Volume 1

The revision of the EU Directive on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes / House of Lords. European Union Committee.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Lords. European Union Committee
Date:
2009
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: The revision of the EU Directive on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes / House of Lords. European Union Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    24 Fune 2009 time being put in to make this work. That seems quite unnecessary. We have to try to move to a system which is related to the welfare impact of procedures, rather than dotting Is and crossing Ts in the way that the Home Office has felt obliged to do under the current Act. Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: There is a big concern among investigators about an issue underlying this Directive, which is that the imposition of additional bureaucratic steps—over and above the ones that we already have, on which we are negotiating and working very hard together with the Home Office— will add an additional burden. There are statements, requirements, authorities and authorisations in here that do cause a lot of anxiety in academic investigators that this will just make it bigger without actually improving the animal welfare side, as my colleague pointed out in his opening statement. We are very concerned that a linkage is being made that bureaucracy in some way reflects animal welfare. We absolutely refute that there is any association between these two. Bureaucracy has to be appropriate to the level of animal welfare that you want and not be overwhelming. Chairman: | think that you are getting your message through! Can we go back to non-human primates, with a question from Lord Cameron. Q222 Lord Cameron of Dillington: Perhaps | could first say that I am a farmer and so I understand that any representative body always resists change like mad, particularly if it is being foisted upon us by our political masters, shall we say. I wonder if I could start by asking if you accepted that minimising—and you can interpret that word in whatever way you like—the use of non-human primates must be part of the acceptability by the general public of all the work you do, not least in connection with the question being asked by Lord Palmer. Sir Mark Walport: | think that we would agree with that completely, and we would go further and say that minimising the use of all animals has to be the goal. One then has to recognise that one needs to make judgments and it is actually about proportionality and deciding on a case-by-case basis whether the experimentation is justified or not. In parenthesis, it is worth noting that research on agricultural animals is something that would become almost impossible under these regulations. The housing conditions that are required would make agricultural work almost impossible. You would not be able to release animals back into your farm afterwards. There seems a slight paradox that this, which has come from a committee that ought to know about agriculture, has completely neglected it in terms of the regulations. Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: Could I add that every funder from the Association of Medical Research Charities as well as the public bodies, as part of the application form where there is a request for “use of animals”, stipulates that there has to be a specific justification, which is tested by peer review as to why those experiments are to be conducted in animals. The numbers are strictly tested, both for the ethical considerations in relationship to the use of the animals as well as to the numbers actually required in order to achieve the end goals of the proposed studies. It is not just something that we aspire to, therefore; it is something that we have inherently in our funding practices that is tested grant by grant, application by application, as it comes to every funder. Q223 Lord Cameron of Dillington: This is an area that obviously divides the two sides pretty thoroughly, but even the RSPCA last week were saying that they do not want to ban experiments on non-human primates; they are just looking for ways of minimising them. Clearly, as you said, the draft Directive restricts [non-human primate] research to life-threatening and debilitating clinical conditions, although that was broadened by the Commission, when they gave evidence to us, to include conditions such as infertility, diabetes, Parkinson’s and so on. On the other hand, two weeks ago Professor Hammond, who perhaps more represents your position, was saying that they wanted to “protect basic research that generates knowledge”, which is pretty well a free-for-all as far as we were concerned. How would you minimise the use of non-human primates? Sir Mark Walport: I think the short answer is that it is not a free-for-all, because we review this extremely rigorously. We have scientific review, which asks the question “Will this fundamentally add _ to knowledge?” In the case of primates we also add an additional level of peer review in that the MRC, the Wellcome Trust and other funders send the applications to the National Centre for the 3Rs for an additional layer of peer review; so we are therefore extremely careful. Let me give you another example that has recently been discovered. There are these neurons called “mirror neurons”. If you are looking at someone moving, there are neurons that respond to that. That is relevant to the understanding of autism, which is an extremely important condition; but I do not necessarily think that the researchers doing that research at the time would know what the clinical implications of the research are. A fundamental understanding of the brain is therefore absolutely crucial to the understanding of neurological conditions, which are a huge burden of ill health. We are very careful that, when a research question is asked, it is an important question. In other words, if it is answered it will tell us something which we did not know that is important about how the nervous system works. That is not a free-for-all by