<P> Guinea pigs have also been featured in film and television . In the TV movie Shredderman Rules, the main character and the main character's crush both have guinea pigs which play a minor part in the plot . A guinea pig named Rodney, voiced by Chris Rock, was a prominent character in the 1998 film Dr. Dolittle, and Linny the Guinea pig is a co-star on Nick Jr.'s Wonder Pets . Guinea pigs were used in some major advertising campaigns in the 1990s and 2000s, notably for Egg Banking plc, Snapple, and Blockbuster Video . The Blockbuster campaign is considered by some guinea pig advocates to have been a factor in the rise of caging guinea pigs and rabbits together . In the South Park season 12 episode "Pandemic 2: The Startling", giant guinea pigs dressed in costumes rampage over the Earth . The 2009 Walt Disney Pictures movie G - Force features a group of highly intelligent guinea pigs trained as operatives of the U.S. government . A video game based on the movie was also released . A guinea pig named Bugsy appears in the 2008 film Bedtime Stories . A guinea pig named Cashew features prominently in the second season of the U.S. adaptation of House of Cards . </P> <P> The use of guinea pigs in scientific experimentation dates back at least to the 17th century, when the Italian biologists Marcello Malpighi and Carlo Fracassati conducted vivisections of guinea pigs in their examinations of anatomic structures . In 1780, Antoine Lavoisier used a guinea pig in his experiments with the calorimeter, a device used to measure heat production . The heat from the guinea pig's respiration melted snow surrounding the calorimeter, showing that respiratory gas exchange is a combustion, similar to a candle burning . Guinea pigs played a major role in the establishment of germ theory in the late 19th century, through the experiments of Louis Pasteur, Émile Roux, and Robert Koch . Guinea pigs have been launched into orbital space flight several times, first by the USSR on the Sputnik 9 biosatellite of March 9, 1961--with a successful recovery . China also launched and recovered a biosatellite in 1990 which included guinea pigs as passengers . </P> <P> In English, the term' guinea pig' is commonly used as a metaphor for a subject of scientific experimentation, or any experiment or test in modern times . This dates back to the early 20th century; the Oxford English Dictionary notes its first usage in this capacity in 1913 . In 1933, Consumers Research founders F.J. Schlink and Arthur Kallet wrote a book entitled 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, extending the metaphor to consumer society . The book became a national bestseller in the United States, thus further popularizing the term, and spurred the growth of the consumer protection movement . The negative connotation of the term was later employed in the novel The Guinea Pigs by Czech author Ludvík Vaculík as an allegory for Soviet totalitarianism . Guinea pigs were popular laboratory animals until the later 20th century; about 2.5 million guinea pigs were used annually in the U.S. for research in the 1960s, but that total decreased to about 375,000 by the mid-1990s . As of 2007, they constitute about 2% of the current total of laboratory animals . In the past, they were widely used to standardize vaccines and antiviral agents; they were also often employed in studies on the production of antibodies in response to extreme allergic reactions, or anaphylaxis . Less common uses included research in pharmacology and irradiation . Since the middle 20th century, they have been replaced in laboratory contexts primarily by mice and rats . This is in part because research into the genetics of guinea pigs has lagged behind that of other rodents, although geneticists W.E. Castle and Sewall Wright made a number of contributions to this area of study, especially regarding coat color . In 2004, the U.S.'s National Human Genome Research Institute announced plans to sequence the genome of the domestic guinea pig . </P> <P> The guinea pig was most extensively implemented in research and diagnosis of infectious diseases . Common uses included identification of brucellosis, Chagas disease, cholera, diphtheria, foot - and - mouth disease, glanders, Q fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and various strains of typhus . They are still frequently used to diagnose tuberculosis, since they are easily infected by human tuberculosis bacteria . Because guinea pigs are one of the few animals which, like humans and other primates, cannot synthesize vitamin C, but must obtain it from their diet, they are ideal for researching scurvy . From the accidental discovery in 1907 that scurvy could be induced in guinea pigs, to their use to prove the chemical structure of the "ascorbutic factor" in 1932, the guinea pig model proved a crucial part of vitamin C research . </P>

Where does the name guinea pig come from