“Havens of mercy”: health, medical research, and the governance of the movement of dogs in twentieth-century America

From Springer Nature via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: received 2020-09-26, accepted 2021-11-07, registration 2021-11-08, pub-print 2021-12, pub-electronic 2021-12-02, online 2021-12-02Publication status: PublishedFunder: Wellcome Trust; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100004440; Grant(s): 106639/Z/14/Z, 205393/C/16/Z, 100433/Z/12/ZAbstract: This article argues that the movement of dogs from pounds to medical laboratories played a critically important role in debates over the use of animals in science and medicine in the United States in the twentieth century, not least by drawing the scientific community into every greater engagement with bureaucratic political governance. If we are to understand the unique characteristics of the American federal legislation that emerges in the 1960s, we need to understand the long and protracted debate over the use of pound animals at the local municipal and state level between antivivisectionists, humane activists, and scientific and medical researchers. We argue that the Laboratory Animal Care Act of 1966 reflects the slow evolution of a strategy that proved most successful in local conflicts, and which would characterize a “new humanitarianism”: not the regulation of experimental practices but of the care and transportation of the animals being provided to the laboratory. Our analysis is consistent with, and draws upon, scholarship which has established the productive power of public agencies and civil society on the periphery of the American state

Rat cities and beehive worlds: density and design in the modern city

Nestled among E. M. Forster's careful studies of Edwardian social mores is a short story called "The Machine Stops." Set many years in the future, it is a work of science fiction that imagines all humanity housed in giant high-density cities buried deep below a lifeless surface. With each citizen cocooned in an identical private chamber, all interaction is mediated through the workings of "the Machine," a totalizing social system that controls every aspect of human life. Cultural variety has ceded to rigorous organization: everywhere is the same, everyone lives the same life. So hopelessly reliant is humanity upon the efficient operation of the Machine, that when the system begins to fail there is little the people can do, and so tightly ordered is the system that the failure spreads. At the story's conclusion, the collapse is total, and Forster's closing image offers a condemnation of the world they had built, and a hopeful glimpse of the world that might, in their absence, return: "The whole city was broken like a honeycomb. [⋯] For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky" (2001: 123). In physically breaking apart the city, there is an extent to which Forster is literalizing the device of the broken society, but it is also the case that the infrastructure of the Machine is so inseparable from its social structure that the failure of one causes the failure of the other. The city has-in the vocabulary of present-day engineers-"failed badly.

Developing a collaborative agenda for humanities and social scientific research on laboratory animal science and welfare.

Improving laboratory animal science and welfare requires both new scientific research and insights from enquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Whilst scientific research provides evidence to replace, reduce and refine procedures involving laboratory animals (the ‘3Rs’), work in the humanities and social sciences can help understand the social, economic and cultural processes that enhance or impede humane ways of knowing and working with laboratory animals. However, communication across these disciplinary perspectives is currently limited, and they frame questions, generate results, engage users, and seek to influence policy in different ways. To facilitate dialogue and future research at this interface, we convened an interdisciplinary group of 45 life scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, non-governmental organisations and policy-makers to generate a collaborative research agenda. This drew on other agenda-setting exercises in science policy, using a collaborative and deliberative approach for the identification of research priorities. Participants were recruited from across the community, invited to submit research questions and vote on their priorities. They then met at an interactive workshop in the UK, discussed all 136 questions submitted, and collectively defined the 30 most important issues for the group. The output is a collaborative future agenda for research in the humanities and social sciences on laboratory animal science and welfare. The questions indicate a demand for new research in the humanities and social sciences to inform emerging discussions and priorities on the governance and practice of laboratory animal research, including around: international harmonisation, openness and public engagement, ‘cultures of care’, harm-benefit analysis and the future of the 3Rs. The process underlines the value of interdisciplinary exchange for improving mutual understanding of different research cultures and identifies ways of enhancing the effectiveness of future research at the interface between the humanities, social sciences, science and science policy

Confronting the stigma of perfection: genetic demography, diversity and the quest for a democratic eugenics in the post-war United States

Eugenics has played an important role in the relations between social and biological scientists of population through time. Having served as a site for the sharing of data and methods between disciplines in the early twentieth century, scientists and historians have tended to view its legacy in terms of reduction and division - contributing distrust, even antipathy, between communities in the social and the biological sciences. Following the work of Erving Goffman, this paper will explore how eugenics has, as the epitome of “bad” or “abnormal” science, served as a “stigma symbol” in the politics of boundary work. In the immediate post-war era, demographers often denigrated the contributions of biologists to population problems as embodying eugenicist’s earlier extra-scientific excesses. Yet in the 1960s, a reformed and revitalized eugenics movement helped reunite social and biological scientists within an interdisciplinary programme of “genetic demography”. The paper will argue that leading geneticists and demographers were attracted to this programme because they believed it allowed for eugenic improvement in ways that were consistent with the ideals of the welfare democracy. In doing so, it provided them with an alternative, and a challenge, to more radical programmes to realise an optimal genotype and an optimum population, programmes they believed to threaten population science and policy with the stigma of typological thinking. The processes of stigma attribution and management are, however, ongoing, and with the rise of the nature-nurture controversy in the 1970s, the use of eugenics as a tool of demarcation has prevailed

Escaping the laboratory: the rodent experiment of John B Calhoun and their cultural influence

In John B. Calhoun’s early crowding experiments, rats were supplied with everything they needed – except space. The result was a population boom, followed by such severe psychological disruption that the animals died off to extinction. The take-home message was that crowding resulted in pathological behaviour – in rats and by extension in humans. For those pessimistic about Earth’s “carrying capacity,” the macabre spectacle of this “behavioural sink” was a compelling symbol of the problems awaiting overpopulation. Calhoun’s work enjoyed considerable popular success. But cultural influence can run both ways. In this paper, we look at how the cultural impact of Calhoun’s experiments resulted in a simplified, popular version of his work coming to overshadow the more nuanced and positive message he wanted to spread, and how his professional reputation was affected by this popular “success.

Between quality and quantity : eugenics and the evolution of American Demography as a scientific discipline, 1927-1972

Defence date: 20 September 2002Examining board: Gianfranco Poggi, Supervisor, European University Institute, Florence ; Jaap Dronkers, European University Institute, Florence ; Troy Duster, University of California at Berkeley ; Massimo Livi-Bacci, Università degli Studi di Firenze ; Arpad Szakolczai, University College, CorkPDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 201