Building transnational bodies: Norway and the International Development of Laboratory Animal Science, ca. 1956-1980.

Tone Druglitrø,Robert G W Kirk

doi:10.1017/s026988971400009x

Abstract

ArgumentThis 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.

Highlights

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
In this article we explore how Norwegian national concerns were both informed by, and informed, the international endeavor to co-coordinate a transnational response to questions of laboratory animal production, provision, and management
Prior to the formation of laboratory animal science and medicine in the immediate decades following the close of the Second World War, these practices predominantly consisted of ad hoc local arrangements, based on tacit and unverified knowledge that co-developed with research agendas in dispersed laboratories

Summary

Introduction

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. Scholars from a wide range of other disciplines, including science studies, cultural studies, and geography, emphasize the international outlook of the biomedical sciences (Jasanoff 2005; Sunder Rajan 2006) and fundamentally spatial aspects of laboratory animal production and use (Davies 2010, 2012a, 2012b) These different perspectives are shaped by disciplinary preferences and by periodization. From its beginning laboratory animal science was consciously engaged in the construction of shared languages and practices, as well as the networks and infrastructures through which science travels, as a means to provide the tools by which the biomedical sciences were given form and function

Objectives

Conclusion