Model Organisms and Model Environments: A Rodent Laboratory in Science, Medicine and Society

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the role of animals in science and medicine. While historians have tended to focus on the processes of standardisation, increasing attention is being given to the surprising and unexpected elements of the model organism. Experimental organisms are, simultaneously, both artefacts and samples of nature. Rachel Ankeny and Sabina Leonelli put it clearly and succinctly: ‘they are systems that have been engineered and modified to enable the controlled investigation of specific phenomena, yet at the same time they remain largely mysterious products of millennia of evolution, whose behaviours, structures, and physiology are for the most part still relatively ill-understood by scientists.’ In continuously generating new questions, organisms provide novelty so essential to successful experimental systems. They are, as Hans-Jörg Rheinberger would argue, scientific objects or ‘epistemic things’, not merely predictable ‘technical objects’. What I would like to do is extend this approach further, considering not simply the organism, but the material structures that support it which are all too often taken for granted in the history of science and medicine. I think that we need to add to the history of the model organism, a focus on healthy environments, even sick buildings, in our study of laboratory spaces. Research that depends on the use of animals also depends upon the built environments and infrastructures that surround them. There was a great interest, for example, in standardising food, lighting, and cage size. In my own research I have looked at the laboratory practices of the physiologist and psycho-biologist Curt Richter. Richter was doing innovative work with rats, wild and domesticated, as part of a programme at Johns Hopkins instigated in 1942 to develop new ways to control Baltimore’s