Use of House Mice in Biomedical Research

What was true in 1981 is even more true today. The number of laboratory mice used as a model for human and animal biomedical research continues to grow at a rapid rate. The mouse's usefulness as a biomedical model has been sharply enhanced by recent advances in the ability to experimentally modify its genome. In this issue oilLAR Journal, a group of experts focus on the role of the mouse in biobehavioral research. Our goal is to review selected parts of the literature on laboratory mouse behavior and to assess behavioral measurement procedures that may be useful to investigators utilizing this common biomedical model. The word mouse in the English language can be traced back to the Latin mus, then to the Greek mys, and finally to the ancient Sanskrit mush (Silver 1995). Mush in ancient Sanskrit means "to steal." Well named, the house mouse, Mus sp., has been an effective thief of human food supplies since the beginnings of agriculture. The earliest association between the house mouse and human habitation is in a neolithic community in Turkey c. 6500-5650 BC (Brothwell 1981). The house mouse proved it is a highly adaptable mammal by dispersing widely along with its human hosts. Mice are found as commensals in diverse human structured habitats throughout the world and as feral mice in a wide variety of natural habitats (Bronson 1984). Although the wild house mouse remains a serious pest to humans, over the past century humans have begun to "steal" back from the mouse. How and what did we steal from the lowly mouse? Beginning about the turn of the century, mouse fanciers in England and the United States were breeding mice for unusual coat color as well as other characteristics. They were long preceded by Chinese mouse fanciers as early as 307 AD, but there is no evidence that mice from China contributed to the gene pool of the modern laboratory mouse (Festing and Lovell 1981). In Europe, the mouse was used as early as 1614 by Robert Hooke in his studies of oxygen in living systems (Masson JH 1940 as quoted in Festing and Lovell 1981). The use of the mouse became more common as specific strains were developed. Particularly notable in the United States was Miss Abbie Lathrop (Figure 1), a retired school teacher who bred "fancy" mice on her farm in Massachusetts around the turn of the 20th Century (Morse 1978). The mice from her colony soon became part of biologic research programs at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, when it was noted that the strains developed tumors. Miss Lathrop's "Fancy" mice were initially brought into the laboratory in 1902 by Prof. Ernest Castle of Harvard. Soon thereafter, his student, Clarence Little, and other associates developed strains from Miss Lathrop's original colony such as the now commonly used CBA, C3H, C57BL/6, and BALB/c strains. Work on these mice was focused on clarifying the genetic basis of cancer. Additional research on the