The Curious History of the Lab Rat

If you give them any thought at all, you probably associate them with sewers, cargo ships and maybe animated movies about animals that want to become French chefs. But for almost 200 years, tens of millions of rats have played a central role in science, performing a job they did not volunteer for, and one that almost always results in a premature death.

Here at SciShow we explore the big questions like, "Why the rat?".

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Sources for this episode:
http://www.boston.com/business/articl...
http://www.lssu.edu/faculty/jroese/An...
http://cbn.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root...
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3...
http://ai.stanford.edu/~serafim/Publi...
http://www.animalresearch.info/en/lis...
http://ehs.uc.edu/lams/data/pdfs/9039...
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/...