| Chapter 1: | An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship |
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Dirty Black Sewer Rat, Clean White Lab Rat
The ambiguous location of rats and mice between the past and the present is also a characteristic of another ambiguity, which manifests in the simultaneous location of rats and mice as at once vermin and laboratory animals. As vermin, rats and mice are an old foe, the dirty, black- or grey-furred, disease-bearing animals of ancient sewers, drains, and dark places. As laboratory animals, rats and mice are the (usually) white, clean animals that are located at the forefront of the new—the modern biotechnical fight against disease. Partly by recourse to the racial connotations that are embedded in dirty, diseased blackness and clean, germ-free whiteness, science has had its work cut out for it, locating disease-bearing rats and mice at a position at the forefront of the fight against disease. Rats and mice have had to be transfigured from their status as the bearers of disease and their location right in the thick of filth to the hygienic representatives of medical progress, where they are stationed as icons of biomedicine’s struggle to conquer disease. Rats and mice very often appear as sacrificial, Christlike figures in this domain; the assignation of a crown of thorns and other Christian iconography to Oncomouse, the breast cancer mouse model in Lyn Randolph’s painting that graces the cover of Haraway’s Modest_Witness (1997), indicates that only the power of Christian salvation stories, ‘steeped in transubstantiation of debased flesh into divine glory, has the gospel magic to perform such a feat of essentially soma-ontological conversion’ (Acampora, 2006, p. 102).
The fact that rats and mice can stand in for humans and can be submitted to pain and death in their stead speaks directly to the biological and genetic similarities between humans and rodents. As abject as rats and mice are, as far as they are thrust from humans by means of traps or bait, they are included in the laboratory because they are so very like humans: rats and mice are people’s genetic and biological homologues. Rats and mice share a high degree of genetic homology with humans. In genetics, homology refers to a similarity of DNA sequences; DNA codes with similar sequences are presumed to have a common ancestry. The mouse genome has been fully sequenced (the rat genome partially so),