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Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.

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The Mad Egghead, Who Built a Mouse Utopia, by Lee Allen Dugatkin.

Standing before the Royal Society of Medicine in London, on the 22nd of June, 1972, the ecologist turned psychologist John Bumpus Calhoun, the director of the Laboratory of Brain

Evolution and Behavior at the National Institute of Mental Health,

NIMH, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, appeared a mild-mannered, smallish man,

sporting a graying goatee. After what must surely have been one of the oddest opening remarks

to the Royal Society in its storied 200-plus-year

history. I shall largely speak of mice. Calhoun began, but my thoughts are on man, on healing,

on life, and its evolution. He spoke of a long-term experiment he was running

on the effects of overcrowding and population crashes in mice.

Members of the Royal Society were scratching their heads,

as Calhoun told them of Universe 25, a giant experimental

setup he had built, and which he described as a utopian environment constructed for mice.

Still, they listened carefully as he described that universe.

They learned that to study the effects of overpopulation, Calhoun, in addition to being a scientist,

...