This paper takes up the ICHSTM theme of ‘knowledge at work’ to examine the forms of knowledge and practice that have sustained the use of nonhuman animals within the biomedical sciences from the mid to late twentieth century. A number of historical studies have addressed the role that experimental animals have played as ‘models’ in the production of biomedical knowledge. However, the forms of knowledge and practice that sustain animals in their varied scientific roles have yet to be critically examined. The provision of healthy animals for the laboratory required the adaptation and deployment of existing knowledge of animal health and wellbeing, drawn from diverse sites (e.g. the zoo), as well as innovation where knowledge of the needs of a particular species was lacking. This work also required the construction and formalization of new sites, not least the animal house, which have hitherto escaped rigorous historical analysis. This paper charts how the work of maintaining animals for use in the laboratory enrolled existing expertise (e.g. veterinary knowledge) for new purposes, creating new forms of expertise (e.g. the animal technician) and new spaces of work (e.g. the animal house). Giving rise to new networks, these processes cumulatively facilitated exchanges of knowledge across disciplines, geographies, and communities, creating a new auxiliary field of ‘laboratory animal science and medicine’, was became an essential component of the transnational infrastructure which grew to support the global reach of the biomedical sciences from the mid to late twentieth century.

This paper reconstructs the emergence of specific forms of knowledge and practice that shaped human and animal work in the provision of animals for the laboratory. Questions include how humans and animals interacted in the animal house? How, conceptually and materially, were their interactions governed and to what effect? By exploring these questions the paper will reveal how species identity moved from narratives of national origin to those of welfare need (as animals ceased to be ‘from’ nature and increasingly became products of and for the laboratory). Driving such transformations was the goal of establishing acceptable standards of laboratory animal care. This agenda gave rise to an expert discourse that transcended the situated needs of a specific research laboratory programmes and their contingent animal models. Rather, ‘laboratory animal science and medicine’ pursued forms of knowledge and practice that were generic, holding true for all members of a species. Wholly instrumental, and fundamentally material, these processes contributed to the transformation of animal welfare from a moral value grounded in political language to a scientific value embedded in the material cultures of science. A transformation that might can be understood as the materialization of welfare.