors are usually assigned to fit the flagship student's field of study or interest and future career. In the past, I have had students majoring in the sciences as tutors, but no medical students, as BYU lacks a medical school. But here in the southern capital I am in luck! My tutor, named Chen Liang (the same Chinese last name as I have), is a 9th year medical student at Nanjing, so he is just getting started! (This is not exactly true, but close enough).

Chen Liang works at the big, multiple thousand bed Gulou Hospital close to campus, a hospital building that looks somewhat like a modern art museum because of the unusual design. Unusual for hospitals anyway. He is studying fetal development at the moment and more specifically, effects of malnutrition of the mother on the offspring. To accomplish this task he does what anyone would do: starve pregnant mother rats and see if their kids are normal or not. This may sound unpleasant, and it is. The rats do not like it and some develop diabetes and die. But that is how science works, and I really mean that, no sarcasm here. Currently Chen Liang is in the stage of examining the rat offspring, both males and females and looking for how their mother's hunger affected them.

So one day I, under the guidance of another student participating in the research, ventured outside of the gates of Nanjing University and made my way to the lab. Chen Liang usually researches in the hospital, but for this day he needed an ultrasound machine that can be used on rats and other smaller animals. There are only two of these rare and expensive machines in Nanjing, and since Gulou Hospital has seen a great decrease in rodent patients over the last decade, this year's budget did not allow for one of these machines. But don't ferret..err... fret, there is another place in Nanjing that specializes in researching animals, and that is where this machine is located, and that is where we went! (Sorry for the pun. Speaking of puns, what do you call a soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray? A seasoned veteran!)

***Liquid Nitrogen for the Lab***

***

 After ringing the bell, Chen Liang greeted us wearing an authoritative white coat and let us into the facility. The inside air carried a strong animalistic scent, which undoubtedly came from the rooms filled with rat cages, including white and red-eyed inhabitants.
We made it to the rat imaging department, where I beheld a rat MRI machine, a rat CT machine, a rat EKG machine and, of course, a rat ultrasound machine. The ultrasound machine had its own person working the machine, employed from the research center. My tutor was there to oversee the experiment and to shave the rats. Ultrasounds have to be done on the skin, of course. He used a small blade held with some medical tweezer-like scissors (I will learn the real name of those eventually) and some sort of shaving cream. Carefully and only slightly injuring the rats, he shaved their chests. In order to do that, he had to sedate the rats first. This he did with a drug cocktail he mixed himself, a concoction of a muscle relaxant and a general anesthetic. He would grab the protesting rat, stuff its head into a glove to guard against bites and give it a shot right in the abdomen, disregarding the disproving squeals. As a note, the male rats were much more wimpy than the females. After just a little bit, they would be just as lifeless as the aforementioned glove and could be shaved and examined. The actual ultrasound was done similar to human ultrasounds, with the exception that the patient was totally knocked out and his four limbs taped to the table. But they used gel, like with humans!
This was all that Chen Liang was going to do today. After all the rats are examined, the last step would be to kill them and look into their tissue for other abnormalities.



I did not stay for that.