THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 13
1
DEPT.OFPREVENTION
MIGHTYMICE
I
magine, 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 deci-
sion, made early this year, to send six-
teen vials of mouse sperm to Mount
Desert Island, Maine. Much of the is-
with requests to cryopreserve genetically
modified mice used to study other dis-
eases. Universities were shuttering labs
whose work was not related to the pan-
demic, 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 Hal-
loween lab, because there is a lot of liq-
uid 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 trans-
fer 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 Des-
ert Island every week, and travelling to
began on Jamaica Avenue, in 1927. “It
doesn’t matter whether Fred Trump was
a dues-paying member of the Klan,”
Kuszai said. “He was situated within a
community in which there were thou-
sands of Klan members.”
Woodhaven has changed since then.
People of color make up eighty per cent
of the population, and only twenty per
cent of residents voted for Donald Trump
in 2016. Still, affection for the Trump
family persists among some locals. Tony
Rinaldi, the owner of Hardware City, a
store down the street from where the
historical marker stood, said that Trump
had a good bit of support among his
customers. “A lot of people are upset by
the things that are going on in this coun-
try,” he explained, without elaborating.
The District Attorney charged Me-
dina with attempted criminal mischief.
(The case is pending, with a court date
set for October.) Medina, a self-described
activist, lives in Ridgewood, not far from
Woodhaven. Petite, with cropped blond
hair and a nose ring, she answered her
door the other day but didn’t have much
to say about her arrest. “It makes me a
little nervous, because I work for A.O.C.,”
she said, and excused herself to return to
a conference call. (Ocasio-Cortez did
not respond to a request for comment,
but financial disclosures show that Me-
dina was on her campaign’s payroll.)
As for Medina’s methods, Hardware
City’s Rinaldi didn’t think much of them.
“A blowtorch?” he said, suggesting that
a reciprocating saw would have been
better. “If you had a good blade, it would
take one or two minutes to saw down a
pole like that.”
—Phil Campbell
land is a national park, with granite peaks
and rocky beaches. Tucked into the land-
scape is the Jackson Laboratory, a non-
profit founded, in 1929, to conduct bio-
medical research. It is the largest distrib-
utor of genetically engineered laboratory
mice in the country, with a mouse re-
pository 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 out-
break’s epicenter. When the authorities
locked down his city, he was stuck at
home. “It was just terrifying,” Lutz re-
called. “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 conven-
tional 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 en-
gineered such a mouse in response to
SARS. One of the teams, co-led by Stan-
ley Perlman, a virologist at the Univer-
sity 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 ani-
mals were no longer living, but Perlman’s
team had frozen their sperm. Two vials
arrived within days, followed by four-
teen 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 con-
taminants. Then, using I.V.F., the labo-
ratory began the process of generating
twelve hundred transgenic mouse pups.
With each passing week, the corona-
virus 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
