Committee calls for more guidance on animal experiments
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《英国医生杂志》
The Home Office must make available clear and accessible information on the degree and length of suffering experienced by animals involved in scientific research in the United Kingdom. This is the conclusion of a panel of experts brought together by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics to debate the ethical issues raised by experiments on animals.
Credit: SIPA/REX
The report, published this week, paid particular attention to the predicament of animals undergoing genetic modification. The number of such procedures, which involve removing individual genes from laboratory subjects, usually mice, to discern their purpose, stood at 764 000 in 2003. This was a quarter of the total number of experiments involving animals, and the number of such experiments is expected to continue to grow.
Professor Steve Brown of the Medical Research Council's Mouse Genome Centre said these procedures were "undeniably useful in increasing scientific knowledge... but we need to understand how it impacts on the welfare of the new animals which are created and also its translatability in terms of human biology and disease."
Approximately 2.72 million animals were used in scientific experiments in the UK in 2003. The working party recommended that the government focus on reducing the number of such experiments and replacing them with tested alternatives, although the panel's chairwoman, Baroness Perry of the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee, admitted that "it is unrealistic to expect that animal experiments will be eradicated in the near future."
Representatives on the panel, who included antivivisectionists, scientists, and philosophers, produced a package of recommendations, among which was that the Home Office should make its Annual Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Animals, an annual update on the nature and number of animal experiments conducted in the UK, clearer and more accessible to the public.(Madeleine Brettingham)
Credit: SIPA/REX
The report, published this week, paid particular attention to the predicament of animals undergoing genetic modification. The number of such procedures, which involve removing individual genes from laboratory subjects, usually mice, to discern their purpose, stood at 764 000 in 2003. This was a quarter of the total number of experiments involving animals, and the number of such experiments is expected to continue to grow.
Professor Steve Brown of the Medical Research Council's Mouse Genome Centre said these procedures were "undeniably useful in increasing scientific knowledge... but we need to understand how it impacts on the welfare of the new animals which are created and also its translatability in terms of human biology and disease."
Approximately 2.72 million animals were used in scientific experiments in the UK in 2003. The working party recommended that the government focus on reducing the number of such experiments and replacing them with tested alternatives, although the panel's chairwoman, Baroness Perry of the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee, admitted that "it is unrealistic to expect that animal experiments will be eradicated in the near future."
Representatives on the panel, who included antivivisectionists, scientists, and philosophers, produced a package of recommendations, among which was that the Home Office should make its Annual Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Animals, an annual update on the nature and number of animal experiments conducted in the UK, clearer and more accessible to the public.(Madeleine Brettingham)