Reader's Mice

The new book by Karen Rader (holder of the Marilyn Simpson Chair for Science and Society), Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900-1955, examines how mice came to be the standard lab research subjects. One of her own undergraduate professors said, “You could probably open these animals up, throw a handful of dirt in and close them up, and they would be just fine.” “This got me thinking,” Rader recalls. “That’s not true for humans; so how and why is work with laboratory animals applied to humans?”