As a graduate student I had the opportunity to work in a biological research facility to create an artistic project that examined tensions arising from animal use in contemporary medical research. The resulting work, may the mice bite me if it is not true focuses on mice used in science to model human diseases. This work re-contextualizes laboratory animals and relocates them into a field of cultural and philosophical study. The work consists of four mice positioned as living portraits of people who have died from conditions that these mice were developed to model. The resulting mouse portraits were of: Franz Kafka (tuberculosis), Joseph Beuys (natural causes), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (compromised immune system) and Gilles Deleuze (lung cancer).