Characterizing Speaking of Research as extremist is fair. They seem never to have encountered anything having to do with experimenting on animals that they find even a little bit questionable. Whenever some lab-related hideousness gets reported in the news, they stand mute. Like the recent USDA reports about Envigo’s beagle breeding farm in Virginia. Even the journal Science wrote about it. But nothing seems hideous enough to motivate a comment from Speaking of Research.
FASEB is a much older organization. It promotes an extreme weakening of standards, regulations and oversight of the use of animals in laboratories. You can read FASEB’s recommendations here and Peta’s response here.
Ms. Charalambakis’s article was an attack on those who expose or criticize the industry’s dark, usually hidden details.
Nevertheless, I found parts of the article sadly humorous. It starts out with this: “… animal rights groups make a concerted—and often aggressive—effort to misrepresent the truth about scientific research with animals.” And then she misrepresents the actual oversight of the research:
“Multiple people, including scientists, veterinarians, and members of the public that participate on institutional review committees evaluate researchers’ literature search—as well as the overall study design—to verify that proposed studies are using animals only when non-animal models cannot provide the answers. By scrutinizing research projects from every angle, institutional review committees notify investigators if a more appropriate method exists.”
The institutional review committees she refers to – Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs) – are required by law, but the quality of their decision-making isn’t.
Reproducibility is a fundamental tenet of the scientific method. When a scientist makes a discovery, comes up with an explanation, reports something new, it isn’t generally accepted as true until the result or claim has been replicated in other labs.
One might suppose that an element so central to the claim that there is meaningful oversight of animal use in the labs would be regularly evaluated and even improved. But that isn’t the case.
Seemingly, the only effort by scientists to evaluate these committees' decision-making is the report: Plous, S., Herzog, H. 2001. Reliability of protocol reviews for animal research. Science 293(July), 608-609.
A random sample of 50 Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees participated in a study of the protocol review process. Each committee submitted three animal behavior protocols it had recently reviewed, and these protocols were reviewed a second time by another participating committee. The result showed that approval decisions were statistically unrelated. On most cases, proposals that were disapproved by one committee were approved by the second committee. All told, 61% of [150] protocols were judged as either not very understandable or not understandable at all, as having poor research designs and procedures, or as justifying the type and number of animals in a way that was deemed not very convincing or not convincing at all.
There seems to have been no published follow-up research. No one involved in animal research seems to care enough about the failure of this key component to do further research or to have done anything to fix it.
The element in the Animal Welfare Act pointed to by the Associate Director of Science Policy, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) as evidence of meaningful oversight, doesn’t do what it was seemingly intended to do and Charalambakis is undoubtedly familiar with the regulations.
Pointing to these committees as evidence of meaningful oversight is clear evidence of being intentionally misleading. Talk about misrepresenting “the truth about scientific research with animals.” Charalambakis continues:
The decision to use a canine or nonhuman primate model versus a mouse or zebrafish is not taken lightly. When communicating about animal research, it is important to emphasize not only the public health implications of this work but also the meticulous review process that occurs before research begins.
That's ridiculous. Those using dogs tend to keep using dogs. Career primate vivisectors keep using monkeys. The more senior the vivisector, the less likely that anyone looks carefully at their methods. Moreover, “the meticulous review process is frequently, maybe usually, anything but. The NIH explains:
Protocol Review The IACUC oversees the specific use of animals by formally reviewing animal use protocols and granting approval prior to the work commencing. The 2 valid methods of protocol review are either full committee review (FCR) or designated member review (DMR). (PHS Policy IV.C.2.)So, in actual practice, experiments on animals, no matter how hideous, can be approved by as few as two people. Both of them can be vivisectors; participation in the decision-making by the so-called member of the public is not required. Ms. Charalambakis might be simply mistaken, but it’s more likely that she’s knowingly misleading the public.
FCR may only be conducted at a convened meeting with a quorum (simple majority) of members present. A majority vote of the quorum present is needed to approve, require modifications in (to secure approval), or withhold approval of a protocol. When substantive modifications are required in a protocol to secure approval, the resubmitted protocol must be reviewed using either FCR or DMR.
DMR may occur only after all IACUC members have been provided with a list of the protocols to be reviewed and have an opportunity to call for FCR. If FCR is not requested, at least one member of the IACUC qualified to conduct the review is designated by the Chair. DMR may result in approval, require modifications in (to secure approval), or request FCR. DMR may not result in disapproval.
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