Business: Mighty Mice

Naked came the rodents

Building a better mousetrap was too prosaic for Boston-born Veterinarian Henry Foster. Instead, he built a better mouse—millions of them. Thirty years ago, Foster, whose degree came from a nonaccredited school in Massachusetts, paid $1,300 for some traps and pens from an abandoned Maryland rat farm, shipped them to Boston and went into business as Charles River Breeding Laboratories, Inc. Today Charles River, located on a 60-acre spread in Wilmington, Mass., is the world's largest supplier of animals for scientific research. In 1979 the firm netted $3 million on sales of $30 million and paid a dividend of 34¢ a share. This year the company will dispatch more than 18 million of its well-bred rats, mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits and monkeys to research laboratories throughout the world, where in the name of science the creatures will debauch themselves gobbling saccharin, lushing liquor and inhaling cigarette smoke.

Charles River critters have a distinguished history in the development and testing of vitamins, antibiotics, insulin, contraceptives and cancer drugs. Now the company has another product: the nude, athymic mouse, a hairless, pink-colored model bred without a thymus, the gland that helps the body develop immunity against outside infection. The first of these mice was an unexpected mutation, which was then bred to other mice in the Charles River labs. Now the company turns out more than 250,000 of these beasts annually. They are especially useful in cancer research because they will not reject a tumor transplant like other laboratory animals. Unfortunately, they will not reject any other diseases either, and so they must be raised in a totally germ-free environment; researchers have to scrub down and wear face masks before entering the breeding lab. Because the care is expensive, the bare rodent sells for $12, vs. 70¢ for Charles River's regular furry off-the-shelf mouse. ∎