Each time Karina Frey picked up a scalpel to begin a dissection in her high school science classes, she felt sad. “I’m an animal lover,” she says, “so knowing animals were killed for scientific purposes just made me feel bad.”
Nevertheless, the senior at J.W. Mitchell High School in New Port Richey, Florida, forced herself to do it because she aspires to be a doctor. “I want to be on the medical career path, so I knew I had to do what I had to do,” she says.
Some of her friends couldn’t even bring themselves to do the cutting, so they stood back and looked over her shoulder, Frey says. A friend from a different high school told her dissection convinced her not to go into medicine.