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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Edmund Ramsden
Edmund Ramsden
Affiliation:
Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow, Centre for Medical History, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter, Devon EX4 4RJ, UK. Email: E.Ramsden@exeter.ac.uk
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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’.

Keywords

Model OrganismsModel EnvironmentsLaboratoryCityCrowdingStress
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 365 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 Sabina Leonelli, ‘Growing Weed, Producing Knowledge: An Epistemic History of Arabidopsis thaliana’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 29 (2007), 193–224.

2 Rachel A. Ankeny and Sabina Leonelli, ‘What’s So Special About Model Organisms?’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 42 (2011), in press.

3 Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

4 For an analysis of attempts to improve the conditions of the animal laboratory, see: Robert Kirk, ‘Between the Clinic and the Laboratory: Ethology and Pharmacology in the Work of Michael Robin Alexander Chance, c.1946–1964’, Medical History, 53 (2009), 513–36.

5 For an analysis of this project, and the various different experimental systems employed in it, see the forthcoming article by the author in the journal, History of the Human Sciences.

6 C.P. Richter, ‘Experiences of a Reluctant Rat-Catcher: The Common Norway Rat – Friend or Enemy?’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 112 (1968), 403–15.

7 Jay Schulkin, Curt Richter: A Life in the Laboratory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

8 C.P. Richter, ‘It’s a Long Long Way to Tipperary, The Land of my Genes’, in D.A. Dewsbury (ed.), Leaders in the Study of Animal Behavior: Autobiographical Perspectives (Lewisberg: Bucknell University Press, 1985), 377.

9 Christine Keiner, ‘Wartime Rat Control, Rodent Ecology, and the Rise and Fall of Chemical Rodenticides’, Endeavour, 29 (2005), 119–25.

10 For a much more detailed analysis of Calhoun’s work and its influence in the social and behavioural sciences, see the forthcoming article by the author in the journal, Isis, 102 (2011).

11 John B. Calhoun, ‘Experimental Socio-physical Environments’, URBS Doc 249, 3 December 1975, John B. Calhoun Papers, Box 8b, University of Wyoming.

12 Ibid.

13 John B. Calhoun, ‘Population Density and Social Pathology’, Scientific American, 306 (1962), 139–48.

14 John B. Calhoun, ‘Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 66 (1973), 80–9.

15 For an analysis of Calhoun’s influence in popular culture, see: Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams, ‘Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun and their Cultural Influence’, Journal of Social History, 42 (2009), 761–92.

16 See Omar R. Galle, W.R. Gove, and J.M. McPherson, ‘Population Density and Pathology: What are the Relations for Man?’, Science, 176 (1972), 23–60; H.H. Winsborough, ‘The Social Consequences of High Population Density’, Law and Contemporary Problems, 10 (1965), 120–6. For a very critical appraisal of these studies, see Harvey Choldin, ‘Urban Density and Pathology’, Annual Review of Sociology, 4 (1978), 91–113.

17 Jonathan L. Freedman, Crowding and Behavior (San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman, 1975).

18 See H. M. Proshansky, W. H. Ittelson, and L. G. Rivlin (eds), Environmental Psychology: Man and His Physical Setting (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970).

19 Andrew Baum and Stuart Valins, Architecture and Social Behavior: Psychological Studies of Social Density (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977); Edmund Ramsden, ‘Travelling Facts About Crowded Rats: Rodent Experimentation and the Human Sciences’, in Peter Howlett and Mary S. Morgan (eds), How Well Do Facts Travel?: The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 223–51.

20 Paul Paulus, Prison Crowding: A Psychological Perspective (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1988).

21 Claude S. Fischer and Mark Baldassare, ‘How Far from the Madding Crowd?’, New Society, 32 (1975), 531–3: 531.

22 M. Morrison and M.S. Morgan, ‘Models as Mediating Instruments’, in idem (eds), Models as Mediators: Perspectives on Natural and Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See again Ankeny and Leonelli, op. cit. (note 2), for an insightful analysis of this approach in the context of model organisms.

23 Mark Baldassare, Residential Crowding in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 46.