The Curious History of the Lab Rat
If you give them any thought at all, you probably associate them with sewers, cargo ships and maybe animated movies about animals that want to become French chefs. But for almost 200 years,...
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If you give them any thought at all, you probably associate them with sewers, cargo ships, maybe animated movies about animals that want to become french chefs, but for almost 200 years, tens of millions of rats have played a central role in science performing a job that they did not volunteer for and one that almost always results in a premature death. There are lots of critters, big and small out there. My question is... Why the rat? The truth is, rats no longer hold the unlucky distinction of being the most widely used scientific test animal. Over the past 20 years they have been surpassed by mice. A very rough estimate suggests that about 100 million vertebrates are used for research every year. But the vast majority of these, like 95% are either rats or mic...
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If you give them any thought at all, you probably associate them with sewers, cargo ships, maybe animated movies about animals that want to become french chefs, but for almost 200 years, tens of millions of rats have played a central role in science performing a job that they did not volunteer for and one that almost always results in a premature death. There are lots of critters, big and small out there. My question is... Why the rat? The truth is, rats no longer hold the unlucky distinction of being the most widely used scientific test animal. Over the past 20 years they have been surpassed by mice. A very rough estimate suggests that about 100 million vertebrates are used for research every year. But the vast majority of these, like 95% are either rats or mic...
