Building Transnational Bodies: Norway and the International Development of Laboratory Animal Science, ca. 1956–1980

Abstract

ArgumentThis article adopts a historical perspective to examine the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine, an auxiliary field which formed to facilitate the work of the biomedical sciences by systematically improving laboratory animal production, provision, and maintenance in the post Second World War period. We investigate how Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine co-developed at the local level (responding to national needs and concerns) yet was simultaneously transnational in orientation (responding to the scientific need that knowledge, practices, objects and animals circulate freely). Adapting the work of Tsing (2004), we argue that national differences provided the creative “friction” that helped drive the formation of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine as a transnational endeavor. Our analysis engages with the themes of this special issue by focusing on the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine in Norway, which both informed wider transnational developments and was formed by them. We show that Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine can only be properly understood from a spatial perspective; whilst it developed and was structured through national “centers,” its orientation was transnational necessitating international networks through which knowledge, practice, technologies, and animals circulated.

Locating the ‘culture wars’ in laboratory animal research: national constitutions and global competition

“…This account also connects to the academic literatures increasingly engaging with the scientific, policy, and spatial practices of laboratory animal research. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences are increasingly trying to scale up accounts of how responsibility and care operate in laboratory animal research from discussions of corporeal encounters based on co-presence ( Greenhough & Roe, 2011 ), to the development and maintenance of institutional cultures of care ( Gorman & Davies, 2020 ), through to national frameworks ( Friese et al., 2019 ) and international exchange ( Druglitrø & Kirk, 2014 ). Drawing things together at international scales is complex but important.…”

A good life? A good death? Reconciling care and harm in animal research

“…Considering the broader atmospheres within which care happens also encourages us to locate these everyday acts of caring with respect to the broader infrastructures within which laboratory animal research itself sits. Whilst very different to studies which focus on the provision of care services (Power et al, 2019;Power & Hall, 2018), historians of laboratory animal science have observed the ways in which particular forms of care (most notably those associated with the provision of care labour) are woven into the infrastructures of laboratory animal research (Druglitrø, 2016b; see also Druglitrø & Kirk, 2014;Kirk, 2008). Such work has often focused on how the social and economic infrastructures of laboratory animal science serve to instrumentalise the practice of care (Druglitrø, 2016a;Friese, 2013;Giraud & Hollin, 2016).…”

Improvising care: Managing experimental animals at a Japanese laboratory

“…This work asks about the standards of practice that govern how technicians and scientists care for animals, such as the aforementioned 3Rs, within mainly European and American settings (Davies, 2012;Davies et al, 2018;Greenhough and Roe, 2018). Historians of science Druglitrø and Kirk (2014) have shown that in the 1950s and early 1960s various European and North American countries developed national regulatory, bureaucratic and management systems for producing and provisioning laboratory animals, while negotiating with international networks and infrastructures. In this dynamic and mutual process, they argue, transnational rules and techniques were imagined and solidified into law, even though many local differences have remained.…”