Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900-1955 (review)

In Making Mice, Karin Rader sets out to tell how inbred mice became standard laboratory animals of biomedical research. The account focuses on the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, and its founder and longtime director, mouse geneticist C. C. Little.

As Rader cogently argues, there was nothing obvious in turning mice into laboratory animals. In particular, the often cited facts that mice are cheap to keep and breed fast do not explain per se the establishment of the mouse as the most widely used mammalian model organism. Mouse fancying, which became more popular in Europe and the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, turned mice breeding into an accepted cultural activity and at the same time provided a built-in market for the rodents. Initially, scientists used these channels to acquire mice for their experiments. For the most part mice, and especially breeding experiments, fell outside the purview of antivivisectionists, yet to turn the animals into model systems for human diseases, the biological and emotional relations of mice and humans needed to be carefully negotiated.

Little first became acquainted with the mouse while working under William Castle at the Harvard Bussey Institute for Applied Genetics. Castle had acquired his first mice from local mice fanciers, but it was Little who used inbreeding as an approach to study the genetics of particular characteristics of the mouse, including especially coat colors, as well as the genetics of cancer. The coupling of breeding with its scientific uses turned pet mice into laboratory animals. Little pursued his vision of using inbred mice as a model system for genetic research with remarkable determination and promotional skill throughout his life. Rader points to the eugenic implications of Little's pure line research and cancer susceptibility studies, but the issue is not pursued in any depth, and the reader is left puzzling on Little's actual position on the question and his political involvement.

After various administrative experiences and institutional ventures, in 1929 Little received private funds to build an institution for genetic research on cancer. An extensive mice breeding program became an integral part of the institute's own research. In a central chapter Rader shows how economic pressures in the years of the Depression led Little to set a price for the inbred mouse mutants produced in the laboratory that up to that point had been freely shared between researchers. The commodification of the mice strains slowly but relentlessly moved the focus of the Jackson Laboratory from research to mouse production and distribution. In 1937 the Jackson Laboratory sold 65,000 mice, with numbers continuing to rise steeply. While struggling to keep up the research profile of the laboratory, Little used his position as director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer and later his membership of the National Advisory Cancer Council to promote the use of Jackson, or JAX mice, as they came to be known, from the lab's cable address, as part of an experimental approach to cancer research and to biological research generally.

When after the war a fire destroyed Bar Harbor and with it a large part of the mice stocks housed in the Jackson Laboratory, geneticists and medical researchers from around the country who had previously received stocks of JAX mice for their research started sending back breeding pairs of those same stocks to Bar Harbor. For Rader this dramatic episode highlights the extent to which researchers had come to see the Jackson Laboratory as an indispensable Bureau of Biological and Medical Standards for their work. Ironically for Little, by that time the genetic theory of cancer was on the wane, but the use of JAX mice got a boost for being employed in federally funded large-scale cancer chemotherapy screening programs. Through the concerted effort of former Jackson researcher William Russell and his wife Liane Russell, mice also became the standard organism in large-scale experiments on...