Care on the Move: Laboratory Animal Transportation and Post-WWII Biomedical Practice in Europe and the United States.

Project Information

LabAniTrans

Grant agreement ID: 101025635

DOI

10.3030/101025635

Project closed

EC signature date 22 April 2021

Start date 1 March 2022

End date 29 February 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 175 572,48

EU contribution

€ 175 572,48

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT MAASTRICHT
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LabAniTrans (Care on the Move: Laboratory Animal Transportation and Post-WWII Biomedical Practice in Europe and the United States.)

Reporting period: 2022-03-01 to 2024-02-29

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Goals:

LabAniTrans will open up a new space within which to reconsider contemporary animal transportation practices and their place in scientific culture.

Theoretically, LabAniTrans will synthesize two hitherto separate arenas of intellectual inquiry: historical investigation into the practice and development of inter-species care practices, and concern with the circulation and spatial dynamics of objects of investigation amongst historians and sociologists of science. In demonstrating ways in which notions of human-animal care can alter spatial dynamics, and conversely how the relocation of animals can impact care practices, LabAniTrans will help set a new agenda within animal studies. This will supplement an emergent understandings of scientific infrastructures as co-constituted by objects of science alongside individual scientists, institutions, and economies.

Empirically, LabAniTrans will draw on archival and published empirical data relating to laboratory animal transportation, to facilitate examination of two mid-late twentieth-century trends in laboratory animal science: a) the emergence of laboratory animal science as a key prompt for the articulation and standardization of live animal transportation care practices, and b) the emergence within biomedical science of systematic recognition that shipping conditions and their effects can alter experimental results.15 These trends will be explored through comparative analysis of state-funded laboratories, infrastructural practices and regional administrative norms in North America and Europe. LabAniTrans will thereby begin to unpack the 'black box' of contemporary animal care infrastructures.

Results:

Contemporary approaches to the supply of laboratory animals both depend on, and have contributed significantly to, the emergence of logistics as a central pillar of contemporary capitalism.

This finding a) confirms and expands on recent work in 'critical logistics', and b) provides a new perspective on the conditions under which logistics became an organizing force for capitalist production. Those responsible for sourcing, relocating and producing animals for laboratory investigation simultaneously contributed to changes in the mode of capitalist production over the twentieth century, and created means by which animal bodies were re-fashioned according to logistical requirements.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The main research undertaken during this project involved archival research, creative synthesis of archival findings with publicly available literature, and integration of findings with state-of-the-art theoretical scholarship.

Training involved supervisory meetings with Prof. de Bont (Maastricht University), collaboration with the 'Moving Animals' research team led by Prof. de Bont, co-editorship of an edited monograph (title: 'Globalizing Animals') associated with the Moving Animals project, co-authorship of an introductory chapter to 'Globalizing Animals', attendance of and involvement in History Department and MUSTS meetings at Maastricht University, contribution to public engagement activities as part of the Moving Animals project, and enrolling on and attending foreign-language courses.

Transfer of knowledge between the PI and the host institution took place during meetings of the Moving Animals project, History Department and MUSTS Research Program meetings, and through exchange of work in progress texts:

a) Transfer of knowledge from the host institution to the PI: The Moving Animals project's principal concern with global history, histories of globalization, and the study of 'wild' rather than confined animals prompted close engagement with historiographical traditions unfamiliar to the PI (history of globalization, environmental history). The project also provided the PI with a model of collaborative team-building, experience with the organization of workshops and public engagement events and production of an edited monograph. In addition, the participation of MUSTS and History Department scholars in Moving Animals and general institutional meetings prompted closer consideration by the PI of the history of managerial science and the sociology of the body. Language courses facilitated the PI's linguistic competence.

b) Transfer of knowledge from the PI to the host institution: The concern of the LabAniTrans project with histories of confined rather than 'wild' animals prompted collaborative questioning of the basic conceptual categories ('wild', 'tame', 'feral' etc.) used in defining the research problem of Moving Animals (the results of this are elaborated in the introductory chapter to 'Globalizing Animals'). Organization of the LabAniTrans project workshop created opportunities for cross-thematic exchange between scholars concerned with the study of laboratory animals (history and sociology of medicine and biology) and Maastricht-based scholars concerned with environmental history and sociology, and the history of wildlife. The PI's experience in public engagement facilitated creative presentation of Moving Animals project results (Naturalis Biodiversity Center event).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Findings of the project, as expressed in the project monograph, constitute the first 'global history' of laboratory animals and laboratory animal science, and the first 'human-animal history' of the emergence of logistics-driven capitalism.

Project findings go beyond the state of the art in two major ways:

1. They situate global changes in relations of production at the centre of historical and social studies of laboratory animals. Historical and social studies of laboratory animals have up to this point focused primarily on their ethical status, their surrounding regulatory scaffold, their role in discipline formation, and the extent to which they embody scientific standardization practices. I find in contrast that economics of supply and demand have been critical to the regimes of care, breeding and management that enable laboratory animal life.

2. They deepen and extend work positioning embodiment and embodied experience as critical to the maintenance of contemporary logistical practice. Recent work on the place of bodies in logistics-driven economies emphasises the ways human labor is both necessary to and significantly altered by the establishment of logistical regimes - notably through work conducted at ports and during commodity transportation, but also more generally throughout societies. The project findings extend this literature by addressing the ways in which animal as well as human bodies are both critical to and modified by logistical regimes.

University of Michigan Professor George Nace demonstrates his 'MEESA' frog breeding equipment.