Note: This article was originally posted to the JAX website here. An unwritten rule in the mouse genetics community — one that sometimes unintentionally gets broken — is that we shouldn’t develop personal attachments to individual mice. Anyone who has ever worked with mice will attest to their unique beauty and individual personalities. That said, mice are short-lived mammals; individual mice rarely live past two years. This limits their attraction as a pet but makes them ide

Note: This post was first published to my blog on the JAX website. I shouldn’t be here. Any moment now security will show up at my office door and hurriedly usher me out of the building. Clearly someone made a mistake, missed a phone call, filed a piece of paper in the wrong folder, and I slipped through the cracks. This makes no sense. Children raised in poverty by a single mother in a small Midwest farm town [Beaverton, Michigan; pop. 1,071] do not go on to start their own