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Origins of the Lab Mouse

How the mouse found its way from Victorian novelty to a biomedical mainstay.

These “fancy” varieties were then standardized in the 1920s by a small group of researchers at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine who intended to use them to investigate the genetics of cancer but were instead forced to sell their mice to support the lab when funding dried up during the Great Depression. Cuénot’s reasons for taking up genetic studies of mice have not been fully expounded, but perhaps, isolated from the skepticism of Parisian academic elites who doubted the applicability of Mendel’s laws to animals, he was simply free to follow his own interests. Some are working to change this: for instance, Fauna bio is collecting genomic data from a wide variety of animals, including fringe critters like the 13-lined ground squirrel, that might help us better understand highly conserved genes and resistance mechanisms to diseases like obesity.

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