How The Wild Hamster Was Tamed

The familiar pet was a rare animal until biologist Israel Aharoni set out to find it.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, host: In the spring of 1930, a biologist named Israel Aharoni ventured to the hills of Syria on a mission. He was searching for a rare golden mammal whose name roughly translates from Arabic as Mr. Saddlebags.

It may all sound exotic, but the animal Aharoni discovered can now be found in many grade school classrooms and children's bedrooms, running on a wheel in a little cage.

With me now to tell us more is Rob Dunn. He is a biologist and an assistant professor at North Carolina State University. He joins us from the studios at WUNC Chapel Hill.

Welcome to the show.

Professor ROB DUNN (Biology, North Carolina State University): Thank you very much. It's great to have a chance to talk with you today.

WERTHEIMER: So how did you get on to Mr. Aharoni's story and - his story of Mr. Saddlebags?

Prof. DUNN: I'm fascinated with the stories of individual humans and the way they affect both the living world and our understanding of the living world. And my general sense is that more often than not, these big changes we see in the world often can be traced back to the actions of individual humans with all sorts of problems. And so I'm always on the lookout for these stories.

WERTHEIMER: What inspired Aharoni to venture into the desert in search of this little saddlebag guy?

Prof. DUNN: He was a Jewish scientist working in Jerusalem. And in general, he wanted to discover both known and unknown species in and around Jerusalem and to name them in Hebrew.

But in this particular instance, he had a friend with whom he worked, Saul Adler, and Adler had been working with Chinese hamsters(仓鼠) as a model organism to try to understand the disease Leishmaniasis(利什曼病，一种寄生虫传染病).

But the hamsters wouldn't breed in the lab, and so every time he did an experiment and killed them, he would have to go get more Chinese hamsters or have them sent to him.

Aharoni saw this as a chance both to discover this organism in the wild and to bring it back from Adler, who could then breed them and make major discoveries about humans.

WERTHEIMER: What they ultimately had to do was dig a giant hole, and at the bottom of it, in a little burrow(洞穴), they found a hamster nest and took the little babies back to the lab. But as you describe it in your paper, he kept losing bits of this litter.

Prof. DUNN: These rare animals that were going to be so hard to find, and he found in a farmer's field. And so he proceeded to dig this great, deep, eight-foot hole in the wheat field and pulled up 11 individuals, originally, a mother and her babies. And immediately, when they put them in a box, the mother started to eat one of the babies, and so one of the 11 was dead. And so they killed the mother, and so then there were nine.

And so they brought the nine back to the lab, and as hamsters are wont to do, five of them escaped from their wooden cage and ran somewhere in the lab and were never to be seen again.

And so then, there were four. And the brother ate one of the sisters, and then there were three. At this point...

WERTHEIMER: Good lord. This is a very brutal adventure.

Prof. DUNN: I think it befits the Torah, at least sort of a Greek tragedy, sort of story, mixed with some Torah. But - and so they have these three individuals, and they very much want to breed them.

And so, lo and behold(你瞧), one of the sisters and the brother hamster have sex, and everyone is so excited that it's described as one of the greatest miracles in science of the times, and it's this incredible thing.

(Soundbite of laughter)

WERTHEIMER: I guess those of us who had some experience of modern hamsters would not think that this was so surprising.

Prof. DUNN: It seems in retrospect to have been in the cards, I guess, or at least in the cedar shavings. But it's this amazing story. And so they reproduce, and they eventually produce 150 offspring, this sort of Adam and Eve hamster, and they start being taken abroad in people's coat pockets, in official shipments to other places.

And so the hamster that you might have had as a child descends from that original brother and sister, almost inevitably.

WERTHEIMER: Why doesn't Israel Aharoni get the fame that he obviously deserves, to be the father of the hamster, so to speak?

Prof. DUNN: I suppose we don't think about the origin of hamsters as something that bestows ordinary fame. But I do think there are aspects of it that turn out to be quite significant to us as humans. And one of them is that the birth defects they tend to have lead to a kind of heart disease that's very similar to some human forms of heart disease.

And so these hamsters have continued to be a good laboratory model precisely because they're so inbred, because of this original story involving Aharoni.

And so they do matter to us in this unusual way, in addition to turning those wheels all around the world.

WERTHEIMER: Rob Dunn is a biologist and an assistant professor of biology at North Carolina State University.

Professor Dunn, thank you.

Prof. DUNN: Thank you so much.

WERTHEIMER: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

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