Word: rats
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...their laboratories. Indiana University holds the patents on Crest toothpaste, Rutgers on the drug Streptomycin. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation at the University of Wisconsin provides the university with over $2 million annually, much of it derived from royalties on inventions made in the Foundation labs. (Warfarin, a leading rat poison, is the best known of these...
Moreover, the laboratory animal and the wild animal now bear little resemblance to each other. They are both rodents, but that is about all. Confined in thousands of laboratories, the white rat represents hundreds of different varieties, each as different from its common ancestor as the Chihuahua is from the wolf. Some cornered Norway rats will fight to the death rather than allow themselves to be captured by a man; a cornered laboratory rat will simply back away. Wild Norways ruthlessly kill intruder rats; their amiable laboratory cousins merely sniff at strangers. Wild rats survive by their wits; captive rats...
With unwarranted assurance, psychologists have frequently extrapolated from rat performances in mazes all manner of conclusions about man. Because rats can tolerate a good deal of alcohol, for instance-ounce for ounce, more than man-experimenters have thrown doubt on the longstanding conclusion that man and drink dangerously mix. Insights into the human capacity for stress, based on experiments with placid laboratory rats, falter before the unrehearsed wild rat's total inability to endure any man-imposed stress...
Dependent Animal. In its social organization, the rat makes a poor human analogue. The newborn rat, for instance, gets a minimum of parental care and is self-sufficient within just 22 days. The young human is the most cared-for of all the world's mammals. His dependency can last as long as 22 years...
...rat anyway, with so many better possibilities around? As one possible successor, Lockard proposes the oriental tree shrew, which is readily tamed, breeds promiscuously throughout the year and, on the evolutionary map, lies nearer to man than does the rat. To focus on the rat, when less than 1% of all species has ever been impounded in a laboratory, says Lockard, is like examining only the earth and then generalizing about the universe...