Topic
Laboratory science research, explained
12 open-access laboratory science studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- How did Britain make a distemper vaccine?
Bresalier and Worboys trace an interwar campaign in which valued pet dogs, MRC scientists, and commercial partners produced a vaccine — and ferrets replaced dogs as lab animals.
- How funding cuts remade animal biotech
Myelnikov shows ABRO survived 1981 cuts by promising biotechnology—recombinant drugs in sheep milk—the path that led toward Roslin and Dolly.
- How anaesthesia licensed Victorian vivisection
Holmes and Friese argue that the anaesthetised animal allowed cooperation without consensus among physiologists, humanitarians, and, after 1876, regulators.
- Liddell's farm and experimental neurosis
Kirk and Ramsden show Liddell using a hybrid farm-laboratory to make animal neurosis a tool for psychiatry, bridging Pavlovian and psychodynamic traditions.
- Reworking a 1934 tobacco mosaic experiment
Scholthof and colleagues re-perform Holmes’s Tabasco leaf-drop assay and conclude that some historical experiments cannot be fully replicated; craft and materials matter.
- Why human embryos returned as research models
Hopwood argues the boom in human developmental biology is species-specific (medicine and regulation) yet still depends on imperfect mouse and stem-cell models.
- Claude Bernard and life in the laboratory
Bernard championed complex in-vivo physiological laboratories while his notebooks show exploratory, difference-seeking practice rather than the tidy method of his Introduction.
- Caves and Arctic huts as circadian labs
Hussey shows that mid-century physiologists used caves and the High Arctic as 'timeless' natural laboratories to free-run human clocks, before special bunkers became the gold standard.
- Moving mouse strains without moving mice
Peres and Roe show that laboratory mouse strains travel as commodities and sentient bodies; infection, welfare and data-quality concerns are shifting mobility from live mice toward embryos and gametes.
- What is a scientific knowledge skirmish?
Griesemer and Barragán track a laboratory exchange in human population genomics: Rosenberg’s clusters, Serre and Pääbo’s challenge, and Rosenberg’s response.
- Adam’s laburnum as a heredity puzzle
Cytisus adami, a supposed graft hybrid, stayed a ‘strange puzzle’ because nurserymen’s testimony never quite satisfied botanists.
- Civilizing visiting scientists in Galápagos
After 1964 the CDRS required approval to collect, while public conservation talk still blamed locals and invasives.