The Mouse Man

Image by Laura-Elizabeth via Flickr

One of the things I learned from Jim Endersby's fantastic A Guinea Pig's History of Biology (which I reviewed here) is that progress in biology often depended on the creation of suitable model organisms. That is, before certain scientific questions could be answered, wild-type animals had to be transformed, often laboriously, into model-organisms. New Scientist magazine has a very nice article on the American geneticist C. C. Little (aka "The Mouse Man"), who created an important strain of genetically identical mice.

It's an interesting little vignette in the history of science and biology -- have a look.