Making Mice: The Standardization of Mus Musculus for Scientific Research

科学中的模型在指导研究方面起着极其重要的作用。 本杰明·富兰克林在提出第一个现代电学科学理论时使用了“双流体”模型。 自笛卡尔和牛顿时代以来，波模型和粒子模型一直指导着对光的研究，尽管自本世纪量子力学发现以来，这两种模型似乎都不正确。 模型在生物学研究中也发挥着重要作用。 由于我们在人类身上做实验时必须格外小心，生物学家必须转向其他物种，以模拟人类生理学的变化。 在19世纪，人们选择的模型是青蛙。 灵长类动物、猪、猫、蝾螈，甚至马蹄蟹、鱿鱼和蛞蝓都是某些研究领域的模型。 每一个都提供了特定的机会，但也限制了研究人员的能力。 科学家必须平衡有机体为研究人员提供的机会，以及他们可以提出的问题的限制。 20世纪世纪生物学的首选生物越来越多地成为小鼠。 这一决定是如何以及为什么做出的，以及它在过去五十年中如何塑造了生物学研究的方向，是雷德博士研究的主题。 近交系小鼠是美国生物学和医学研究中使用最广泛的实验动物。 然而，老鼠作为一种标准生物的历史环境却被完全忽视了。 雷德博士正在扩展她早期对C。C.利特尔和杰克逊实验室选择了一种标准化的小鼠，小家鼠，作为生物医学研究的模型。 在这项资助下，她正在研究小鼠模型在美国两个生物医学领域日益重要的作用：辐射遗传学和癌症研究。 她试图展示近交系小鼠是如何发展成为一种精心设计的实验技术，从而实现广泛的生产关系，包括生物医学科学家之间以及这些科学家与支持他们工作的社会之间的关系。 这项研究还应阐明台式生物医学研究与研究政策之间的联系，并阐明构成生命科学中科学实践和有机体的复杂的社会、政治和知识关系。

Models in science serve an enormously important role in guiding research. Benjamin Franklin used a "two-fluid" model when he advanced the first modern scientific theory for electricity. Two models, the wave and the particle model, have guided research on light since the time of Descartes and Newton though since the discovery of quantum mechanics in this century, neither model seems correct. Models serve an important role in biological research as well. Since we must be extraordinarily careful in experimenting on humans, biologists must turn to other species to model what goes on in human physiology. In the 19th century, the model of choice was the frog. Primates, pigs, cats, newts, even horse-shoe crab, squid and slugs serve as models for certain areas of research. Each offers specific opportunities but also limit researchers in what they can do. Scientists must balance the opportunities an organism offers researchers with the limits it places on the kinds of questions they can raise. The organism of choice in 20th century biology has increasingly become the mouse. How and why this decision has been made and how it has shaped the direction of biological research for the past five decades is the subject of Dr. Rader's research. Inbred mice are the most widely-used experimental animals in American biological and medical research. Yet the historical circumstances surrounding the mouse's rise as a standard organism have been completely ignored. Dr. Rader is expanding on her earlier studies of the process by which C. C. Little and the Jackson Laboratory chose a standardized mouse, mus musculus, as a model for biomedical research. Under this grant, she is examining the increasing importance of mouse models in two American biomedical fields: radiation genetics and cancer research. She is trying to demonstrate how the inbred mouse developed as a carefully crafted experimental technology which enable a wide range of productive relations, including among biomedical scientists and betw een these scientists and the society that supported their work. The study should also elucidate the connections between bench-top biomedical research and research policy, as well as illuminate the complex social, political, and intellectual relations that constitute scientific practices and organisms in the life sciences.