The story
The Jackson Laboratory was founded by Clarence Cook Little, a former University of Maine and University of Michigan president, in 1929 in Bar Harbor, Maine under the name Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory with the purpose of discovering the causes of cancer and other diseases through research on mammals. The campus was built on 13 acres (5.3 ha) of land donated by George Dorr. Initial funding for the laboratory campus came from Edsel Ford, the son of Henry Ford, and from Roscoe B. Jackson, a one-time head of the Hudson Motor Car Company, for whom the institution is named. As well as providing funds for the first laboratory building, Roscoe B. Jackson provided support for the first five years of operation.
The sale of mouse animal models began in 1933 with early sales to the United States Public Health Service and now The Jackson Laboratory is one of the world's largest suppliers of laboratory mice for biomedical research. In particular, the C57BL/6J strain, which is widely used and cited is maintained at The Jackson Laboratory. The demand for mice generated at The Jackson Lab increased in 1937 when the Surgeon General supported a grant from National Cancer Institute to the lab that made mice produced there a de facto industry standard due to federal standardization requirements because it was the only large-scale mouse provider before World War II.
The research performed at The Jackson Laboratory is associated with at least 26 Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine via research, resources, or educational programming. Some notable findings from the institution include:
Established that cancer is a genetic disorder, a novel concept before the Laboratory's founding in 1929.
Dr. Leroy Stevens first described cells that can develop into different tissues – today known as stem cells.
Dr. Elizabeth Russell performed the first bone marrow transplants in a mammal, leading to new treatments for blood and immunological diseases.
Dr. George Snell won the Nobel Prize in 1980 for providing an in-depth understanding of the immune system's major histocompatibility complex, making organ transplants possible.
Dr. Douglas L. Coleman discovered the hormone leptin, central to obesity and diabetes research, earning him the Shaw Prize, the Albert Lasker Award, the Gairdner International Award, Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biomedicine, and the King Faisal International Prize in Medicine.
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Use of cancer avatars – mice with implanted human tumors – to test targeted therapies for cancer patients.
Recent research has examined cancer stem cells, leukemia, type 1 diabetes, lupus, and mammalian lifespan.
Highlights
A grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences funds the development of new computational tools to understand how multiple genes interact in complex diseases.
The National Institute on Aging provides $25 million to develop new treatments, future therapies based on precision modeling.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds phase 2 of the Knockout Mouse Production and Phenotyping Project (KOMP2).
Researchers link mutations to butterfly-shaped pigment dystrophy, an inherited macular disease.
Jackson Laboratory researchers discover mutation involved in neurodegeneration.
The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine opens in Farmington, Connecticut in October 2014.
In October 2020, it received a $11.8M USD grant from Harold Alfond Foundation.
The Jackson Laboratory Cancer Center
The Jackson Laboratory Cancer Center (JAXCC) first received its National Cancer Institute designation in 1983 in recognition of the foundational cancer research conducted there. The JAXCC is one of seven NCI-designated Cancer Centers with a focus on basic research.
The Jackson Laboratory Cancer Center has a single program, Genetic Models for Precision Cancer Medicine, composed of three biological themes: cancer cell robustness, genomic and genetic complexity, and progenitor cell biology. The themes emphasize the systems genetics of cancer and translational cancer genomics, and all are supported by the JAX Cancer Center's technological initiatives in mouse modeling, genome analytics and quantitative cell biology.
The Morrell Park fire
On May 10, 1989, a flash fire destroyed the Morrell Park mouse production facility. The fire lasted for five hours, requiring over 100 firefighters from 15 companies and a total of 16 trucks for the fire to be contained. Four workers of the Colwell Construction Company who were installing fiberglass wallboard in the room where the fire broke out were injured, one with burns over 15 percent of his body. While none of the foundation strains were lost, 300,000 production mice (about 50% of their stock) died, resulting in a national shortage of laboratory mice and the layoff of 60 employees.
This was the second fire to severely affect the laboratory; the 1947 fire that burned most of the island destroyed most of the laboratory, and its mice. Worldwide donations of funds and mice allowed the lab to resume operations in 1948.
From Wikipedia’s article on Jackson Laboratory, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4