The Long Run

Most of us are familiar with the term “The Rat Race,” and we probably have an idea that it derives from scientific experiments in which rats were, and possibly still are, raced against each other, especially in mazes. What was it all about? What was it meant to prove? Whatever the answers, some things are fairly certain. One is that rats make fairly useful experimental subjects, because, as mammals, their bodies are in some ways, very similar to ours.

Another factor, which goes back at least as far as the Story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, is that rats, over the centuries, have in general received a very bad press. Having no media agency working on their behalf, with no humanitarian organization promoting their interests – as have dogs and cats – the very word “rat” has come to be a pejorative. I need hardly conjure up for you images of Jimmy Cagney lashing out with an epithet like “You Dirty Rat!” (which was probably the most severe epithet the Hollywood censors of that day would allow).

So, because there will always be extremists (known to some as “cranks”) willing to protect any endangered form of life from what they see as human exploitation – scientists in general feel socially safer, working with supposedly repulsive rats than with cute cats and cuddlesome canines. Even better, of course, would be insects, like the ant and the cockroach, – but here the genetic similarities unfortunately diminish. There is indeed a whole class of God’s Creatures which we refer to as “pests,” which may legitimately be the subjects of widespread experimentation – but in this case, the usual object is to find ways of wiping them out.

There are in fact, as we all know, whole “extermination” industries – many of whose members, I don’t doubt, are good church-going people – who feel not the slightest remorse when they see the Sixth Commandment, rendered by the scholars of King James, as “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” (Subsequent generations of translators, no doubt under much pressure from lobbyists like the Slaughterers’ and Exterminators’ Alliance, have brought out more soothing versions, such as “Thou Shalt Not Murder.”)

We seem to have come a long way from the Rat Race – but not really. Figuring out new ways to kill off the rat population (which is blamed for such epidemics as the historic Black Death, in turn the cause of death of about a third of the population of Europe in the 14th Century – although the real culprits were not the Rats, but the Fleas they carried) is still a popular vocation among scientists. It competes for funding with the quest for anti-mosquito techniques and toxins, and many similar campaigns. What’s most remarkable is that, despite these efforts, over all this time, the rats and mosquitos – to say nothing of so many other apparent enemies of Mankind, such as termites, ticks, and bedbugs – have not only been able to hold their own, but even make occasional frightening inroads in our defenses – so that, from time to time the headlines inform us that a new bug, unseen for centuries, is deforming fetuses or killing cattle.

In the long run, it’s really we who are racing the rats – and the rats (and their ilk) have a good chance of being the ultimate winners. But Science (I hope) still has a thing or two up its sleeve. In the great tradition of Louis Pasteur, the Curies, and Walter Reed, research is constantly progressing towards a pest-free world. It may be that somebody somewhere – perhaps not yet born – will discover how to eliminate an entire odious segment of the genetic scale. But is species extinction really what we want? All life (for better or worse) depends on other life. Get rid of one species, and you upset the whole balance of Nature. One is tempted to be seduced by biblical visions of the lion lying down with the lamb, and all being as harmonious among the species as it was (presumably) on Noah’s Ark.

Perhaps the best hope one can reasonably cherish is that of coming to terms with one’s own private rat-race. I don’t know how many of my readers are in the habit of composing their own epitaphs, but one that keeps recurring to me is the single word, “ENOUGH!”

But far be it from me to leave you with such a dismal thought. Here is one expressing a slightly more positive outlook: “I WANT ALL MY POSTHUMOUS MEDALS IN ADVANCE.