The mother of all lab mice.
(As aired on All Things Considered, September 18, 2002)

 

When I look at mice from above, I adore them. They have warm, soft fur and a constant curiosity. When I hold mice up and look at them from below, though, I see their sharp, strange, rodent teeth, and they suddenly look repulsive.

Mice have hung around human settlements at least since people started growing grain and stacking it in piles. But unlike cats, which people probably domesticated in order to kill mice, people couldn't figure out how to put mice to useful purposes.

Most people through history saw mice as if always looking at their teeth, as vermin. But some people saw mice more fondly and kept them as pets, including a woman of the late 19th and early 20th centuries named Abbie Lathrop. She had been a schoolteacher, but illness forced her to retire. Then Miss Lathrop took up poultry farming, but failed. So she decided to breed mice and other small animals for the pet market. She was part of a network of mouse fanciers in the United States, Britain, China and Japan who bred exotic mice, including chinchilla mice, spotted mice, mice of many colors and even waltzing mice that walked with a peculiar dancing gait.

Also at the beginning of the 20th century, scientists were taking early steps towards understanding genetics. Since exotic pet mice had a wide range of coat colors and behaviors and they reached breeding age quickly, they were an excellent model for understanding mammalian inheritance over many generations. I'm not sure how scientists discovered Abbie Lathrop, but, however it happened, soon she was filling orders for hundreds of mice at a time.

Her relationship with science deepened when she worried about skin lesions on her mice and sent samples to a number of scientists. One of them, Leo Loeb at the University of Pennsylvania, diagnosed the lesions as cancer. Miss Lathrop and Dr. Loeb ended up co-authoring 10 scientific papers about cancer in mice.

But even more important for mouse history, around the same time, scientists at Harvard began inbreeding mice from Miss Lathrop's farm. They mated brother mice to their sisters for repeated generations to create strains of genetically identical mice. These inbred strains of mice became such a powerful tool for biomedical science that a new phase began in mouse history: mice being bred essentially as livestock, but for research.

Many of the mice in laboratories today are the direct descendants of mice from Miss Lathrop's mouse farm. For instance, when I worked in a lab, I worked with mice of the strain C57 Black/6, which is one of the most commonly used kinds of lab mice. They've even gone to space for experiments on the space shuttle. And all of the world's C57 Black/6 mice, in fact, all of the C57 Black/6 mice who have ever lived, are all descendants of Abbie Lathrop's mouse number 57.

About 100 years ago, Abbie Lathrop chaperoned a revolutionary transition in the relationship of mice and humans. The mice that Miss Lathrop raised had been pets and pests. Their descendants have become tools for human curiosity and survival. Medical discovery depends on them. People have long kept cattle and sheep and pigs and chickens to further the human enterprise. Abbie Lathrop and her scientist customers added to that list mice.

 

copyright 2002 joe wright
broadcast and transcript, copyright 2002 national public radio