Models in science serve an enormously important role in guiding research. Benjamin Franklin used a "two-fluid" model when he advanced the first modern scientific theory for electricity. Two models, the wave and the particle model, have guided research on light since the time of Descartes and Newton though since the discovery of quantum mechanics in this century, neither model seems correct. Models serve an important role in biological research as well. Since we must be extraordinarily careful in experimenting on humans, biologists must turn to other species to model what goes on in human physiology. In the 19th century, the model of choice was the frog. Primates, pigs, cats, newts, even horse-shoe crab, squid and slugs serve as models for certain areas of research. Each offers specific opportunities but also limit researchers in what they can do. Scientists must balance the opportunities an organism offers researchers with the limits it places on the kinds of questions they can raise. The organism of choice in 20th century biology has increasingly become the mouse. How and why this decision has been made and how it has shaped the direction of biological research for the past five decades is the subject of Dr. Rader's research. Inbred mice are the most widely-used experimental animals in American biological and medical research. Yet the historical circumstances surrounding the mouse's rise as a standard organism have been completely ignored. Dr. Rader is expanding on her earlier studies of the process by which C. C. Little and the Jackson Laboratory chose a standardized mouse, mus musculus, as a model for biomedical research. Under this grant, she is examining the increasing importance of mouse models in two American biomedical fields: radiation genetics and cancer research. She is trying to demonstrate how the inbred mouse developed as a carefully crafted experimental technology which enable a wide range of productive relations, including among biomedical scientists and betw een these scientists and the society that supported their work. The study should also elucidate the connections between bench-top biomedical research and research policy, as well as illuminate the complex social, political, and intellectual relations that constitute scientific practices and organisms in the life sciences.
