It’s easy to take for granted that we have laboratory animals for use in medical testing. Surely we always had these reliable tiny human things with tails to do the science on, right?
Today’s Moment of Science… the incredible story of the humble lab mouse.
Mice have been used for centuries in various bits of biomedical research to varying degrees of success. Along with several other rodents, they provide scientists with a test subject that has enough biological similarities to humans to be useful, but there’s far less paperwork when you inject it with a brand new drug just to see what happens. When I do that to myself it’s “degeneracy,” but whatever.
We weren’t always great at using lab animals though. Experiments are designed to control for all possible variables and, generally, we aim to observe the effects of one variable at a time. If you want to know what the effect of drug X is, your best bet is to first test it on a homogenous group.
If you took a mischief of mice gathered at random from a field without knowing their strain, any genetic predispositions to diseases, allergies, behaviors, or other potential complications, that could muck up your data. Maybe half of your mice got cancer because they were gonna develop cancer at a certain age anyway, or a bunch of them behaved strangely because they didn’t take well to captivity. Or maybe you just got some asshole mice, who knows.
Not to get weirdly Gattaca on this, but science needed to build a better mouse.
Enter Abbie Lathrop.
Born in 1868 in Illinois, the highest level of education she completed was a teaching certificate. Her career took a turn for the unexpectedly historic when she took up work as a small animal breeder and mouse fancier in Massachusetts around the turn of the century. She conducted her work as one would scientific research into mouse breeding, keeping meticulous notes in her journals. Her animals were initially sold as pets, and eventually to labs for research.
As a reminder that any and all scientific breakthroughs will be used for war, her guinea pigs were used by the government for toxic gas detection in the trenches in WW1, which… yikes.
Note, credit for breeding the first lab mice sometimes goes to Harvard educated self-righteous prick Clarence Cook Little. He referred to Lathrop as a “talented pet-shop owner.”
It’s true, many popular strains of lab mice came from his lab, and he contributed greatly to his field. However, his strains were commonly bred directly from Lathrop’s animals. It’s suspected that five popular strains of his mice were bred from a single mouse of Lathrop’s. He was also a eugenicist who worked for the Council for Tobacco Research and denied to his dying day that smoking causes lung cancer.
That guy went to Harvard.
Lathrop started noticing malignancies on certain strains of her mice in 1908, which prompted her to collaborate with noted pathologist Leo Loeb. They published ten papers together, establishing a link between certain strains of mice and a higher incidence of mammary cancers. They found they could reduce the incidence of cancer by removing their ovaries.
Not bad for a talented pet-shop owner.
There are limitations to animal testing. There are ethical concerns about how we handle and end the lives of lab animals. In studies regarding aging, they generally live out their natural lives. But after many types of studies they’re regularly euthanized, and there’s likely never going to be perfect consensus of what defines ‘humanely’ killing an animal for medical research.
Furthemore, as unbiased as we can make these tests, most of the time they don’t translate to humans. You can eliminate a lot of variables, but a big one you can’t eliminate is that we’re different species. The number varies from behavioral science to pharmacology and everything in between, but studies in lab animals work out in humans 10-40% of the time. And 40% is being generous.
What are we going to do though, test this shit out on humans first? That’s how Bill Gates really gets a 5G chip in you.
The mice are not thankless. In Novosibirsk in Siberia, Russia they are memorialized in the monument to the lab rats and mice.
Strains descended from Abbie Lathrop’s mice are still used in research, and her notebooks are held at The Jackson Laboratory today.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, celebrating my cat’s predator instinct kicking in with a sense of irony, and bringing me a mouse while I was writing this.
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Just wondering if SciBabe would be interested in the sequel to this story, involving Biologist Bret Weinstein? https://youtu.be/hKTV2R6TT0Y
There’s nothing involving that crank that I would ever be interested in.