44 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
I
n 2006, Joe y Ramp suffered 23 bro-
ken bones, an injury to her prefrontal
cortex, and permanent nerve dam-
age to the left side of her body after
she and her horse took a fall. Ramp recalls
plunging head first, and then the horse,
which she had been training to play polo,
rolling on top of her. She fractured her eye
socket, cheekbone, and two vertebrae, and
broke her jaw and collarbone.
Tw o years and multiple surgeries later,
Ramp’s body was restored to the extent
that modern medicine would allow, but
her injuries meant she could no longer
continue her career as a horse trainer. She
also faced a bigger problem: severe and
lasting damage to her mental health.
In combination with a history of child-
hood sexual abuse, the accident caused Ramp
to develop symptoms that led to a diagnosis
of a complex form of post-traumatic stress
disorder (P T SD). Shortly after the acci-
dent, she began losing periods of time,
with no memory of what had happened.
She would dissociate from her environ-
ment, sometimes rendered unable to
communicate, and at times completely
losing touch with rea lit y. Ramp, then a
single mom in her 40s, became home-
bound, she says. And with no way to
understand what was happening in her
brain, she fell into a dark depression that
almost ended trag ic a lly.
“The day I was going to commit suicide
I sat down with my [life] insurance policy
in my lap and a gun,” she tells The Scientist.
But a nearby book with a golden retriever on
the cover caught her attention. “I picked it
up that day and started reading this book on
the floor of my office with a gun on my lap.”
It was the story of a service dog that
had helped a military veteran recover from
severe symptoms of PTSD, and it gave her
hope. She decided she would look into
getting a service dog to help her reinte-
grate into society and ultimately launch a
research career studying PTSD.
“I was like, maybe I can understand,”
says Ramp. “I was within minutes of tak-
ing my own life, and I made the decision
to instead try to rebuild one.”
Now with her own golden retriever ser-
vice dog Sampson by her side, the 54-year-old is earning her second bachelor’s degree
while working in the neuroscience lab of
Justin Rhodes at the Beckman Institute
for Advanced Science and Technology at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-
paign (U of I). With skills in brain section-
ing, immunoassays, and genotyping under
her belt, rave reviews from faculty, and an
undergraduate thesis in the works, Ramp
next wants to earn a PhD.
But her research career faces a major
hurdle: at the University of Illinois, Samp-
son is not permitted into laboratories that
study live mammals.
So far, the institution has prevented
Ramp from taking a psychology labora-
tory course involving rat experiments and
has kept her out of the Rhodes lab’s mouse
facilities. “The next hurdle comes with my
graduate work,” she says. “I [could] be up
against the same resistance, and maybe
won’t be able to follow the graduate direc-
tion that I had intended.”Ramp’s situation raises a difficult ques-
tion: When should service animals be per-
mitted—or not permitted—in scientific
laboratories? As is the case with most dif-
ficult questions, the answer is: it depends.
Institutions must consider the rights of
people with service animals, but also the
safety of everyone involved, the integrity
of the experiments, and federal regulations
for animal care and use.
“It’s a very delicate balance,” says Patri-
cia Redden, a professor of chemistry at
Saint Peter’s University in New Jersey
who raises service dogs and has served on
American Chemical Society committees
developing guidance on the admission of
service dogs to chemistry labs. “ Yo u can’t
really come out and s ay, ‘No, we absolutely
categorically will not allow them.’ But on
the other hand, you don’t want to come
out and s ay, ‘Absolutely, you can bring your
service dog in.’”Bringing dogs into labs
Wherever Ramp goes, Sampson goes too.
In addition to the physical support he pro-
vides—helping her up stairs and picking
up items off the floor, for example—Samp-
son is trained to alert Ramp to signs that
she is becoming overwhelmed. If she starts
rubbing her hands together or tapping her
finger, Sampson will get her attention by
nudging her leg or hands, and Ramp can
assess the situation—and remove herself
from it, if necessary.
“He keeps me aware,” says Ramp. “If I
don’t have him, and he doesn’t alert [me]
to those types of things, I will continue to
let those symptoms get worse.” In extreme
cases, she continues, “I can completely dis-
sociate to a point of not even being aware
of my surroundings. And I will continue to
function, drive, act, and do everything in
a complete state of psychological fugue.”
For these reasons, Ramp says, she
can’t be without Sampson. She first real-ized that this arrangement would present
some challenges in her quest to become a
neuroscientist when she started at Park-
land College, a two-year community col-
lege in Champaign, Illinois, in the fall of- The faculty and administrators had
no experience with service animals in the
laboratory. After several discussions, they
arranged for Ramp and her service dog,
then a Labrador retriever named Theo,
to attend general chemistry lab courses.
Some equipment was moved to ensure
that Ramp wouldn’t have to crisscross the
lab, and Theo had to wear goggles and
shoes like the students did. “Everyone
involved wanted to see if we could make it
work,” says Parkland chemistry professor
Andrew Holm.
When she started at U of I in 2015,
Ramp expected things to be easier. With
the institution’s 70-year history of disabil-
ity services, “I didn’t foresee a problem,”
I was within minutes of taking my own life, and I made the
deci sion to instead try to rebuild one.
—Joey Ramp, University of Illinois