Robert G. W. Kirk

‘Wanted—standard guinea pigs’: standardisation and the experimental animal market in Britain ca. 1919–1947

In 1942 a coalition of twenty scientific societies formed the Conference on the Supply of Experimental Animals (CSEA) in an attempt to pressure the Medical Research Council to accept responsibility for the provision of standardised experimental animals in Britain. The practice of animal experimentation was subject to State regulation under the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, but no provision existed for the provision of animals for experimental use. Consequently, day-to-day laboratory work was reliant on a commercial small animal market which had emerged to sustain the hobby of animal fancying. This paper explores how difficulties encountered in experimental practice within the laboratory led to the problematisation of biomedical sciences reliance upon a commercial market for animals during the inter-war period. This is shown to have produced a crisis within animal reliant experimental science in the early 1940s which enabled the left-wing Association of Scientific Workers to cast sciences reliance on a free market as economically inefficient and a threat to the reliability of British research. It is argued that the development of standard experimental animals in Britain was, therefore, embedded within the wider cultural, societal, political and economic national context of the time.

A Brave New Animal for a Brave New World: The British Laboratory Animals Bureau and the Constitution of International Standards of Laboratory Animal Production and Use, circa 1947–1968

In 1947 the Medical Research Council of Britain established the Laboratory Animals Bureau in order to develop national standards of animal production that would enable commercial producers better to provide for the needs of laboratory animal users. Under the directorship of William Lane-Petter, the bureau expanded well beyond this remit, pioneering a new discipline of “laboratory animal science” and becoming internationally known as a producer of pathogenically and genetically standardized laboratory animals. The work of this organization, later renamed the Laboratory Animals Centre, and of Lane-Petter did much to systematize worldwide standards for laboratory animal production and provision—for example, by prompting the formation of the International Committee on Laboratory Animals. This essay reconstructs how the bureau became an internationally recognized center of expertise and argues that standardization discourses within science are inherently internationalizing. It traces the dynamic co-constitution of standard laboratory animals alongside that of the identities of the users, producers, and regulators of laboratory animals. This process is shown to have brought into being a transnational community with shared conceptual understandings and material practices grounded in the materiality of the laboratory animal, conceived as an instrumental technology.

Standardization through Mechanization: Germ-Free Life and the Engineering of the Ideal Laboratory Animal

This article examines efforts to establish germ-free animals as ideal laboratory animals, tracing the development of germ-free technology by James Reyniers (1908–67) and Philip Trexler (1911–) at the University of Notre Dame. Despite capturing the scientific imagination between 1942 and the late 1950s, germ-free animals never became the generic tools that Reyniers hoped. This article shows how Reyniers failed to establish germ-free animals because the tension between standardization and the need for novelty was not successfully managed. However, Trexler adapted techniques of producing germ-free life to produce more successful Specific Pathogen Free (SPF) animals. Now so ubiquitous as to be invisible, SPF animals succeeded where germ-free animals failed because they embodied a standard that could be reconfigured to suit local research agendas, while also remaining highly defined and capable of representing natural forms of life. SPF animals became the ideal laboratory animal, used around the world.

Between the clinic and the laboratory: ethology and pharmacology in the work of Michael Robin Alexander Chance, c.1946-1964.

Whilst ethology has garnered the attention of historians of science, particularly those interested in the biological and behavioural sciences, historians of medicine have yet to explore ethology’s medical significance. Ethology, “the biological study of behaviour”, is historically associated with the work of Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, who, alongside Karl von Frisch, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for their research into the “organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns”.1 This particular award is notable as it was the first to be given in part recognition of the establishment of a discipline rather than for a specific discovery or advance.2 This award was also provocative as it was the first to recognize non-reductionist behavioural research.3 Prior to 1973, otherwise renowned psychologists including Wilhelm Wundt, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung had failed to gain recognition, whereas some behavioural physiologists were awarded the Nobel Prize, for example Ivan Petrovich Pavlov in 1904. Historians of medicine should be interested in ethology as the 1973 prize recognized that ethological research had “led to important results for, e.g. psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine, especially as regards possible means of adapting environment to the biological equipment of man with the aim of preventing maladaptation and disease”.4 This paper explores the relevance of ethology to the development of the clinical and biomedical sciences in post-Second World War Britain. In doing so it engages and extends Richard Burkhardt’s metaphorical use of ecology to describe ethology as characterized by interactivity, a responsiveness to contingency, and a willingness to evolve and adapt to a diverse number of “ecological” niches. The paper also continues Burkhardt’s biographical approach to ethology’s history by focusing on a single figure, the comparatively little known pharmacologist and ethologist Michael Robin Alexander Chance (1915–2000). It contends that medicine formed a hitherto unrecognized example of “ethology’s ecologies”.5 Michael Chance could be described as a marginal figure to the history of medicine; his work did not have the broad influence that would have made him of obvious historical interest. Moreover, Chance existed on the borders of so many sub-disciplines that it is difficult to identify who should be interested in his work. Employed as a pharmacologist, yet identifying himself as an ethologist, Chance’s research interweaved the fields of pharmacology, physiology, endocrinology, ethology, animal husbandry, psychiatry, anthropology, and sociology, amongst others. Spatially, and practically, Chance’s work found application in locations as diverse as the material practices of laboratory science and the education in clinical observation of medical students. Adequately historicizing the diversity of Chance’s oeuvre would be a major undertaking beyond the bounds of a single article. Consequently analysis is here restricted to how he integrated ethology within laboratory science in order to reveal the “social” nature of laboratory animals. In the 1940s Chance turned to ethology as a means to study how social behaviour altered laboratory animal responses and undermined their experimental reliability.6 His work was no less instrumental in orientation than, say, the genetic standardization of mice undertaken by C C Little.7 Chance saw the animal as a tool, but, none the less, emphasized the “nature” of the laboratory animal as a living being with social relations, relations that included that between animal and human. The paper begins by outlining how Chance first encountered the “social” laboratory animal during his pharmaceutical work at Glaxo Laboratories. In order to contextualize his work within the culture and politics of the period, the origins of his interest in ethology are then traced, but not to animal behaviour. Chance’s ethological interests are shown to have developed during his time at the Pioneer Health Centre, Peckham; thus he first learnt of ethology in the study of human health. Relocating the origins of Chance’s ethology from the animal to the human geographically repositions his work away from the laboratory (an unusual place for ethology to be practised) to the clinic. The importance of ethology to Chance’s experimental science is then explored, with particular focus upon how ethology imbued the laboratory animal with subjective “natural” characteristics, feelings, and needs. Consequently, Chance reconfigured the relationship between experimenter and experimental animal as one based on mutual obligation and co-operation. This is shown to have opened up a new territory within which the explicit recognition of an ethical relationship between researcher and laboratory animal became a necessary part of experimental practice. Accordingly, this paper argues not only that ethology operated within the laboratory despite its widespread association with the field, but also that it served as a vector by which other factors conventionally seen as being outside the laboratory became integrated within its material practices. Such factors included clinical observation and the consideration of animal welfare, both of which have been seen as extrinsic to, as opposed to integral to, the practices of laboratory science.8

Developing a Collaborative Agenda for Humanities and Social Scientific Research on Laboratory Animal Science and Welfare

Improving laboratory animal science and welfare requires both new scientific research and insights from research in the humanities and social sciences. Whilst scientific research provides evidence to replace, reduce and refine procedures involving laboratory animals (the ‘3Rs’), work in the humanities and social sciences can help understand the social, economic and cultural processes that enhance or impede humane ways of knowing and working with laboratory animals. However, communication across these disciplinary perspectives is currently limited, and they design research programmes, generate results, engage users, and seek to influence policy in different ways. To facilitate dialogue and future research at this interface, we convened an interdisciplinary group of 45 life scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, non-governmental organisations and policy-makers to generate a collaborative research agenda. This drew on methods employed by other agenda-setting exercises in science policy, using a collaborative and deliberative approach for the identification of research priorities. Participants were recruited from across the community, invited to submit research questions and vote on their priorities. They then met at an interactive workshop in the UK, discussed all 136 questions submitted, and collectively defined the 30 most important issues for the group. The output is a collaborative future agenda for research in the humanities and social sciences on laboratory animal science and welfare. The questions indicate a demand for new research in the humanities and social sciences to inform emerging discussions and priorities on the governance and practice of laboratory animal research, including on issues around: international harmonisation, openness and public engagement, ‘cultures of care’, harm-benefit analysis and the future of the 3Rs. The process outlined below underlines the value of interdisciplinary exchange for improving communication across different research cultures and identifies ways of enhancing the effectiveness of future research at the interface between the humanities, social sciences, science and science policy.

In dogs we trust? Intersubjectivity, response-able relations, and the making of mine detector dogs.

The utility of the dog as a mine detector has divided the mine clearance community since dogs were first used for this purpose during the Second World War. This paper adopts a historical perspective to investigate how, why, and to what consequence, the use of minedogs remains contested despite decades of research into their abilities. It explores the changing factors that have made it possible to think that dogs could, or could not, serve as reliable detectors of landmines over time. Beginning with an analysis of the wartime context that shaped the creation of minedogs, the paper then examines two contemporaneous investigations undertaken in the 1950s. The first, a British investigation pursued by the anatomist Solly Zuckerman, concluded that dogs could never be the mine hunters best friend. The second, an American study led by the parapsychologist J. B. Rhine, suggested dogs were potentially useful for mine clearance. Drawing on literature from science studies and the emerging subdiscipline of “animal studies,” it is argued that cross-species intersubjectivity played a significant role in determining these different positions. The conceptual landscapes of Zuckerman and Rhines disciplinary backgrounds are shown to have produced distinct approaches to managing cross-species relations, thus explaining how diverse opinions on minedog can coexist. In conclusion, it is shown that the way one structures relationships between humans and animals has profound impact on the knowledge and labor subsequently produced, a process that cannot be separated from ethical consequence.

Science, Culture, and Care in Laboratory Animal Research: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the history and future of the 3Rs

The principles of the 3Rs—replacement, refinement, and reduction—strongly shape discussion of methods for performing more humane animal research and the regulation of this contested area of technoscience. This special issue looks back to the origins of the 3Rs principles through five papers that explore how it is enacted and challenged in practice and that develop critical considerations about its future. Three themes connect the papers in this special issue. These are (1) the multiplicity of roles enacted by those who use and care for animals in research, (2) the distribution of “feelings that matter” across species and spaces of laboratory animal practice, and (3) the growing importance of “cultures of care” in animal research.

Working across species down on the farm: Howard S. Liddell and the development of comparative psychopathology, c. 1923–1962

AbstractSeeking a scientific basis for understanding and treating mental illness, and inspired by the work of Ivan Pavlov, American physiologists, psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1920s turned to nonhuman animals. This paper examines how new constructs such as “experimental neurosis” emerged as tools to enable psychiatric comparison across species. From 1923 to 1962, the Cornell “Behavior Farm” was a leading interdisciplinary research center pioneering novel techniques to experimentally study nonhuman psychopathology. Led by the psychobiologist Howard Liddell, work at the Behavior Farm formed part of an ambitious program to develop new preventative and therapeutic techniques and bring psychiatry into closer relations with physiology and medicine. At the heart of Liddell’s activities were a range of nonhuman animals, including pigs, sheep, goats and dogs, each serving as a proxy for human patients. We examine how Pavlov’s conceptualization of ‘experimental neurosis’ was used by Liddell to facilitate comparison across species and communication between researchers and clinicians. Our close reading of his experimental system demonstrates how unexpected animal behaviors and emotions were transformed into experimental virtues. However, to successfully translate such behaviors from the animal laboratory into the field of human psychopathology, Liddell increasingly reached beyond, and, in effect, redefined, the Pavlovian method to make it compatible and compliant with an ethological approach to the animal laboratory. We show how the resultant Behavior Farm served as a productive “hybrid” place, containing elements of experiment and observation, laboratory and field. It was through the building of close and more naturalistic relationships with animals over extended periods of time, both normal and pathological, and within and outside of the experimental space, that Liddell could understand, manage, and make useful the myriad behavioral complexities that emerged from the life histories of experimental animals, the researchers who worked with them, and their shared relationships to the wider physical and social environments.

Re-imagining Bleeders: The Medical Leech in the Nineteenth Century Bloodletting Encounter

While some historians have noted the absence of animals in medical history, few have made the animal the central object of their historical gaze. Twenty years ago W.F. Bynum urged medical historians to follow historians of science in paying attention to the role of non-human animals in the material practices of medicine.1 Yet few have responded to his call. In this paper we again ask the question: what work can the non-human animal achieve for the history of medicine? We do so in the light of the conceptual possibilities opened up by the rapidly emerging field of ‘animal studies’. This interdisciplinary and sophisticated body of work has, in various ways, revealed the value of the ‘animal’ as a tool for exploring the co-constitution of species identity.2 We asked ourselves, surely, in our present biomedical world, this must be an area that we as medical historians are best placed to comment on; and what better place to start than the well-known, yet surprisingly little-studied, medical leech?

Building Transnational Bodies: Norway and the International Development of Laboratory Animal Science, ca. 1956–1980

Argument This article adopts a historical perspective to examine the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine, an auxiliary field which formed to facilitate the work of the biomedical sciences by systematically improving laboratory animal production, provision, and maintenance in the post Second World War period. We investigate how Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine co-developed at the local level (responding to national needs and concerns) yet was simultaneously transnational in orientation (responding to the scientific need that knowledge, practices, objects and animals circulate freely). Adapting the work of Tsing (2004), we argue that national differences provided the creative “friction” that helped drive the formation of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine as a transnational endeavor. Our analysis engages with the themes of this special issue by focusing on the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine in Norway, which both informed wider transnational developments and was formed by them. We show that Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine can only be properly understood from a spatial perspective; whilst it developed and was structured through national “centers,” its orientation was transnational necessitating international networks through which knowledge, practice, technologies, and animals circulated. More and better laboratory animals are today required than ever before, and this demand will continue to rise if it is to keep pace with the quickening tempo of biological and veterinary research. The provision of this living experimental material is no longer a local problem; local, that is, to the research institute. It has become a national concern, and, in some of its aspects . . . even international. (William Lane-Petter 1957, 240)