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Having left school to begin higher education, you don’t look back, nor do you keep up with the schoolmates you used to see. You choose to begin a brand-new life, to keep the old one to yourself, never to mention it, to engineer separate sections within you, between which communication is impossible, to divide, to distinguish, to break up.

The first contradiction is philosophical. We experiment on animals because they are like us, yet at the same time we consider them sufficiently different to use them in experiments. The second is personal: usually people like me do biology because they like animals and then the job makes us treat them as if we don’t care. You have to get used to it. I’ve only belatedly started to question my practice, in the beginning I went for a very standard path.

The institution where you study is relatively far from your home. This allows you to establish some distance, develop some strategies for retreating, to build some protective barriers, some ditches, palisades, fortifications, ramparts. You retreat, you hide, you separate off, you fade out, you try out silence. You are preparing yourself.

Ethics are complicated because there’s a very strong anthropomorphising tendency towards pets, yet at the same time, statistically, the number of animals used for experiments is very low compared to the numbers that we eat. In our lifetime, considering the complete range of research practices, it comes to about one and a half mice and half a rat.

Following the discovery of this data, I see my life unfold in the shape of a rodent cut in two, of which one half has been sacrificed for my health and the other for the health of someone close to me. If I die young, the number of animals used on my behalf could add up to a whole number. At least then I’d have the consolation of not being responsible for the systematic sectioning of lab rats.

You are spending more and more time far from home, you meet students with whom you go to cafés, you demonstrate in the streets, you argue, you debate, you read. But, even though you’re convinced to the contrary, your distance makes no difference to the exclusivity of your relationship with your mother. You are contaminated.

In the animal research centres, the risks posed by the animals can be divided into two distinct groups. Either they come from animals that are themselves carriers of their own infections, which in some cases (known as zoonoses) are transmissible to humans. Or the risks arise from the manipulation and inoculation of laboratory animals that have been correctly cared for and are completely free of pathogens. Experimentation demands risk management. In fact, people assume a degree of risk that they must be able to measure when they inoculate animals with all kinds of fatal diseases.

Your feelings towards various young people in your circle are confused but, though you don’t understand why, your body responds only partially to the ardent desires described to you and so often depicted in the books and films that you like. You feel alone, you feel out of step, you feel dazed, numb, ill at ease, sick, disabled. You are contaminated.

There are four categories of animal labs corresponding to the four groups of pathogens. Group 1 includes biological agents not known to provoke disease in humans. Group 2 includes biological agents which may pose a danger to humans but among which transmission by proximity is highly unlikely. Group 3 includes biological agents capable of causing serious illness in humans. Effective treatments or prophylactics are available but transmission in the community remains possible. Group 4 contains the most dangerous biological agents: those that cause serious illness, are highly transmissible and for which there is neither treatment, nor prophylaxis.

To succeed in pre-empting the dangers of contamination arising from the inoculation of lab animals with serious diseases, you must be certain that the mental and psychological barrier between people and animals is impregnable. And wherever it may not be impregnable, the means for making it so must be found.

Your body and your mind live two parallel lives. While your knowledge is flourishing and broadening, you continue in ignorance of your physical self. You are dazed, bewildered, unmindful, distracted, absent, deaf and blind. You are forgetting yourself.

We create models in the labs, for example models of obese mice, rats deprived of sugar, monkeys with Parkinson’s or baboons with multiple sclerosis, but this doesn’t mean that we’re mistreating animals; we carry out surgery in exactly the same conditions as human surgery, we intubate them, we perform gaseous anaesthesia, we administer analgesics and antibiotics, we are very careful with our subjects insofar as, in order to obtain good scientific data, we must keep the animal in good health, have it awaken comfortably, without any suffering and infection-free; only under these conditions can its disease progress smoothly.

You too – your pathology is advancing smoothly but at no point do you feel that you’re suffering from disease, from melancholy or from depression. You don’t worry about what’s happening to you, about the way you avoid everything that troubles you. You forget yourself.