“Skilled Care” and the Making of Good Science

Abstract

This article investigates the construction of laboratory animal science as a version of ''good science.'' In the 1950s, a transnational community of scientists initiated large-scale standardization of animals for biomedicine, which included the standardization of care of laboratory animals as well as the development of guidelines and regulations on laboratory animal use. The article traces these developments and investigates how the standardization work took part in enacting laboratory animals as compound objects of care-and laboratory animal science as being an intrinsically ethical practice-as good science. Importantly, the analysis shows how technological development is inextricably accompanied by ethics, as it is the result of complex social organization involving multiple ethical commitments. By investigating the development of laboratory animal science historically, it is possible to tease out how values, norms, and standards have been made integral to specific practices in the first place and how they have developed and been sustained over time. The article contributes to current concerns in science and technology studies about how life is made, valued, and ordered at the intersection of science and society and in biomedicine,

Cultures of care? Animals and science in Britain

“…Kirk (, , , ), Druglitro () and Greenhough and Roe (, ) have explored the professionalization of laboratory animal science, through which the naturalistic animal has been made a subject of scientific research. They build upon and extend earlier ethnographic research that explored the relationships between animal technicians and scientists and the corresponding division of labour (Arluke, ; Birke et al, ; Michael and Birke, ).…”

“…In other words, a concern with animal care has been thought of as something that distinguishes technicians from scientists. Love and care for animals has been a crucial part of creating a science of nurturing for laboratory animals (Druglitro, ; Kirk, , ).…”

“…Earlier research has shown that scientists learn to distance themselves from laboratory animals as part of their education, so that they understand animals as ‘tools’ rather than sentient creatures (Birke, Arluke and Michael : 11, 14). While animal care work has been professionalized since the middle of the twentieth century (Druglitro, ; Kirk, , , , ), it has nonetheless been marginalized relative to science per se. This is evidenced by the systematic erasure of animal husbandry practices from scientific journal articles (Birke et al, ; Holmberg, ; Lederer, ; Lynch, ), and the perceived need for the ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines.…”

Pest Control and Ecology

“…Like their counterparts building animal welfare science in the laboratory, for these scientists good care for the wild animals they worked with was an intrinsic part of their practices of good science. 130 Developed in collaboration with laboratory colleagues and organisations such as UFAW, this version of good care was similar to the cultures of care of government animal health, prioritising populations over individuals, lack of suffering over preserving life, and integrating anthropocentric priorities in relation to boosting food production and minimising economic losses. As we will explore in the next chapter, the logics of care developed by conservationists and animal protection campaigners would become increasingly at odds with those held by MAFF's veterinarians and research scientists from the 1960s onwards.…”

Entanglements in Health and Well‐being: Working with Model Organisms in Biomedicine and Bioscience

“…Social science scholarship on modeling in medical research has explored either how specific organisms impact and shape our knowledge of human disease (Ankeny et al. ; Davies , ; Nelson ) or how animal technicians and scientists affect laboratory animals (Dam and Svendsen ; Druglitrø ; Greenhough and Roe ; Kirk , , , , , ).…”