The premise

JAX mice, then, functioned less as static research tools guaranteeing the dominance of a particular line of work than as ever-present totems of the genetic approach in American experimental biology. Because they were standardized at the locus of the gene, considerations of how their hereditary constitutions shaped results became a material part of all work in which they were used. [...] My claim, then, is that the emergence of standard research organisms reflects changing social and disciplinary ecologies of knowledge. Genetically standardized mice were the standard-bearers for a genetic approach to biomedicine; their production represented, to paraphrase Karl Marx on technology, the power of genetic knowledge objectified [18].

Rader, Karen A. Making Mice : Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900-1955. Princeton University Press, 2004. ISBN 0691016364.