Model Organisms and Model Environments: A Rodent Laboratory in Science, Medicine and Society

Abstract

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the role of animals in science and medicine. While historians have tended to focus on the processes of standardisation, increasing attention is being given to the surprising and unexpected elements of the model organism. Experimental organisms are, simultaneously, both artefacts and samples of nature. Rachel Ankeny and Sabina Leonelli put it clearly and succinctly: ‘they are systems that have been engineered and modified to enable the controlled investigation of specific phenomena, yet at the same time they remain largely mysterious products of millennia of evolution, whose behaviours, structures, and physiology are for the most part still relatively ill-understood by scientists.’ In continuously generating new questions, organisms provide novelty so essential to successful experimental systems. They are, as Hans-Jörg Rheinberger would argue, scientific objects or ‘epistemic things’, not merely predictable ‘technical objects’.