Abstract
In 1937, in a manner typical of the New Deal approach to governmental duties, Washington policy makers considered the creation of a federal agency that would support medical research on the cancer problem. During the spring of that year, as a contribution to this public debate, the major news magazines depicted on their covers the fight against the dread disease. In March, Life displayed a picture of hundreds of inbred mice produced by the Jackson Memorial Laboratory at Bar Harbor. Mice were presented as the “ideal laboratory tool for the propagation and study of cancer” under the general headline “Mice replace Men on the Cancer Battlefield.”
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abir-Am, Pnina (1982). The discourse of physical power and biological knowledge in the 1930s: A reappraisal of the Rockefeller Foundation’s policy in molecular biology. Social Studies of Science 12:341–82.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 131 (1965). Adipose Tissue Metabolism and Obesity.
Bordo, Susan (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western culture and the body. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Bud, Robert F. (1978). Strategy in American cancer research after World War II: A case study. Social Studies of Science 8:425–59.
Creager, Angela (2001, in press). The life of a virus: Wendell Stanley, TMV, and material models in biomedical research. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Creager, Angela and Gaudillière, Jean-Paul (2000, in press). Experimental arrangements and technologies of visualization, in J.-P. Gaudillière and I. Löwy (eds.), Transmission: Human diseases between heredity and infection. Historical approaches. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Elzen, Bolie (1986). Two ultracentrifiiges: A comparative study of the social construction of two artefacts. Social Studies of Science 16: 621–2.
Elzen, Bolie (1988). Scientists and rotors. PhD thesis, University of Twente, Twente, NL.
Endicott, Kenneth M. (1957). The chemotherapy program. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 19: 275–93.
Galison, Peter and Hebbly, Bruce (eds.) (1992). Big science, the growth of large-scale research. Stanford, CA: Stanford University.
Gaudillière, Jean-Paul (1998). The molecularization of cancer etiology in postwar United States, in S. de Chadarevian and H. Kamminga (eds.), Modularizing biology and medicine (pp. 165–193). Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Gaudillière, Jean-Paul (1998, May). Rockefeller strategies during the Second World War: Molecular machines, viruses, and machines. Paper presented at the conference on ’Medicine as a Social Instrument: The Rockefeller Foundation, Medical Research and Public Health.’ Paris.
Gaudillière, Jean-Paul (1999). Circulating mice and viruses: The Jackson Memorial Laboratory, the National Cancer Institute, and the genetics of breast cancer, 1930–1965, in M. Fortun and E. Mendelsohn (eds.), The practices of human genetics, sociology of science yearbook 1999 (pp. 89–124). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Gaudillière, Jean-Paul (2000, in press). L’invention de la biomédecine: la reconstruction des sciences du vivant en France après la guerre. Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines.
Gelhorn, Alfred (1953). A critical evaluation of the current status of clinical cancer chemotherapy. Cancer Research 13:202–15.
Gelhorn, Alfred (1959). Invited remarks on the current status of research in clinical cancer chemotherapy. Cancer Chemotherapy Reports 5:1–12.
Holstein, Jean (1979). The first fifty years at the Jackson Laboratory. Bar Harbor: The Jackson Laboratory.
Hounshell, David (1992). Du Pont and the management of large-scale research and development, in P. Galison and B. Hebbly (eds.), Big science, the growth of large-scale research. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Ingalls, Ann M., Dickie, Margaret, and Snell, G. (1949). Obese, a new mutation in the house mouse. The Journal of Heredity 41: 317–18.
Jackson Laboratory (1954). Genes, mice and men: A quarter-century of progress at the R.B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory. Bar Harbor: Jackson Memorial Laboratory.
Jackson Laboratory, Annual Reports 1956–57 and 1957–58.
Jackson Laboratory, Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory (ed.) (1966). The biology of the laboratory mouse. Bar Harbor: The Jackson Laboratory.
Jackson Laboratory (1986). Two ultracentrifuges: A comparative study of the social construction of two artefacts. Social Studies of Science 16: 621–2.
Jackson Memorial Laboratory (1960, November). Research proposal to the National Science Foundation. Jackson Laboratory Archives.
Kay, Lily (1986). W. M. Stanley’s Crystillization of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus, 1930–1940. Isis 77: 450–72.
Kay, Lily (1993). The molecular vision of life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kevles, Daniel (1987). The physicists: The history of a scientific community in Modern America. Cambridge, CA: Harvard University Press.
Kleinman, Daniel L. (1995). Politics on the endless frontier. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kohler, Robert (1991). Partners in science: Foundations and natural scientists, 1900–1945. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kohler, Robert (1994). The Lords of the Fly: Drosophila genetics and the experimental life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lane, Priscilla W. (1954). Fertile, obese, male mice. Journal of Heredity 45: 56–8.
Löwy, Ilana (1995). Between bench and bedside. Cambridge, CA: Harvard University Press.
Mayer, Jean (1955). An experimentalist’s approach to the problem of obesity. Journal of the American Dietetic Association 31:230–35.
Mayer, Jean (1956). Appetite and obesity. Scientific American (November 1956), 21–7.
Mayer, Jean (1963a). Obesity. Annual Review of Medicine 14:111–32.
Mayer, Jean (1963b). Obese adolescent girls, an unrecognized minority group. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 13:35–9.
Minutes of the CCNSC Chemotherapy Review Board, List of mouse supply contracts (11959). NCI Archives, AR 002397
The National Program of Cancer Chemotherapy Research: Information statement (1959). Cancer Chemotherapy Reports 1:99–104.
Patterson, James T. (1987). The dread disease, cancer and modern American culture. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press.
Rader, Karen (1995). Making mice: C.C. Little, The Jackson Laboratory and the standardization of musmusculus for research. PhD thesis. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University.
Rasmussen, Nicolas (1997a). The midcentury biophysics bubble: Hiroshima and the biological revolution in America, revisited. History of Science 35:245–99.
Rasmussen, Nicolas (1997b). Picture control: The emergence of electron microscopy and the transformation of American biology, 1940–1960. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Rasmussen, Nicolas (1998). Instruments, scientists, industrialists and the specificity of influence: The case of RCA and biological electron microscopy, in J.-P. Gaudillifcre and I. Löwy (eds.), the invisible industrialist: Manufactures and the construction of scientific knowledge (pp. 173–208). London: Macmillan.
Rockefeller Archive Center (= RAC):
RAC(a), RU 5, Mr. Pickles’ Appointment, 19 Sep 1936, Series 4, Box 22, Folder 260.
RAC(b), RG 1.1, Clarence C. Little to Warren W. Weaver, 4 December 1937, Series 200, Box 143, Folder 1774.
RAC(c), RG 1.2, Johannes Bauer to Warren W. Weaver, 24 March 1937, 100IHD Laboratory
RAC(d), RG 1.1, Warren W. Weaver’s correspondence, Series 200, Box 143, Folder 1774.
RAC(e) RG 1.1, Series 200, Box 143, Folder 1774.
RAC(f), DATE RAC, RG 1.1 Series 200, Box 143, Folder 1774.
RAC(g). RG 5, Edouard Pickles to Thomas Francis, 8 March 1945, Series 4, Box 22, Folder 260.
RG(h) RG 1.1, Clarence C. Little to Warren W. Weaver, 3 May 1946, Series 200, Box 144, Folder 1777.
RAC(i) RG 1.1, Clarence C. Little to L. Webster, 25 Jan 1941, Series 200, Box 143, Folder 1774.
RAC(k). RG 1.1, Warren W. Weaver to Clarence C. Little, April 1943, Series 200, Box 143, Folder 1774.
RAC(I). RG 1.2, Medical Sciences Division. Series 200, Box 113, Folder 1189.
RAC(m), RG 1.1, Warren W. Weaver to Clarence C. Little, 21 March 1946, Series 200, Box 144, Folder 1777.
Starr, Paul (1982). The social transformation of American medicine. New York: Basic Books.
The Cancer Chemotherapy Program (1966). Cancer Chemotherapy Reports 50:397–401.
Zubord, C. Gordon (1984). Origins and development of chemotherapy at the National Cancer Institute. Cancer Treatment Reports 68: 9–19.
Zubord, C. Gordon, Schepartz, Saul A., and Carter, Stephen C. (1977). Historical background of the National Cancer Institute’s drug development trust. National Cancer Institute Monographs 45: 7–11.
Zubord, C. Gordon, Schepartz, Saul. A., Leiter, John, Endicott, Kenneth M., Carrese, Martin L., and Baker, Christopher G. (1966). History of the cancer chemotherapy program. Cancer Chemotherapy Reports 50:349–81.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gaudillière, JP. (2001). Making Mice and Other Devices: The Dynamics of Instrumentation in American Biomedical Research (1930–1960). In: Joerges, B., Shinn, T. (eds) Instrumentation Between Science, State and Industry. Sociology of the Sciences, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9032-2_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9032-2_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-0242-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-010-9032-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive