This time of year, it’s not unusual to see a pest control van parked in the driveway of a Maine house. It is eviction time for a family of unwanted visitors who took up winter residence.

It didn’t take a stand-on-a-chair, “Eek, a mouse,” moment to know that field mice had gotten in, because they could be heard merrily scampering inside the walls.

It would be a mistake to consider all Maine-born mice to be pests. At the Maine coast town of Bar Harbor, Jackson Lab scientists have for 90 years successfully bred genetically pure lab mice, little soldiers, to do battle with dreaded diseases. The lab is a major player in the search to find therapies and cures for Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson’s and diabetes.

Jackson Lab breeds the mice and then houses them in an environment that excludes all organisms. The scientists use respiratory gear and high tech protective clothing, eliminating all direct human contact. All materials in their lives are sterilized.

Mice share 95 percent of the human DNA. Jackson Lab researchers are able to splice genes that model certain human populations. Using these specific mice which model an individual’s genetic make up, lab researchers can predict, treat, and even prevent disease. The lab has over 8,000 strains of genetically defined mice models which are available 24/7 to researchers throughout the world.

Last month, after a historic all-female space walk, 205 days in space, and 86.9 million miles traveled aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, a Caribou-native, returned to earth.

Five months earlier, mid-December, 2019, a Space X’s Dragon spacecraft had blasted off for a rendezvous with the station. The cargo included 40 Jackson Lab female mice, nicknamed Mighty Mice in fond remembrance of Mighty Mouse, a popular 1940s movie cartoon hero. This wasn’t the lab’s first rodeo since this was the fifth launch of Maine mice into space since 2001.

Officially the station’s flight engineer, Meir is a physiologist, defined by Webster’s as, “a branch of biology dealing with the functions and activities of life or living matter.” Meir welcomed the Maine mice aboard, prepared their habitat, and then monitored the scientific experiments for the next 30 days.

The female mice were grouped in small clusters. Mice are social animals, so a small hut was placed in each enclosure so they could sleep together. Despite their weightless environment, they quickly learned to use their hind legs or tails to anchor themselves to the habitat’s walls. They were fed rodent food bars, but I’m not sure if they brought along their own Poland Spring water.

For this mission, Jackson Lab scientists had genetically engineered mice models with a lack of the gene for the growth factor Myostatin, which gave them skeletal structures that were twice the average of non-engineered mice.

This 30-day experiment was to gain a better understanding of microgravity’s effect on muscle and bone degeneration, a wasting condition, commonly found in AIDs, ALS, cancer, extended space travel and bed-ridden patients.

Late December and early January, the space station’s orbits took the lab mice over China. There, then unknown to the rest of the unsuspecting world, was the Wuhan wet market, patient zero, an awakening beast, and a soon-to-be catastrophic global pandemic.

Jackson lab and its on-the-ground mice models were prepared. Earlier research had shown that the portals of mice, despite their 95 percent DNA share with humans, were not receptive to the entry of a coronavirus and therefore couldn’t be engineered as research platforms during a possible epidemic.

Researchers at the University of Iowa had successfully engineered a mouse model which could be infected by coronaviruses. They donated sperm from that model to Jackson Lab.

Soon, with dimmed lighting and soft music, pups arrived, the first spearhead of a lab mice model that would take on two coronavirus epidemics — SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012, and now COVID-19, all three bat-originating epidemics.

World labs are in a desperate search for more accurate and quicker testing, therapeutics to reduce the length and severity of the inflection, and, most importantly, for the vaccine to prevent COVID-19. More than 12 labs are now in a sprint to the human trials stage for a vaccine.

There’s a lengthy bridge between the research lab’s trial and error, cost, time, and lives lost and the start of human trials, final approval, manufacture, and implementation of a vaccine.

From the first step on, our Maine COVID-19 engineered mice, the littlest soldiers in this war, are turning this COVID-19 pandemic around, and with their sacrifice, savings lives throughout the world.

Tom Murphy is a former history teacher and state representative. He is a Kennebunk Landing resident and can be reached at tsmurphy@myfairpoint.net.

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