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.

    95/260 (page 89)
    24 Fune 2009 can be interpreted. What we are concerned about here, therefore, is a blanket diktat to do it but not actually to do it well. | Q236 Lord Palmer: Which would have nothing to do with the protection of animals? Sir Mark Walport: It would have nothing to do with the welfare of animals at all, no. Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: Could | deal with the issue you raised on intellectual property, my Lord? I am afraid that this is often used as a red herring. Intellectual property is intellectual property, whether it is commercial or academic. In terms of the normal restraints that universities applied, from my previous experience as Deputy Rector of Imperial College, even when we entered into commercial contracts as an academic institution, there was a delay put in place in terms of publication and making data available, in order to allow protection of intellectual property by that institution. Therefore, as funders of research we certainly would allow a reasonable delay in order to allow intellectual property to be registered, but it cannot be an end in itself that you can delay indefinitely in order just to claim “This is protecting intellectual property”. Beyond that reasonable time limit, academics are free to publish. There is a time factor here that is often not considered when that question is asked. Professor Headley: Could I add that one should remember that it is the nature of academics to sing from the rooftops the wonderful results that they are achieving. That is deep in the psyche of the people who go in to do this sort of research. One has a whole industry of international conferences to which scientists go, in order to broadcast their latest results. That then spawns a network of informal contacts between the scientists working in cognate areas; so that you can pick up the phone and say, “Have you ever tried this?” and get the information that is supposedly, if one read the draft Directive rightly, not available to anybody. It is available through this informal networking, which is actually quite effective in the way that it operates. Q237 Chairman: | think that there is a concern, though, that there are many experiments that take place where people do not achieve successful results, so that they do not want to broadcast it, for very obvious reasons. There is a fear that these take place on animals which are subject to experimentation. I take your point that to try to record every one would be difficult. This is a concern, though. Sir Mark Walport: I understand that it is a concern, but it is also a concern for the people who fund research. We worry if we fund a grant and no results appear. The pressure on investigators to make sure that the results do appear is actually very high, and we do look into grants where nothing happens. Professor Headley: There is a serious scientific difficulty with negative results, in knowing whether they are meaningful negatives or whether they are negative simply because the experiment did not work—in which case one learns nothing from broadcasting the information. It can be very difficult to know which of those two is the case when something has not worked out properly. That is one of the reasons why people are reluctant to broadcast; they just are not sure. They might discuss it informally but they will not put it down on paper, because they do not know to what extent it was simply a failure of the techniques in some way or whether it genuinely meant that that is not the way the system operates. Q238 Chairman: Professor Headley, you originally intimated that you may want to leave around 12 o’clock. Are you staying with us? Professor Headley: | am afraid that I do need to catch a train and I need to leave in ten minutes. Q239 Chairman: In which case, is there anything before you leave that you particularly wanted to draw to our attention which you have not had an opportunity so far of expressing? Professor Headley: Perhaps we could touch on the severity classification a little more? Chairman: Which is the next set of questions. Q240 Earl of Caithness: The Commission gave us a very good exposition as to why their severity classifications were right and justified. Sir Leszek said this morning that 19 out of 19 of his reporters said they were ghastly and horrible and needed to be changed. What is the true situation? Professor Max Headley: There are two different things. One is whether the number of bands and the names that one gives them are appropriate; the second is the definition of what falls into those different bands. The names that the Directive gave us were reasonable, but what it did not do at all was to describe where the boundaries between those bands are. That causes major problems for the interpretation of the rest of the Directive. If you do not know when you are designing the rest of it [the Directive] what is a mild procedure and what is a moderate procedure, then how can you start to design and interpret those articles that refer to this terminology and make sense of it? The argument that has come from the sector, therefore, is that it is crucial to the design of the rest of the Directive that we have a well-designed and described set of procedures that fit into each of those severity bands. In the sense that the Parliament’s amendment gave us the beginnings of that description, we supported it. In the sense that it did not include non-recovery as a category and did not separate out humane killing as a category, we did