An exploration of the various ways animals and their relations to humans have been depicted throughout the ages. This volume delves into the realm between representative images and real animals. It is a historical inquiry into human interaction with the animals we eat, pamper, experiment on, and imagine, as they have been variously domesticated, slaughtered, loved, studied, and made into icons of human invention. Common assumptions and experiences with animals have entered into the functioning and conceptualizing of life, yet these are historically and culturally contingent. The essays in this volume unveil the ways in which human-animal relationships reveal the interhuman structures of the cultures in which they are formed. By using animals as a lens, they refocus our awareness of the ways in which humans have allotted resources, gathered knowledge, and structured families. The treatment of animals is often a guide to the treatment of people within a society, while the perceived 'stewardship' of humans over animals has helped shape the broader environment that both human and nonhuman animals share. The authors tackle their subject from a variety of levels -- popular, scientific, and economic. The essays explore the vast borderland between human ideas and physical nature regarding animal representation. Contributors include Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr., Jonathan Burt, Ken C. Erickson, Katherine C. Grier, Richard C. Hoffmann, Andrew C. Isenberg, JacquelineMilliet, John Solomon Otto, Karen A. Rader, Harriet Ritvo, Nigel Rothfels, Kenneth J. Shapiro, and Edward I. Steinhart. Mary Henninger-Voss is an Associate of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University.

"Making Mice" blends scientific biography, institutional history, and cultural history to show how genetically standardized mice came to play a central role in contemporary American biomedical research.

Karen Rader introduces us to mouse "fanciers" who bred mice for different characteristics, to scientific entrepreneurs like geneticist C. C. Little, and to the emerging structures of modern biomedical research centered around the National Institutes of Health. Throughout "Making Mice," Rader explains how the story of mouse research illuminates our understanding of key issues in the history of science such as the role of model organisms in furthering scientific thought. Ultimately, genetically standardized mice became icons of standardization in biomedicine by successfully negotiating the tension between the natural and the man-made in experimental practice.

This book will become a landmark work for its understanding of the cultural and institutional origins of modern biomedical research. It will appeal not only to historians of science but also to biologists and medical researchers.