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

LabAniTrans will detail the emergence and enactment of standard care practices for laboratory-housed animals since WWII. In doing so, it will construct the first comprehensive account of animal transportation care insofar as it relates to biomedical conduct.The project will synthesize two hitherto separate arenas of intellectual inquiry: historical investigation into the practice and development of inter-species care practices, and historical concern with the spatial dynamics of scientific objects of investigation. Whilst both of these themes have found prominence in the emerging field of animal studies, there is as yet little explicit appreciation of how they might productively intersect and/or diverge. In demonstrating ways in which notions of human-animal care alter spatial dynamics and vice versa, LabAniTrans will help set a new agenda within animal studies. This agenda will supplement existing conceptions of scientific infrastructures as co-constituted by objects of science alongside scientists, institutions, and wider economies.Drawing on on archival and published empirical data relating to laboratory animal transportation, LabAniTrans will examine 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. These trends will be explored through comparative analysis of state-funded laboratories, infrastructural practices and regional administrative norms in North America and Europe, with a particular focus on three state institutions (in Britain, West Germany, and Iowa (US)) in which they initially emerged. LabAniTrans will thereby begin to unpack the 'black box' of contemporary animal care infrastructures.