LabAniTrans · Care on the Move: Laboratory Animal Transportation and Post-WWII Biomedical Practice in Europe and the United States.

Care on the Move: Laboratory Animal Transportation and Post-WWII Biomedical Practice in Europe and the United States.

Goals: LabAniTrans will open up a new space within which to reconsider contemporary animal transportation practices and their place in scientific culture. Theoretically, LabAniTrans will synthesize two hitherto separate arenas of intellectual inquiry: historical investigation into the practice and development of inter-species care practices, and concern with the circulation and spatial dynamics of objects of investigation amongst historians and sociologists of science. In demonstrating ways in which notions of human-animal care can alter spatial dynamics, and conversely how the relocation of animals can impact care practices, LabAniTrans will help set a new agenda within animal studies. This will supplement an emergent understandings of scientific infrastructures as co-constituted by objects of science alongside individual scientists, institutions, and economies. Empirically, LabAniTrans will draw on archival and published empirical data relating to laboratory animal transportation, to facilitate examination of two mid-late twentieth-century trends in laboratory animal science: a) the emergence of laboratory animal science as a key prompt for the articulation and standardization of live animal transportation care practices, and b) the emergence within biomedical science of systematic recognition that shipping conditions and their effects can alter experimental results.15 These trends will be explored through comparative analysis of state-funded laboratories, infrastructural practices and regional administrative norms in North America and Europe. LabAniTrans will thereby begin to unpack the 'black box' of contemporary animal care infrastructures. Results: Contemporary approaches to the supply of laboratory animals both depend on, and have contributed significantly to, the emergence of logistics as a central pillar of contemporary capitalism. This finding a) confirms and expands on recent work in 'critical logistics', and b) provides a new perspective on the conditions under which logistics became an organizing force for capitalist production. Those responsible for sourcing, relocating and producing animals for laboratory investigation simultaneously contributed to changes in the mode of capitalist production over the twentieth century, and created means by which animal bodies were re-fashioned according to logistical requirements.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union