what is right and what is wrong?

When my new boss showed me around the lab and showed me the video of the rats in the chamber being shocked, I had to pretend something was in my eye to blink back the sudden tears. I knew that crying would give me away. They needed someone who would do the job compassionately but with as much detachment to the animals as possible. I have never figured out, really, how to detach my affections, even from rats.
She told me that per regulation they kill all the rats, either to harvest their brain material or as standard procedure after a behavioral experiment. She said our experiment wouldn't require killing as many rats as a behavioral experiment but if I ever had to help out the graduate student in the lab, I may have to kill as many as forty rats at once. Later I learned that they anesthetize them and then put them in a kind of guillotine designed to waste as little of their body as possible. They are asleep and don't feel a thing. They kill all of them because it is considered inhumane to just keep rats in little cages forever as they grow cramped and obese.
My boss was concerned for all the wrong reasons about my interactions with the rats. She was worried I'd freak out, think they were gross or something. When she took me in to look at the rats though the only reason I had trouble picking them was because it seemed like it would be painful to dangle them by the tails, although she assured me it wasn't. The adorable brown and white mouse with its inquisitive nose and friendly paws sat still for a moment in my arms before it started scrabbling about. It was one of the cutest things I've ever seen. I tried to imagine refraining from naming it, refraining from showing any kind of attachment to it as I trained it, shocked it, and finally killed it.
I kept my wits together for the remainder of the interview, but I felt quite sick and hollowed out inside. When I left the brain and cognitive science building after promising to get back to her, a single memory was pulsing through me. At the beginning of junior year of high school I think I was sitting on the basement floor doing something when one of those disgustingly hairy and huge and poisonous hobo spiders crawled up to me. There was a moment of indecision and hatred (I HATE spiders, all of them, with a burning passion), and then I made a decision that would prove pivotal in my life. I grabbed a nearby Mormon find the Nephite book (like Where's Waldo), and I smashed the spider. I slammed the book down hard to be sure to kill it. When I lifted the book, it was dead in a little ball, its legs all curled up, probably from the lack of disengagement of myasin heads on the actin in its tiny muscles. I felt, in that moment, far more monstrous than the spider. I felt dirty through and through. I felt like throwing up. I flushed the spider down the toilet, and I actually cried, because no matter how much I hate spiders, I recognized that I had prematurely ended something before nature had ended it. There's nothing natural about squashing something with a where's the Nephite book. I decided then and there to never again intentionally kill anything.
In the years since then, things have been hard. I have had to take showers with poisonous hobo spiders, had to try, beating back the fear all the while, to trap them in cups and shove postcards beneath them and put them outside. I have had to defend bees (which I also hate because they keep hurting me) and mosquitos, withstanding bites to preserve their lives. It has been hard for me in a way, I'll convince, but in another way it has been easy becaue I am so certain, especially after that spider incident, how strongly I believe in the sanctity of life. I tend to believe in it more than the quality of life because I think it's just such a miracle, a beating heart. I don't believe in euthanasia even when something (like my dog was at the end of junior year) is suffering very, very much. To me it seems like playing God, messing with the power of life that I hold so sacred.
I am the girl that doesn't kill bugs that even she detests because she sees such a miracle in their simple existence and interconnectedness.
When I got back to my dorm and futilely tried to study organic chemistry (whose final I ended up doing miserably on and ruining my grade, unfortunately), I couldn't stand it anymore. I kept imagining that cute rat I was holding, and then trying to imagine putting it in a guillotine and chopping its head off. What's worse is that decaptiation has always horrified me. There's something senselessly brutile about it to me, and I have always been a little obsessed with the question of what the man in the guillotine is thinking and feeling right before the blade falls, trying to cope with that ending.
I was in a bind. Here is the bind. That lab is exactly the kind of thing I want to do with my life, and every lab I will ever really want to work in will also kill rats or mice. The lab I interviewed with is doing work on the neurological basis of PTSD so as to develop better pharmaceuticals eventually. The rats have a shock-tone pairing over the course of two days in order to imprint a fear memory so they have PTSD when they subsequently hear a tone. Part of the research revolves around drug trials, and part of it revolves around locating proteins. What my boss is doing that I'm sure I will help her with is inserting glo DNA with a vector into proteins involved in the fear response and determining (by killing the rat and looking at the nueral material) where exactly in the amygdale those proteins are located.
The reason I want to help people with PTSD and mental illness is that I have a very close relationship to those things as well. I have moderate PTSD from trauma in my past, and I have bipolar. I have seen my grandfather and my uncle torn apart from PTSD after witnessing horrors in the wars, Iraq and World War II. My uncle had to shoot an entire family. Now he is having a ton of problems with flashbacks and he has taken to self-medicating with drugs and alcohol since he got back a few months ago (how he can still support this infernal war after that, don't ask me). I know how debilitating it is to wake up so depressed you can't move or so manic you can't think. I know how it sucks away life and hope and results in bad quality of life and a lot of suicide. I know the hollow, gnawing ache as PTSD flings you back into some nightmare. I'm feeling it right now as I struggle to survive life at home with the people I love so much who made my childhood such a hellish place at times. I know that this research can help. I'm not screwing aruond with Bayesian modeling anymore. This can make the difference I want it to make.

Do you see my dilemma? I am so opposed to killing things, and yet the good things I want to bring to the world require this kind of utilitarian animal sacrifice. I have a very black and white, deontological view of killing, and now I am presented with a situation that severely strains my moral ideals. I have never really been opposed to medical research on animals, but I suppose I never really made the connection that it violated this other opinion that I have about sanctity of life. As I tried to study for chemistry, though, after I thought about it a lot, I realized that I do believe it's just, not really right, but justified, to kill animals if it brings drugs that help severely hurting people. I know all of the drugs that I take have required that sacrifice, and I know I'd be dead without them. The problem was, though, that I couldn't imagine killing a rat that I loved myself. If I couldn't kill a spider that I hated, how could I kill a cute rat that I loved, that I had worked with for weeks? How could I kill forty all at once? Even thinking about it twisted something in me, and trying to imagine it I started sobbing. I wasted a lot of time that night that I could have been studying for that disastrous chemistry test just crying and trying to imagine, trying to wrap my head around, really intentionally killing something innocent that trusted me. I think that's a terrible part of it to me, the fact that you condition those rats to trust you, to believe in you for sustenance, and then you kill them. It seems like one of the terrible things about human nature to me that we're capable of that kind of betrayal.

I talked to a friend that has done it before, and she made me feel a little better. I talked to my mother who reminded me that if I want to do psychopharmacology this is just something I have to do, whether this year or next or in graduate school, but eventually it will have to happen. I went back and talked to my boss more about the procedure and how she deals with it. Ultimately, it didn't seem like I had a choice, and I liked that because I coudln't face the choice. If I wanted to help people with mental illness, this was just something I had to do, and I knew I wanted to help people with mental illness. So I took the job.

But this week when I was supposed to be buying Chile peppers at Albertsons I went by the pet store and just knelt for a long time outside of the rat cages that said things like "friendly male, wants a loving family" and tried to imagine killing them, and finally I had to leave because I just felt so sick. I imagine that the same thing that gave me PTSD, my capacity to dissociate from bad situations, will allow me to follow through with this. But like how in Harry Potter a soul is fractured a bit from casting the deat curse, I think I will break some part of me in this process. I'm confused still about what is wrong and what is right. Mostly I just wish Kant was applicable in the real world. Even the religion I believe in requires kind of situational ethics, and the Book of Mormon at one point explicitely advocates utilitarianism when it says something like "it is better that one man perish than an entire nation dwindle in unbelief." Also, Abraham was prepared to kill Isaac even when it was seemingly against the very black and white ten commandments. I guess there are always exceptions in life that require the retirement of certain stiff ideas about the way the world is and demand more flexibility.

I don't like this though. I really, really, really, really don't want to kill those rats. And I imagine that the first time I have to do it will be like hell for me. And I don't know, then, whether I hope I become desensitized or not. For my sanity, I hope I do. For my innate sense of morality, I hope I don't.

hope

When I am getting too cynical, I see things like this.

A whole family in a day... your whole life... and yet, you forgive.

"How do you pick up the threads of an old life?  How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back?  There are some things time cannot mend.  Some hurts that go too deep that have taken hold."  -LOTR

Though it seems obvious that we proceed linearly through time, physicists don't really have a good scientific explanation for this imprint.  According to most laws of physics, things should be temporally symmetric.  So what is time?  I suppose in part it is the arrow of entropy, pointing constantly from order to disorder.  It dictates the states of our universe.  Right now I am typing this, and a moment ago I was typing the LOTR quote.  And somehow, then, the universe was a more ordered place than it is now.

But of course there are all sorts of confusing things to think about with time, such as Einstein's twin paradox, and the speed of light being a barrier for total energy (spacial + temporal),  and wormholes, and multiple universes, and those confusing things about going back in time and killing your father.  It seems like some argument against free will.  If time travel exists, then my free will is limited.  Because, at least in one continuous world, if I go back in time before I was born, I cannot kill my mother.  I don't have that choice.

There is something about the nature of long-term-potentiation of excitatory post synaptic potentials in the brain and working, short term, and long term memory in its various locations (hippocampus, frontal cortex maybe?) that makes memories of the past but not of the future, even if physically the ordering of time seems a bit ambiguous.  Something about me traps me in this entity that no one can characterize, this weird next of seconds and the decay of atoms and slowly turning gears.

To me, at least, time is the most incomprehensible thing that we humans can think about, and yet we have managed to make it so integral in our daily lives.  In linguistics we learned that they thought they had found a tribe in some rainforest somewhere that had no language for discussing the future or the past I think.  They originally thought that this tribe had no concept of the future or past, but they've concluded now that they just didn't have a way to articulate their concepts of time.  Is it possible for a human being, isolated from everything, to be unaware of time?  Doesn't he or she sense something changing?  Change, derivatives... those somehow define our lives and yet they mean nothing, really, I mean, semantically, what does it mean for time to have passed?  We have all of these physical by-products we can reference (like atoms decaying), but that seems more like an effect that happens because time passes rather than the actual entity of the passage of time.  Who knows what that is?

What makes us so dependent on time?