Nightmare at Columbia U: Return of Rain Mouse

Remember Dr. Mady Hornig's Neurotoxic effects of postnatal thimerosal are mouse strain dependent ? You may remember that Prometheus wrote an excellent review of the Hornig study, as it appeared in print, as well as the reporting by Hornig of things that the mice did that weren't written up in the study. Prometheus detailed the way Hornig overdosed her "autoimmune" mice and offered a possible explanation for why she might have reported, outside the published paper, that the mice chewed on their tails and feet. But, neither Prometheus nor Autism Diva had a good explanation, it seemed, for why the mice would "groom through" a cage mate's skull. Dr. Hornig, as reported in the book "Evidence of Prestidigitation," seemed to delight in shocking people with her descriptions of the gorey behavior of her evil little "autistic" mice. It was all very odd.

None of the mice described in peer reviewed version of Hornig’s study showed any horrible effects from the thimerosal. She had more than 4 dozen of the SJL/thim mice, and more than 4 dozen SLJ/J mice that didn't get thimerosal and besides them she had mice of 2 other strains in the experiment. The post-mortem part of the Hornig study suffers from the fact that they only bothered to dissect 3 of the SJL/J thimerosal dosed (SJL/thim) mouse brains. Hornig found changes in those 3 autopsied mouse brains, but what Hornig found does not map onto changes found in autistic people’s brains. Even though the Hornig group was looking for what they had defined as the likely mousey correlates of autistic behavior, they found none. Even though the SJL/J mice are supposed to be extremely sensitive to mercury and extremely sensitive to just about everything, they did pretty well.

The upshot of all of this is that “there’s no there there” in the Hornig study, even though it was hyped at the time as proof that thimerosal containing vaccines could cause autism in susceptible indivuals. Even though the abstract and introduction of the paper might lead one to believe that they found something that could be related to autism, there’s nothing there that can be related to autism. In spite of this, Mady dear is going to do another study and inject the mice with thimerosal and this time try to cure them of whatever she thinks they have with more heavy metal, that is, with gold salts.

The weirdest part of the whole Rain Mouse escapade is the description of self injurious and other injurious behavior on the part of the SJL/J strain mice overdosed with thimerosal. As mentioned before, the most curious thing about Dr. Hornig's "Mice of the Living Dead" was that they weren't described in her peer reviewed paper, but were described to the Institute of Medicine and to the Centers for Disease Control folks as recorded in the sensationalistic David Kirby book. Here's a sample:

"... putting up a photo of two mice. "He has groomed through the skull, and eventually destroys his partner," Hornig said. Every parent of an autistic kid in the room could be seen grimacing in dark recognition of such destructive behavior." (page 312)

Hmmmm.

What about those mice? Why did Hornig pick the SJL/J mice in particular? She describes them as a "autoimmune disease-sensitive" breed. Besides being an "autoimmune disease-sensitive" breed what else is known about the SJL/J mice?
This pdf file explains in detail some of their characteristics.

Animal Model
The SJL mouse is an animal model for Hodgkin's disease.[...]
Anatomy
Low brain weight ...
Cerebellus has no intraculminate fissure between vermian lobule IV and vermian lobule V ...
Low percent carcass lipid on a high-fat diet ....
Low retinal ganglion cell number ....
High bone density femur....
Correlation between the organization of hippocampus and behavior in nine strains ....

Behavior
High spontaneous fighting....
Severe fighting among males housed together, beginning at about 8 weeks.
Most males will be killed by 4-5 months unless caged separately....

Bolded emphasis added.

Well, now. SJL/J mice, the ones Dr. Hornig reported as killing their "partners'" by "grooming" through their skulls are known to be aggressive. The males are known to kill each other and so need to be housed separately beginning at 8 weeks of age. For some reason that little fact didn't get reported by that great investigative writer, David Kirby. For some reason Dr. Hornig didn't mention it in her talk to the IOM. In fact, if you want to listen to Dr. Hornig describe her little nightmare mice you can hear her present to the IOM, and see some of her slides and movies of her little murderous mousies. They were mousies made mindlessly murderous by mercury, according to Dr. Hornig. Click here to download a (large) realplayer video file of Dr. Hornig speaking at the IOM. You will be able to hear her in her own words and see a little of some furious self-grooming on the part of one of her mice.

More about the SJL/J mice can be found here. That page includes this information, "Males aggressive, weanlings small, female breeders bite wounds, ..." That page also mentions how some breeds do a kind of agressive grooming of other mice called, "barbering."

What follows is a paraphrase of part of an e-mail sent to Autism Diva by someone who does research on mice. Autism Diva asked him about putting mice together in a cage when they are known to be deadly aggressive:

Not really many people would know that SJL/J mice are prone to violence, aggression and self-mutilation, outside of mouse researchers. A friend of mine in my lab, and I try to make sure that others in our lab "treat them respectfully". The bottom line is that when I see an animal suffering I put it to sleep.

Each lab is on an animal "Protocol". The protocol states everything you can and can't do to mice. If Mady's group did not have some sort of caveat to their protocol that allowed them to observe (to foster tacitly) fighting and injurious behavior, then they'd be in deep trouble if they reported an experiment that involved this observation.

The way it could be legal is if a particular postdoc didn't know that would happen and discovered it occurring in every cage before separating the fighters/groomers. By the way, there is a form of aggressive grooming called Barbering, which is where a dominant mouse will bite off the whiskers of the submissive animals. Back to Mady Hornig's lab, they would be in trouble if the postdoc observed this and then did an experiment where mice were purposefully put together to see if they could repeat the grooming/injury. This is a big no no unless it was written on the protocol and that kind of caveat/rider would be quite rare I'd think. We certainly can't do that.

So, now we have a very different picture of the killer Hornig mice. SJL/J male mice are prone to agression and the females are prone to biting their wounds. If they developed some nerve pain from the thimerosal, biting their limbs would be a very predictable reaction, but maybe they got wounds from another source. There's reason to think that Dr. Hornig broke her lab's rules by allowing the mice to hurt themselves and hurt other mice. If she allowed the SJL/J males to remain in the same cage together past 8 weeks she was "asking" for them to get hurt. She should have explained that the SJL/J mice are prone to aggression always, not just when they are given thimerosal.

On the inaccurately named, "Autism Fair Media," website you can hear founding mercury mom, Lyn Redwood say,

“Mady took an autoimmune mouse and administered vaccine levels of thimerosal along with a control mouse and the autoimmune mouse developed symptoms that were very similar to autism, along with brain pathology that was very similar to autism. We are continuing to fund Dr. Hornig, this year we’re funding her $100,000...”

Notice it's "Mady" not just "Dr. Hornig." Also, notice the misrepresentation of the study. Saying that "Mady" found "symptoms very similar to autism" is a lie. Interestingly, before Hornig started her orginal nighmare mouse study she needed thimerosal containing vaccines to inject into the mouse pups, but she couldn't find any, apparently. Sally Bernard put out a request for people to help her find some on the Autism-mercury Yahoo! group.

You can watch video on "Autism Fair Media" of Dr. Mady Hornig describing her research. It's quite interesting.

Also of note, the University of California at Davis, Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute... a.k.a. "the MIND" has replicated or is replicating the Hornig thimerosal/ SJL mouse study. Autism Diva learned about it from the video of Dr. Burbacher (who works with monkeys) also available on "Fair Autism Media."

Autism Diva will contact the lab-animal use people at UCD to find out what kind of protocol the UCD scientist has in place to protect the SJL/J mice.

"What are we going to do tomorrow night, Brain?

Try to take over the world!"



Autism Diva
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