Research centre home to 2,000 rats
Top neuroscientists work at the University of Lethbridge facility
Deborah Tetley, CanWest News Service
Published: Saturday, April 15, 2006
LETHBRIDGE, Alta -- She's barely three months old, and although swimming is instinctual, she'd rather be dry.
But, in order to climb out of the pool, she has to remember, drawing on a visual cue, which of the swimming lanes houses the dry platform at the end.
Was it the one on the right with the picture of what looks like a candy? Or the one on the left side of the barrier with the giant Pac Man-like image?
Not a simple matter for a rat. Even tougher for a rat with Alzheimer's.
The rodents may be reviled in society, but they are sometimes coddled and even pampered here at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge.
More than 2,000 rats and several hundred mice live here, most of them born and raised, some living off Fruit Loops cereal and food pellets, while a select few bunk eight-to-a-room in three-storey condos, where the nocturnal beasts sleep all day and play with toys at night.
These ones develop a thicker cortex --bigger brains from living in an enriched environment.
Others are lonely. A few are chronically chemically dependent. Some have parts of their brains removed.
All are there for one reason: to help researchers use applied science to study the relationship between behaviour and the brain.
The animals are poked, prodded and operated on for science -- given diseases and ailments such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, dementia and strokes so that doctors, scientists and pharmaceutical companies can work toward identifying treatments and cures.
From the outside, the freestanding Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience complex looks like a Costco store.
Inside, the 40,000-square-foot building is a maze of locked, beige-coloured doors with rotating metal peepholes and labs with odd names such as Rat Room 3.
And, the five-year-old building is under construction to make room for two new MRI machines -- one for humans, the other for rodents.
One side of the facility houses rodents, the other, people and labs.
On the people side, world renowned neuroscientists like Ian Whishaw, Bryan Kolb and Rob Sutherland work with rats and mice along with roughly 150 support staff and students.
Kolb, a neuropsychologist, is best-known for his research into how the brain recovers from injury, and stroke studies into whether nicotine can help human patients recover faster -- the way it does in lab rats.
Psychology and neuroscience researcher Sutherland, meanwhile, has conducted a number of behaviour studies, including feeding alcohol to pregnant rats to determine the minimum dosage needed to cause fetal alcohol affects.
Janice Sutherland runs a company called Neuro Investigations and through experiments with the swimming rats is collecting data for a large pharmaceutical company looking to explore new compounds for Alzheimer's patients.
Nearly 82,000 rats were experimented on in the four western provinces in 2004.
A large, weathered poster tacked to an office door addresses those who decry the experimentation on these and other animals at centre's such as this.
It depicts angry activists calling for the end of animal testing and the caption reads: "Thanks to animal researchers they'll be able to protest 20.8 years longer," suggesting that animal science has added two decades to the average human life.