As a rule, historians doubt that the dying words of a famous Paldean prophet-king, "learn from the Tandemaus", were intended to predict anything like the sprawling research complexes of the modern age. The historical context suggests that his concern was that the people of Paldea stick together, that his death would not lead to a civil war; any group of people whose loyalty to one another even began to approach that of the Tandemaus – who, when widowed, remain by the corpses of their partners until they starve to death – would surely become a mighty nation.
Paldean history was never quite that happy, but the role of Tandemaus in the sciences ensured that his words would not be forgotten. These pokemon first attracted research interest by virtue of being separate individuals, yet capable of sharing a pokeball – a trait shared with Exeggcute and Falinks, to be fair, but Tandemaus are far more common in Paldea – yet their extremely quick rate of reproduction also ensured a ready supply of test subjects for a far wider array of research topics.
The Tandemaus laboratory, admittedly, is more prevalent as an accompaniment to the stereotypical Pokemon Professor in fiction than it has ever been in reality. And it is not only in fiction where there is something strangely unsettling about lab Tandemaus, a weird flicker of super-intelligence or a mysterious Beheeyem sighting which makes the professor wonder who is truly being experimented on. And yet, all the same, generations of PHDs have built their careers off of Tandemaus studies at Uva Academy, or replicated what they found as students in labs around the world; only one eccentric, however, was bold, foolish, or disturbed enough to attempt to replace Tandemaus with Pikachu.