How to choose your research organism

Publication date: Available online 26 December 2019Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical SciencesAuthor(s): Michael R. Dietrich, Rachel A. Ankeny, Nathan Crowe, Sara Green, Sabina LeonelliAbstractDespite August Krogh's famous admonition that a ‘convenient’ organism exists for every biological problem, we argue that appeals to ‘convenience’ are not sufficient to capture reasoning about organism choice. Instead, we offer a detailed analysis based on empirical data and philosophical arguments for a working set of twenty criteria that interact with each other in the highly contextualized judgements that biologists make about organism choice. We propose to think of these decisions as a form of ‘differential analysis’ where researchers weigh multiple criteria for organismal choice against each other, and often utilize multidimensional refinement processes to finalize their choices. The specific details of any one case make it difficult to draw generalizations or to abstract away from specific research situations. However, this analysis of criteria for organismal choice and how these are related in practice allows us to reflect more generally on what makes a particular organism useful or ‘good.’