In 1950, the British biologist Alan Parkes argued that "the animal house is a key point, not less important, and perhaps more important, than the laboratory itself." His comments came during a period of radical transformation in the biomedical sciences around the world: earlier, impromptu infrastructures for producing and maintaining living scientific resources were increasingly recognized as inadequate; the loose-knit profession of laboratory technicians was beginning to professionalize; and the reproducibility of results across space and time was of growing concern. These threads converged in discussions about the proper construction, maintenance, and value of the "animal house": highly local sites for keeping lab organisms defined by regional geography and labor practices that were considered essential to the universality of scientific results. The animal house was a subject of tremendous importance to scientists, but has been little explored by historians. Each presenter on this panel traces the transformation of animal houses in specific locales, revealing tensions between universality and locality, specificity and diversity, as well as the growing challenge of managing scientific labor and capital. Collectively, the papers reveal the animal house as a topic of transnational and global significance, charting the connections to a broader research program into the historical infrastructures of global science in the twentieth century and speaking to vital questions at the intersections of the history of science, medicine, and global capitalism.