ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the role of animal models in genetic research, both historically and in the contemporary moment. It argues that genetic science and animal models have 'co-produced' one another across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. The chapter discusses a brief conceptual introduction to models and modelling in the life sciences. Robert Kohler provides a now canonical historical study of early twentieth-century genetic science by following a specific nonhuman animal species. Both standardization and generality are idealized goals that–while surely productive of knowledge practices–are nonetheless always already partial and incomplete. Gail Davies notes that the shifting terrain surrounding standardization and generalization in the context of postgenomics also fundamentally disrupts the idea of replication that is so central to scientific research. The chapter also reviews the roles of animal models in genetic research, showing how the genetics of animal models and the production of genetic knowledge have co-produced one another since the beginning of the twentieth century.
