Word: norvegicus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Across the Volga. According to Lockard, several factors disqualify the rat as an experimental animal. The first is that the laboratory rat, originally Rattus norvegicus and an indigene of Asia, crossed the Volga River into Europe only 250 years ago. On history's ample scale, it is a newcomer; its rapid diffusion, combined with rapid breeding, makes of the Norway rat an animal that is still in violent evolutionary motion. To arrest it, as in the laboratory, says Lockard, is to claim validity for a motion-picture still...
...Some of your best friends are rats," declares the American Cancer Society in ads that hail the research variety's services to medical science. But the wild Rattus norvegicus is man's worst animal enemy. It bites his babies, inflicting deforming and infected wounds; it cuts down his food supply, and it spreads disease. It was used as an instrument of torture in the Middle Ages, and now it is torturing the Johnson Administration, which is trying to get Congress to enact a $40 million rat-control bill (see THE NATION...
...assured by the manager of a luxurious Ginza hotel that he couldn't possibly have seen a rat "as big as a cat" in his room, the American bought a rat trap, showed up at the reservation desk the next day triumphantly lugging a ¾-lb. Rattus norvegicus...