A talk about flying monkeys and the polio vaccine

On Wednesday, June 21, 2023 at 1 pm EST / 7 PM CET, Tom Quick, PhD, from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University will present a talk about flying monkeys and the polio vaccine: a logistical history of the rhesus macaque.
His talk will explore some of the wider environmental impacts of polio vaccine manufacture during the 1950s. Specifically, it examines the ways in which anti-polio campaigns relied on vastly increased use of Rhesus macaques in biomedicine, entangling them within then-emergent logistical networks. Demand for polio vaccination in the West facilitated the emergence of new trade routes for Rhesus, funneling them from their native habitats in the newly independent nations of India and Pakistan and into the laboratories of pharmaceutical companies. Yet contemporary uncertainties regarding the geopolitical, moral and vital conditions under which these animals could be legitimately enrolled as resources in vaccine manufacture threatened to destabilize their status as tradeable scientific objects. The logistical requirements of polio vaccine manufacture helped motivate significant alterations in attitudes towards these animals amongst governments (especially India, the UK and the US), animal advocate organizations (e.g. the RSPCA and affiliated organizations), and scientists themselves (e.g. at the UK’s Laboratory Animals Bureau).In addressing the contested status of Rhesus at this time, this talk will thereby show how the enrolment of animals within networks of biomedical practice challenged political and cultural as well as scientific assumptions regarding laboratory animals. It will thereby highlight the difficulties involved in disentangling the post-WWII history of laboratory animals from that of the contemporary emergence of logistics as a driving force of global economic change. It will place particular emphasis on ways in which the bulk air transportation of rhesus macaque helped constitute new sets of conditions through which they were conceived of and related to.

Free registration: 3Rs Training Webinar: Flying Monkeys and the Polio Vaccine Tickets, Wed 21 Jun 2023 at 19:00 | Eventbrite

Bio:

Tom Quick completed his PhD in the history of medicine at University College London in 2011. For the next decade, he worked on a range of collaborative projects relating the history of neuroscience, zoology and biology, and medicine. Over the last five years he has become ever more interested in the roles of animals in biomedical science and practice. His published work in this vein addresses the significance of breeding programs in early twentieth century race science, the inclusion of dogs in early-twentieth-century ideals of scientific domesticity, and the enrolment and participation of insects such as maggots and mosquitoes in inter-war medical practice. He joined the Maastricht University as a Marie Skłodowska–Curie Individual Fellow in 2022.