The Mice Came Home

Now here's one that comes out right, and after a night like that, you've earned it. Before the fire, the Jackson Laboratory stood on that east shore, breeding mice for science. That doesn't sound like much until you know what those mice were. They were inbred strains, the same mice generation after generation, and they went out to scientists all over the world. Jack Russell grew up there, and he put it plainly. Those mouse stocks, he said, basically were the lab, scientifically and economically. He was four and a half in October of nineteen forty-seven. He remembered crossing the bridge off the island, looking back at fire on the mountains, and thinking, that's my home. The fire took most of the main laboratory and almost every mouse. And they picked his mother to rebuild the stocks. There was a job for you. A burned building, a small boy, and no mice. Then the mail started coming. The lab had been sending its mice out to other scientists for years, and that, she wrote later, was when they came to appreciate it. Just about the only copies left of all that work were the ones they'd given away. Letter after letter came in, offering stocks to help them start again. Breeding pairs came back from around the world, the descendants of mice sent out from this island, until all but one of the strains were restored. The staff sat at desks on the open floor of a half-built animal house, nursing the tiny colonies as they trickled in. It was a wild time, Elizabeth Russell wrote, but everyone seems to have loved it. I like to picture that floor. No walls to speak of, a row of desks, cold coming in off the bay, and somebody walking up the road with a box of mice from a stranger who remembered.