The 2010 National Medal of Science to Ralph L. Brinster, University of Pennsylvania, for his fundamental contributions to the development and use of transgenicmice.
His firm creates human antibodies in transgenicmice, clones the antibodies and then uses conventional processes to churn out copies of the antibodies by the thousand.
Late in my life, I was hired by a lab at Cornell University as support staff doing research into the molecular components of meiosis, using transgenicmice.
To make their mice hypersensitive to explosives, the researchers altered the gene responsible for the DNT receptor so that the transgenicmice have as many as one million neurons in which the odor receptor is tuned to the fragrance of a land mine.
One difficulty with introducing toxins into transgenic animals such as mice is that they may not survive the toxins, in which case they can't produce the antibodies.