Honoring a Rat

Almost a decade ago we reported on some of the contributions to science made by a diseased strain of rats, specifically the Brattleboro Rat, whose thriving condition and international importance is directly attributable to the efforts of physiologists at the Dartmouth Medical School. The Brattleboro Rat achieved renewed prominence early this month when the 20th anniversary of its discovery a chance event that stimulated a variety of new medical research coincided with an international symposium that brought 150 scientists from three continents to Hanover to talk about the rat over Labor Day weekend.

In 1961, an animal keeper working in the home laboratory of physiologist Dr. Henry Schroeder, near Brattleboro, Vermont, reported what seemed to be some leaking drinking bottles in a perpetually wet cage housing a large litter of rats. Schroeder, a long-time member of the Dartmouth Medical School faculty, found that the problem was not with the bottles but with the rats, which were drinking and urinating constantly because of an inability to retain fluids, and which were suffering from diabetes insipidus, a disease also afflicting humans. Schroeder, who died in 1975, turned the rats over to an interested physiologist at the Medical School, Dr. Heinz Valtin, now chairman of the Department of Physiology and holder of the Andrew C. Vail professorship, whose research has benefited from his association with the Brattleboro Rat ever since.

Valtin and his colleague, Dr. Hilda Sokol, hosts of the symposium, have raised hundreds of litters of Brattleboro Rats and have determined how the rats inherit their characteristic defect of lacking the antidiuretic hormone vasopressin. The animals have been made available to laboratories all over the world, and they have been used in the course of research in the fields of cardiology, endochrinology, pharmacology, psychology, and psychiatry. The rats have also been employed in studies of high blood pressure, alcoholism, some types'of cancer, memory, and aging, and at Dartmouth they have been used extensively for kidneyfunction research.

The papers presented at the symposium focused primarily on new uses for the Brattleboro Rat. There is evidence, for example, that the hormone vasopressin may be an important transmitter of electrical impulses in the brain and that it may be useful in helping improve learning and in fighting depression. Because Brattleboro Rats cannot manufacture vasopressin (the reason is still not fully known) and because they seem to learn more slowly than normal rats, they may turn out to be useful for research in this area.

The symposium was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Josef Rudinger, a Czech scientist who introduced a colony of the rats to Prague, from where they were distributed throughout Eastern Europe. According to Valtin, Rudinger "epitomized the spirit of international exchange of scientific information."

The Brattleboro Rat: an unquenchable thirst.