Her travelling companion, Stephane Hababou, watches the photos of would-be models scroll across the screen. Four times a year she crosses her native region by train searching for the next top models, the ones who will one day strut the catwalks of Paris or New York. She discovers new talents for the Noah Models agency in St. They are the result, she says, of years of mixed marriages by citizens from different republics of the former Soviet Union.Īnna is a scout. She wants to show her international visitor the many charms of Siberian beauties. Perhaps a monument to the fox will one day join the knitting mouse.Anna Yuzhakova takes her laptop computer with her to the restaurant car. The experiment is still ongoing today, and some of the domesticated foxes are sold as sought-after pets to help fund the research. Researchers in the program, started by Soviet geneticist Dmitry Belyaev, carefully bred more than 40 generations of wild silver foxes, and documented the extensive physical changes the animals experienced as each generation grew increasingly friendly and playful toward humans. The most notable research to come out of the institute in its 60 years was a long-running study on animal domestication, reported Maggie Koerth-Baker in 2014 for BoingBoing. 'The mouse is imprinted at the time of scientific discovery.'įounded in 1957, the Institute of Cytology and Genetics was the first arm of the Russian Academy of Sciences devoted to the study of genetics, established just four years after the discovery of DNA by British scientists James Watson and Francis Crick. 'It combines both the image of a laboratory mouse and a scientist, because they are connected to each other and serve one cause,' sculptor Andrei Kharkevich told Sib.fm about his design. And the statue was raised in honor of this (sometimes maligned) relationship. Though some researchers have recently raised questions about the accuracy of this human-mouse comparisons, these tiny creatures remain one of the go-to animals for biomedical researchers around the world. Mice have lived alongside humans for an estimated 15,000 years, and are often used as a simple and fast-growing analogue to the human body for studies on everything from cancer to the effects of space travel. The institute collected donations to fund the statue and its surrounding park, which cost roughly $50,000 (1.7 million rubles) at the time. The statue stands on the grounds of Novosibirsk's Institute of Cytology and Genetics, the Russian magazine Sib.fm reported upon its unveiling, and was designed to honor the important role mice have played in science-from studying disease to developing medications. Emerging from two knitting needles in its hands is the recognizable double-helix of a strand of DNA. Unveiled in 2013 in Novosibirsk in southwestern Siberia, the quirky statue depicts an anthropomorphic mouse as an elderly woman, complete with glasses balanced atop its nose. As debates have erupted in the past week over Confederate monuments in the United States, a strange and obscure monument to the humble laboratory mouse has gained prominence on the internet thanks to a now viral tweet from user rubot.ītw, the best statue in the world is the monument to rats used for DNA research in Russia /NEEY9qbCOQ- rubot August 17, 2017

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