Table Of ContentModel Behavior
Model Behavior
Animal Experiments,
Complexity, and the Genetics
of Psychiatric Disorders
Nicole C. Nelson
The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2018 by The University of Chicago
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Published 2018
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 54592- 9 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 54608- 7 (paper)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 54611- 7 (e- book)
doi: https:// doi .org/ 10 .7208/ chicago/ 9780226546117 .001 .0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nelson, Nicole C., author.
Title: Model behavior : animal experiments, complexity, and the genetics of
psychiatric disorders / Nicole C. Nelson.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2017035137 | ISBN 9780226545929 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780226546087 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226546117 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Behavior genetics—Research. | Animal models in
research. | Mental illness—Animal models. | Mice as laboratory animals. |
Behavior genetics—Methodology.
Classifi cation: LCC QH457.N45 2018 | DDC 616.02/73—dc23
LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov/ 2017035137
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/niso z39.48– 1992
( Permanence of Paper).
C o n t e n t s
Introduction: A Furry, One- Ounce Human? 1
1 • Containing Complexities in the Animal Behavior Genetics Laboratory 21
2 • Animal Behavior Genetics, the Past and the Future 51
3 • Building Epistemic Scaff olds for Modeling Work 81
4 • Epistemic By- Products: Learning about Environments
while Studying Genetics 112
5 • Understanding Binge Drinking 141
6 • Leaving the Laboratory 171
Conclusion: An Expanded Vocabulary for the Laboratory 201
Acknowledgments 211
Appendix 215
Notes 223
Bibliography 229
Index 247
I n t r o d u c t i o n
A Furry, One- Ounce Human?
I am standing in the middle of a mouse colony room. On either side of me,
shelves fi lled with clear plastic cages stretch from the fl oor almost all the way
to the ceiling. Technicians in green hospital scrubs pull the cages in and out
of the metal shelves like drawers as they move about on their morning rounds.
Yellow note cards cover the front of each cage, labeled with cryptic notations
indicating the age, sex, and strain of the mice, how many off spring they have
had, and when the pups will be ready to be weaned. Behind one of the note
cards, a female mouse and her silky pink newborn pups sleep in the corner of
a cage, partially buried in the chips of corncob bedding that cover the plastic
cage fl oor. This mouse has already fi nished her run as an experimental sub-
ject, but in a few weeks her pups will join nearly a hundred other young mice
from this colony room in the next round of a study on the genetics of alcohol
addiction.
This particular mouse room is not especially remarkable. In many ways, it
is just like dozens of other mouse rooms that I visited on my travels through
animal behavior genetics laboratories. Yet standing here, for a moment I let
myself drift out of seeing this space as part of the ordinary backdrop of con-
temporary biomedicine, and I am struck by the strangeness of this enterprise:
thousands of mouse rooms like this one, containing millions of mice, all across
the United States, all across the world, all built in hopes of better understand-
ing the human. How did we arrive at this place, where so many of our hopes
for understanding human biology are concentrated on this small organism?
And how do we expect to extract knowledge about our own addictions and
2 Introduction
Figure 1. Mouse housing room with ventilated cages at a university in Canada— the fi rst
mouse laboratory I visited as part of this project. Photograph by the author, July 2006.
anxieties from those tiny pink mice in the cage that are not yet able to even
open their eyes?
Animal experiments are a crucial part of the machinery of contemporary
biomedicine, and rodents are the most widely used organisms in bio medical
research today— so much so that Angela Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and
Norton Wise (2007, 1) argue that “at the dawn of the twenty- fi rst century, the
face of biology may well be that of a laboratory mouse.” A survey of pub-
lication trends in the journal Genetics shows a concentration in genetic re-
search on a limited number of species over the past fi fty years. In the 1960s,
the number of studies published in the journal on research with so-c alled
model organisms was about the same as publications on other organisms. But
by the close of the twentieth-c entury model, research on model organisms
accounted for more than 75 percent of the journal’s publications (Dietrich,
Ankeny, and Chen 2014). A study of all scientifi c publications indexed in the
National Library of Medicine’s database shows a similar trend. The number
of papers published annually using mice and rats has more than quadrupled
since the 1960s, and by 2009 the mouse alone was the subject of three times
more publications annually than yeast, fruit fl ies, zebrafi sh, and nematodes
A Furry, One- Ounce Human? 3
combined (Engber 2011). Of all the research rodents, the most popular strain
is a mouse with a dark brown coat called the C57 Black 6 (C57BL/6), fi rst
bred by C. C. Little in the 1920s at the Jackson Laboratory (Rader 2004; see
also Gaudillière 2001). Although precise fi gures on the specifi c mouse strains
used in research are diffi cult to obtain, the C57BL/6 easily outsells all oth-
ers, accounting for between half and two-t hirds of mouse sales by some esti-
mates (Engber 2011). Taken together, these fi gures highlight the considerable
amount of biomedical knowledge that is generated based on experiments with
rodents— or even with one single strain of mouse.
Mice appear everywhere in biomedical stories about ourselves as humans.
If you examine a newspaper article about a new medical fi nding, chances are
good that you will fi nd a mouse lurking in the evidentiary basis for the break-
through. A New York Times article on the relationship between exercise and
anxiety, for example, starts out describing in general terms how exercise im-
pacts brain development, before revealing the source of the new information:
a series of experiments with laboratory mice (Reynolds 2013). Researchers
at Princeton gave running wheels to one group of mice and then compared
them to another group of mice that had no exercise equipment. They found
that the runners were both less anxious and had more new neurons in their
brains. What all of this suggests, the article reports, is that activity reshapes
the brains of animals in ways that dampen the eff ect of stressful situations. “Of
course, as we all know, mice are not men or women,” the article cautions in
the penultimate paragraph. But the last word is given to the lead researcher on
the aforementioned mouse studies. He concludes: “It’s not a huge stretch to
suggest that the [brains] of active people might be less susceptible to certain
undesirable aspects of stress than those of sedentary people.”
As much scholarship in animal studies has shown, humans have long used
animals to understand themselves. John Berger’s (1980) infl uential and wide-
ranging essay “Why Look at Animals?” laid the groundwork for a scholarly
agenda of examining animals as symbols, as companions, and as spectacles.
The “parallelism of their similar/dissimilar lives,” as Berger (1980, 7) put it,
has throughout history provided fertile ground for humans to craft narratives
about themselves. Science and technology studies scholars have similarly
examined how scientists use animals to produce narratives about humans.
Donna Haraway’s (1989) seminal work Primate Visions examined how prima-
tology was mobilized in a wide variety of scientifi c and popular settings to gen-
erate stories about the naturalness of particular human social arrangements.
From dioramas of primate “families” in natural history m useums to labora-
tory research on the mother- infant bond, Haraway showed how nonhuman
