In 1979, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in Australia conducted an extensive
comparative study of the toxicity of most of the Australian medically significant snake
venoms and some venoms from -Australian snakes. Here they used mice which
were subcutaneously injected with the crude venoms. In the early 1980's, Richard
Davis and Peter Mirtschin published the cobra scale, which compared venoms with that of the well known Indian cobra venom. Cobra venom is assigned the value of 1 and the toxicity of other venoms are compared to this venom.