The History of the Lab Mouse

When scientists want to understand a gene or treat a disease, they start with rodents. Yet for all that scientists rely on mice, they're poorly understood. Variations in mouse genomes have been only primitively mapped, making it difficult to connect genes and complex conditions. Strains used in research are descended from a few common ancestors, making their study the equivalent of conducting ostensibly universal human studies on the descendants of a single backwoods family.

I'm working on a story about advances in mouse understanding. I can't say much right now, because the studies involved are still embargoed, but I thought I'd pass along the two articles that got me interested in mice in the first place.

The first is a science-and-society history piece from Cabinet Magazine:

Scientists often emphasize a naturalistic explanation for the transformation of mice into model organisms: mice are small mammals that breed readily and often (the young are born three weeks after females have mated), and they are susceptible to many of the diseases that afflict human beings (such as cancer). But paying closer attention to the historical process by which Jax Mice™ came to dominate early-20th century biology-research laboratories suggests a more complicated interpretation: the suitability of these animals for research was not pre-determined, but engineered. These rodents'
physical bodies, as well as their representations, were not static.
They were adapted and constructed for a scientific culture that valued genetically controlled answers to biological and medical questions.
[...]

And their bodies constitute a space that Bruno Latour would call
"technoscience," because they are inhabited at once by both natural knowledge of mammalian processes and its controlled manipulation and application—by, in Latour's words, "all the elements tied to the scientific practice no matter how dirty, unexpected, or foreign they seem."

Oh, that wacky Bruno Latour! I've gotta say that theory just doesn't float my boat like it did back in the fall of 2001. But most of this deals with the history of the Jackson Lab, and it's fascinating to see the path by which a few undistinguished cheese-chasers became a race of animal servants as ubiquitous in science as petri dishes and pipettes.

The Mouse's Tale: Standardized Animals in the Culture and Practice of Technoscience [Cabinet Magazine]
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Image: NICHD*