Experiments on animals could quadruple in near future

By SIMON COLLINS

Scientists believe that experiments on animals could soon rise to more than a million a year because of the dramatic opportunities offered by genetics.

The chairman of Massey University's animal ethics committee, Professor Hugh Blair, told the NZ Bioethics Conference in Dunedin at the weekend that New Zealand had come to the end of a "long honeymoon" during which animal experiments had been slowly declining.

"With the explosion of information coming out of the genome projects, I would suggest that in the next five to 15 years we are going to see an explosion in the use of animals," he said.

John Forman, of the Organisation for Rare Disorders, predicted a "doubling, trebling or quadrupling" of the 263,684 animals that were used in scientific research in 2002.

Professor Blair said scientists were already genetically modifying mice by "knocking out" each of their 30,000 genes one by one to try to work out what each gene does.

"Eventually that is going to flow through to other experimental models [species]," he said.

Humans share 90 per cent of our genes with mice, and even more with some other species. So the knowledge gained from observing the effects of specific genes in animals is expected to help scientists work out what genes do in humans.

Specific drugs may then be developed to counteract proteins produced by genes that malfunction and produce diseases.

Professor Blair said the country's 40 animal ethics committees would struggle to cope with overseeing the huge increase in experiments.

He suggested that approval of "minor manipulations" of animals could be delegated below the level of the full ethics committee.

Out of 20 projects considered at the last meeting of his committee, a third were "minor" proposals such as giving positive reinforcements to a dog to change its behaviour.

However, other speakers at the conference spoke out against relaxing the present ethics committee surveillance of animal research.

Dr Pat Cragg, an Otago University physiologist and a member of that university's animal ethics committee, said the system of checking every case put pressure on researchers to keep reducing the number of animals they used.

Researchers also had to show that the benefits of their experiments for human or animal health in the long term would be greater than the immediate cost to the animals.

James Battye of Massey University's Animal Welfare Science and Bioethics Centre said animal ethics committees were part of the price that scientists had to pay to take the public with them.

"Public trust is not very high. Large numbers of people have not yet developed the habit of trusting scientists," he said.

"I think scientists, to their regret, are going to have to bite the bullet for at least another decade and keep these committees going."

Scientist Dr Michael Morris, who has campaigned to open animal ethics committees to public scrutiny, said: "If you want to be trusted, act in a trustworthy manner."

He said he had been forced to use the Official Information Act to request basic facts about how many animals had been subject to experiments in each university and Crown research institute.

In contrast to ethics committees for medical research on humans, which are open to the public, animal ethics committees' decisions are published only as national statistics.