What’s so special about model organisms?

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BERTology Meets Biology: Interpreting Attention in Protein Language Models (2020, background): “Since the molecular biology revolution in the 1960s, there has been a large focus on a small number of model organisms, such as C. elegans , Drosophila melanogaster , and Mus musculus , as part of biological research [5, 44].”
Model Organisms are Not (Theoretical) Models (2015, background): “For instance, Ankeny and Leonelli ([2011]) state that model organisms can be understood within the “models as mediators” framework (Morgan and Morrison, [1999]), developed primarily to handle theoretical modeling.”
Re-thinking organisms: The impact of databases on model organism biology. (2012, background): “On the one hand, this fact challenges the identity politics which has hitherto characterised model organism work (see Ankeny & Leonelli, 2011): researchers do not need to define themselves as ‘worm people’ or ‘mice people’ any longer, and have personal contacts or have been trained in key…”