Modeling Other Minds: Scientists at a historic New England laboratory are trying to turn octopuses into the next experimental animals—they might transform biology itself

This professional-track thesis, conceived as a piece of long-form journalism, examines attempts to develop cephalopods as model organisms with a wide range of biomedical research applications at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In doing so it explores the tensions between the viability of octopuses as analogues for humans, and how the very traits that make it potentially viable—resilience, intelligence, complex sociality, adaptability—are entwined with a vibrant social imagination of the species that threatens the possibility that it will truly become the next laboratory rat.