Transposing bodies of knowledge and technique: Animal models at work in reproductive sciences

Abstract

A prominent feature of biological and biomedical research and therapeutics over the past century is the entanglement of human and other animal bodies in the making and remaking of knowledge, techniques and products. In this paper, we explore how animal models work in two different but interrelated situations: early/mid 20th-century reproductive sciences focused on human biomedicine; and early 21st-century assisted reproduction of endangered animals in zoos. We use the concept of ‘transposition’ to describe and compare how findings about different species, the infrastructures supporting different species and the body parts of different animal species have been mobilized at these sites. We show how such mobilizations create dynamic relationships in organizational, discursive and embodied ways. The two case studies illuminate the changing practices of modelling within the reproductive sciences, and the changing kinds of work animal models have done in those fields.

Biologies of betrayal: Judas goats and sacrificial mice on the margins of Mexico

“…Scientists selectively breed animals so that their characteristics are known and regularized, and intervene in their lives until they resemble instruments and part of the lab apparatus. As model organisms, they are turned into scientific instruments and research tools, while at the same time laboratory ecologies are constructed around the particularities of their biology (Kohler, 1994;Haraway, 1997;Rader, 2004;White, 2006;Friese and Clark, 2012). Kohler (1994) argues that "laboratory organisms should be treated as constructed artifacts, no less than physical instruments, and as tools for investigation rather than as objects to be investigated" (p. 127).…”

Posthumanist critique and human health: how nonhumans (could) figure in public health research

“…While an extensive part of the literature focuses on zoonotic diseases, public health research also engages in standard biomedical research involving animal models. Biomedical research has long used nonhuman animals as surrogates for humans in research, and public health does this is as well (Friese & Clarke, 2012;Lewis, Atkinson, Harrington, & Featherstone, 2013). The animal model paradigm presumes that species retain certain biological forms and processes through evolution, making it possible for one species to stand as a surrogate for another.…”

Model homes for model organisms: Intersections of animal welfare and behavioral neuroscience around the environment of the laboratory mouse

“…Research from behavioral neuroscience was especially appealing because it addressed both shifts that were taking place in the welfare field in the 1990s: It offered expertise on animal behavior, and it was grounded in experimental, statistically significant data. Techniques such as enriching the environments of laboratory mice, part of the neuroscientist's arsenal for teasing apart interactions between genes and environment in producing brains and behavior, were thus "transposed" (Friese and Clarke, 2012) into the world of animal welfare. A review of the environmental enrichment literature captures this shift, showing the emergence of a subset of the literature that focused on welfare rather than neurocognitive development in the 1990s, a subset that now accounts for about 20 per cent of new articles published annually on cage enrichment (Hutchinson et al, 2005).…”