Pergamon Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci., Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 319–343, 1999  1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain 1369–8486/99 $-see front matter www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc Of Mice, Medicine, and Genetics: C. C. Little’s Creation of the Inbred Laboratory Mouse, 1909–1918 Karen A. Rader* 1. Introduction: People, Research Organisms, and Origin Stories Much existing historical work on biological and biomedical research materials focuses on what might be called ‘men and their organisms’. Within the history of science the organism case study genre originated in an impulse to correct an earlier historiography—one that, as Adele Clarke characterized it (Clarke, 1987, p. 323, n. 6), ‘subordinated’ the question of research materials ‘to the careers of the indi- viduals who developed them and their institutional settings’ (cf. Clarke, 1995). The many excellent narratives produced since then do richly and in novel ways contextualize the choice of particular experimental organisms—for example, within the natural history of a given species, or within the social and intellectual history of a given discipline. 1 At the same time, however, each of these analyses still devotes a great deal of time to discussing the role played by key individual scien- tists—most of whom are already acknowledged as the material creators and key scientific users/advocates of their preferred laboratory creatures. Ironically, existing organism histories reinforce the conclusion that the scientific fates of individual organisms are intimately tied (especially at the early stages of their use) to the actions of individual scientists. In turn, it seems that Clarke’s earlier historiographic admonition bears re-exam- ination: what should it mean to problematize the relationship between the develop- * Science, Technology, and Society, Sarah Lawrence College, 1 Mead Way, Bronxville, NY 10708- 5999, U.S.A. 1 On the first, see especially Robert Kohler’s seminal book (Kohler, 1994), but also Geison, 1997. On the second, see Mitman and Fausto-Sterling, 1992, and Kimmelman, 1992; also, Ankeny, 1997 and Creager, forthcoming. For an early example of the fruitfulness of an institutional approach to standard research organisms, see Clause, 1993. PII: S1369-8486(99)00015-1 319