Who cares about lab rodents?

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Association for the Advancement of Science via the DOI in this recordHumanities and social sciences help advance “cultures of care” around laboratory animal science and welfareWellcome TrustOxford KE Seed FundEconomic and Social Research Council (ESRC

The Cold Futures of Mouse Genetics: Modes of Strain Cryopreservation Since the 1970s

Cryopreservation, or the freezing of embryos or sperm, has become a routine part of many research projects involving laboratory mice. In this article, we combine historical and sociological methods to produce a cryopolitical analysis of this less explored aspect of animal research. We provide a longitudinal account of mouse embryo and semen storage and uses in the UK and show that cryopreservation enabled researchers to overcome particular challenges—fears of strain loss, societal disapproval, and genetic drift—in ways which enabled the continued existence of strains and contributed to the scaling up of mouse research since World War II. We use the theoretical lens of cryopolitics to explore three different, yet overlapping, cryopolitical strategies that we identify. All share the ability to ensure the continued maintenance of genetically defined strains without the need for continually breeding colonies of mice. We argue that, in contrast to more common imaginaries of species conservation, the cryopolitical rationale can best be understood as purposefully not letting the strain die without requiring animals to live. The ability to freeze mice, then, had the potential to unsettle who the objects of care are in mouse research, from individual animals to the concept of the strain itself. Wellcome Trust grant no. 20539

Who cares about lab rodents?

Humanities and social sciences help advance “cultures of care” around laboratory animal science and welfar

Animal research nexus: a new approach to the connections between science, health and animal welfare

Animals used in biological research and testing have become integrated into the trajectories of modern biomedicine, generating increased expectations for and connections between human and animal health. Animal research also remains controversial and its acceptability is contingent on a complex network of relations and assurances across science and society, which are both formally constituted through law and informal or assumed. In this paper, we propose these entanglements can be studied through an approach that understands animal research as a nexus spanning the domains of science, health and animal welfare. We introduce this argument through, first, outlining some key challenges in UK debates around animal research, and second, reviewing the way nexus concepts have been used to connect issues in environmental research. Third, we explore how existing social sciences and humanities scholarship on animal research tends to focus on different aspects of the connections between scientific research, human health and animal welfare, which we suggest can be combined in a nexus approach. In the fourth section, we introduce our collaborative research on the animal research nexus, indicating how this approach can be used to study the history, governance and changing sensibilities around UK laboratory animal research. We suggest the attention to complex connections in nexus approaches can be enriched through conversations with the social sciences and medical humanities in ways that deepen appreciation of the importance of path-dependency and contingency, inclusion and exclusion in governance and the affective dimension to research. In conclusion, we reflect on the value of nexus thinking for developing research that is interdisciplinary, interactive and reflexive in understanding how accounts of the histories and current relations of animal research have significant implications for how scientific practices, policy debates and broad social contracts around animal research are being remade today