A Guinea Pig's History of Biology, by Jim Endersby

When William Buckland, Victorian geologist, fossil hunter and animal fancier, entertained, his dinner guests risked a close-up view of a pet hyena scrunching up a live guinea-pig, bones and all. Later scientists have kept their animals, including guinea pigs, in better order. And Jim Endersby shows how they have used them to create a new kind of order, needed to make real science possible.

Endersby, a young historian of science, has had the neat idea of telling the stories of the creatures which became the emblems of the modern lab. It offers an unusual viewpoint on the path from natural history, which grew from observing living things in the wild, to the biological laboratory.

Each chapter is organised around one of the organisms which became a star of the science of heredity. We meet the fruit fly, beloved of early 20th-century geneticists, whose labs were full of rotting bananas and clouds of tiny insects. Others include the bacteriophages – viruses which prey on bacteria – crucial to work on DNA, the weed arabidopsis, which became the first plant to have its genome unravelled, and the tiny, translucent zebrafish, popular because it is a vertebrate but a very small one.

And, yes, the guinea pig gets a chapter to itself. The unfortunate beast became an early vivisectors' favourite, and helped establish the germ theory of disease. Later, it featured in breeding programmes which helped make the final mathematical links between genetics and evolutionary theory.

As well as the animals, the book is full of neat accounts of the scientists who studied them. A favourite is the introverted Sewall Wright, who would lecture with a misbehaving guinea-pig clasped under his armpit instead of a blackboard eraser and, well... you can guess the rest. Endersby is as interested in social history as the history of science, so each section is alive with details of the period when the work was done, from Darwin lovingly tending passion flowers in his greenhouse to the laid-back atmosphere of Eugene, Oregon, in the 1960s - when the zebra fish was turned from an aquarium ornament into a scientific subject.

As with the fish, the choice of organism to work on was often settled by small creatures which begat large numbers. William Castle at Harvard in 1910 had a lab which housed 400 rabbits, 700 guinea pigs, 500 mice, 1,000 rats, 400 pigeons, eight dogs, and an awful lot of frogs. But his effort to understand the effects of sustained inbreeding led him to the fly - there wasn't really room for anything else. The fly pioneers at Columbia University in New York analysed perhaps 20 million of them to draw up the first chromosome maps.

Progress in genetics needed organisms whose pairings could be controlled - by forced mating if need be, although it could be merely by brushing pollen onto a flower. The complexities of species in the wild had to be tamed, itemised and standardised. So the strain which became the standard laboratory rat, an item of manufacture just as much as a battery chicken, came with a manual specifying all its key characteristics and nutritional needs. And the researchers created communities united by their devotion to a particular organism. Endersby shows how, through the free exchange of specimens, data and ideas, new scientific tribes and their standardised organisms co-evolved.

Viewing the history of biology through the eyes of the lab rat and other model organisms is not completely novel. And other stories could be told - about the sea-urchin, the bacterium E. Coli, or the mouse, which accounts for the vast majority of animal experiments. But Endersby's engaging book covers a good range of the most important lab beasts, and chooses its stories well. It is an absorbing tale of the way our understanding of genetics has depended on a crucial set of involuntary collaborators, the unsung heroes of the laboratory.

Jon Turney runs the MSc in creative non-fiction writing at Imperial College London

Heinemann £20 (320pp) £18 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897

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