Pig Mentations: Race and Face in Radiobiology

In the 1950s, Leo K. Bustad and his colleagues at the Hanford “Experimental Animal Farm” began breeding small pigs to study the effects of radiation on human skin. Within a few years, Hanford miniature swine were called a transformative new experimental organism that might replace canines in the laboratory. Weighing around 160 pounds, the same as radiobiology’s “Standard Man,” their skin was white, which was said to make “seeing” radiation damage easier. This essay traces the emergence of the scientific minipig from experimental agriculture and postwar atomic tests to research at the Hormel Institute and Hanford. It situates the pigs as one part of a broader scientific effort to construct a multispecies “composite” human in the twentieth century, exploring how the pig’s lingering significance to dermatology reveals the role of “racializing assemblages” in the production of experimental organisms and scientific facts.