Willard Triumphant
In the case of an interspecies smack-down between human beings and lab-rats, who do you think would win? You might say the answer is obvious, but let's look at this for a moment.
What have we got going for us? Opposable thumbs, big brains, civilization/technology/control firmly in place. The lab rats are ours to toy with (poor things.) They don't stand a chance.
Or do they?
The one thing they would appear to have going for them is a lack of regulatory prohibitions concerning their advancement. For a lot of pretty sound reasons (along with a lot of Luddite/buzzkill reasons), you can't just go out and build Human Being 2.0. But there's little if anything stopping somebody from building Lab Rat 2.0, 3.0, 9i, Lab Rat 2009 Mega-upgrade, etc. The lab rats might go blasting right past us. Then it's their show.
Could it happen? Well, it seems unlikely. But people are talking about it nonetheless. Maybe as a precaution, we ought to give a thought as to how we can make treatment of lab animals as humane as possible. We should probably be doing that, anyway. But, you know, if the shoe might one day be on the other foot...