Ethnographic encounters with experimental animals: Towards a biogeography of

postgenomic life

Gail Davies Department of GeographyUniversity College London

Outline

• Points of departure– The Cultural Geography/Anthropology of Carl Sauer– The biogeography of the commensal mouse– From farming to Pharma

• Circulating animals in behavioural genetics– Modelling human depression– Challenging animal models– Enriching environments

• Conclusions– Towards a biogeography of post-genomic life

The cultural geography of Carl Sauer

The biogeography of the commensal mouse

Image: Wellcome picture library

From Farming to Pharma

FIMRe: Federation of International Mouse Resources (2006) Mammalian Genomics, 24, 9.

The changing biogeography of the laboratory mouse

• Part of a larger project – called Biogeography and Transgenic Life - http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/transgenic-life

• The changing geography of genetically-altered mice– Internationally – Corporeally – Affectively

• Studied through: – Ethnographic interviews at experimental sites,

conference negotiations, online exchanges, and literature review.

Modelling human depression

• ‘Dangle a mouse by its tail, and it will wriggle and strain to escape before eventually recognizing the hopelessness of its situation. Measure the time it takes to abandon thoughts of helping itself, and you have one of the classic animal tests for depression.’ Alison Abbott (2007) Model Behaviour Nature 450, 6-7

Forced swim test Nature, 450 page 6

Circulating mice models

• Liu et al (2007) Reduced Anxiety and Depression-Like Behaviors in Mice Lacking GABA Transporter Subtype 1 Neuropsychopharmacology 32, 1531–1539

• a) Forced-swimming test results for genotypically different mice.

• b) Tail-suspension test for mice with different genotypes and injected with different drugs.

• The knock-out mouse is most active but is insensitive to Prozac.

Challenging animal models

• “Strains of mice that show characteristic patterns of behavior are critical for research in neurobehavioral genetics [yet] experiments characterizing mutants may yield results that are idiosyncratic to a particular laboratory” (Crabbe et al, 1999)

Image: Wellcome picture library

Behavioural Stereotypies

Images: NC3R, Wellcome picture library

Enriching environments

• “The barren environment that has been designed to minimize uncontrolled environmental effects on the animals might ironically be a primary source of pathologic effects” (Olsson et al, 2003, p.246)

www.awionline.org/pubs/cq02/Cq-mice.html

Standardization and Experimentation

• ‘We have not had fundamentally new drugs in psychiatry, not because of the intrinsic inadequacy of all animal models, but because of the cookie-cutter nature of research design strategies by big Pharma … [which] … has dictated one serotonergic and noradrenergic agent after another’ (Watt 2007, Nature).

• Despret suggests a ‘contrast between the scientist who relies on the availability of both the apparatus and the animal, and a scientist who requires docility (this scientist being himself docile to the perceived prerequisites of science’ (Despret 2004, p.124).

Conclusions

• Towards a biogeography of post-genomic life

– From “Seeds, Spades, Hearths and Herds” to laboratories, apparatus, laboratory animals and drugs.

– From challenging environmental determinism to challenging genetic determinism.

– From tracing cultural landscapes to understanding the space/times of political biogeography.

Acknowledgements

• This presentation arises from a research fellowship funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council on ‘Biogeography and Transgenic Life’ (grant number RES-063-27-0093). I am grateful to the ESRC for this support.