ABOVE: © BIRGIT RITSCHKA
The little black mouse’s feet dangled above the table as the animal clutched a horizontal wire with its two front paws. After just a few seconds, it lost its grip and fell onto a pile of bedding below. For a mouse its age—just six months old, typically its physical prime—that was quite unusual. As Mayo Clinic veterinary technicians Christina Inman and Kurt Johnson knew, young mice would usually manage to hoist their hind legs up to the wire so that they’re hanging from all four limbs, allowing them to last minutes, sometimes even hours, on the endurance test.
It was late 2016, and the two vet techs were in charge of testing the physical performance of dozens of young mice as part of a study led by Mayo geriatrician and aging researcher James Kirkland. The experiment was blinded, so Inman and Johnson knew nothing of the ...
