Question: your work seems interesting, but where would you get doners from? :)

Greg FitzHarris answered on 16 Jun 2010:

We do most of our experiments using mouse eggs. We have to do this because you cant get eggs from (human) women without quite serious surgery and so it is illegal in England for women to donate eggs for research experiments (quite rightly so). So we use mouse eggs because they are like human eggs in many ways, and can help us understand eggs without surgery on humans.

We don’t do any ‘testing’ on the animals when they are alive, so they don’t suffer any distress or discomfort. We go to great lengths to use as few mice as possible (we give the mice a harmless treatment which makes them produce lots of eggs so we can use as few mice as possible).

An important thing to know is that in the UK the use of animals in experiments is very highly regulated — there are lots of regulations in place to make sure that scientists are only allowed to use animals if (a) the experiments are well designed so that useful information will be gained – in our case useful information about eggs. Scientists such as us aren’t allowed to use animals unless they can show that their experiments are going to tell us useful things regarding human health. (b) the scientists are highly trained in handling the animals respectfully – everyone in our lab has been on an extensive course, passed an exam, and holds a license from the Home Office to handle mice (c) the scientists can show that they have done everything reasonably possible to use the fewest number of animals.

So, the simple answer is yes, we do use mice, but this is because realistically we really have to in order to answer the questions which need answering, and everything possible is done to do this as compassionately as possible. No one in the lab ‘enjoys’ working with animals – we just see it as something that has to be done asnd so we do it as professionally as possible.

Its is possible to get some human eggs occasionally…. sometimes there are ‘spares’ after a human ivf cycle. These tend to be the bad ones, or ones which were ‘immature’, though — the ivf guys will obviously try to fetilise all the good ones in the hope of making the best-looking embryo for transfering back into the woman. So, its very hard, near impossible, to get ‘good’ human eggs to do experimanmts on.

I hope this helps… feel free to ask more
Greg