Use of Animals in UK Research

The UK's coalition government made reduction of the number of animals used in research a plank in its platform early on. Today, a report released jointly by the Home Office, the Department for Business Innovation & Skills, and the Department of Health purports to lay out a plan for that reduction. Indeed, the document is called, "Working to Reduce the Use of Animals in Scientific Research." The report has been greeted warmly by scientists and decried as as whitewash by animal-rights activists. This is in part because the report clarifies the government's platform position in this way:

[In] 2010, the Government made a commitment to work to reduce the use of animals in scientific research. This commitment is not focused on baseline numbers which are influenced by a range of extraneous factors. Instead, it encompasses replacement, reduction and refinement (the 3Rs) more broadly, putting them at the heart of a science-led approach.

In other words, the report contains no promises and no target numbers for animal-use reduction, but instead relies upon the 3Rs, as developed by the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals Used in Research (NC3Rs). The government has promised to increase NC3Rs' funding. The report contemplates a more active role for inspectors in recommending "3Rs" steps to the facilities they inspect. It also introduces a new initiative to limit use of animals by other countries via education and outreach; it mentions as an example a plan to use education to reduce the use by China of animals in cosmetic testing. Such use has been banned in the UK for 15 years; one strange result of this ban is that UK cosmetic products (such as those sold by the Body Shop) cannot be imported into China, precisely because they have not been tested on animals. The government hopes that by persuading China to alter its animal-testing standards, it can benefit animals--and also open an enormous cosmetics market to British manufacturers.

The report shows a dramatic increase in the number of procedures done on animals in recent years.

(For a Yale Bioethics/Hastings Center joint project on the use of animals in medical research, look here.)

Romney on Stem Cells

I blogged recently about Newt Gingrich's recent attacks on human embryonic stem cell research, and his intention to investigate and regulate the practices of IVF clinics which create excess human embryos. The news item led me to wonder what Mitt Romney's stem-cell position is. Not surprisingly, it's bounced around a bit.

In his gubernatorial race of 2002, Romney was a supporter of embryonic stem-cell research, and even promised to lobby President Bush for increased research funding in the area. But after a conversation with some Harvard researchers who, Romney often claims, had no moral qualms about destroying two-week-old embryos, he changed his position. Indeed, he credits the stem-cell debate with pushing him toward his current pro-life abortion position. In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, Romney formulated his current position, namely, that it isn't unethical to use "excess" embryos from IVF clinics for embryonic stem-cell research, but that he opposes government funding for such research, and opposes any laboratory creation of embryos (by cloning or otherwise) for research purposes. This page gathers a number of quotations from Romney on the issue over the years.

He has spoken in favor of shifting research from human embryonic stem cells to induced pluripotent stem cells, since the latter research involves no embryonic destruction. He has also made mention several times of "altered nuclear transfer," the purported "scientific solution" to the ethical problem of embryonic stem-cell research promoted by William Hurlbut, a Stanford professor and member of President Bush's bioethics committee. Altered nuclear transfer essentially produces a severely disabled embryo which cannot develop into a human baby; Hurlbut argued that using ANT embryos thus avoided the problem of killing a viable embryo. Pro-life organizations briefly endorsed, and then pulled away from, the Hurlbut proposal. (There's a website touting ANT here; and brief discussion halfway down this page of the political reception by pro-life groups of Hurlbut's proposal.)

This recent item from Fox News takes Romney to task for continuing to invest in Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical firm which uses some stem cells in its research, up until 2010--in spite of having taken a position against embryonic stem-cell research in 2007. But I think that's just a mistake. Romney, as far as I've been able to find, has never taken a comprehensive position opposing all human embryonic stem-cell research. He isn't opposed to privately-funded research on leftover IVF embryos. He opposes laboratory embryo creation, and he opposes the public funding of any embryonic stem-cell research.

No Fetuses in Food!

Oklahoma Senate Bill 1418, introduced by State Sen. Ralph Shortey, would prevent anyone from manufacturing or selling food "which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients." The concern behind the bill, apparently, is with food companies which are in fact using tissue derived from aborted fetuses in research on the development of new product flavorings. (This is of course different from saying that such cells are being used as ingredients in food!)

The Onion, America's finest news source, has gathered some informed opinions on the issue.

Gingrich Would Ban Stem Cell Research, Regulate IVF

Newt Gingrich is telling conservative audiences in Florida that, if elected, he will ban all human embryonic stem-cell research, including research done on excess embryos from fertility clinics. He regards embryonic stem-cell research as "the use of science to desensitize society over the killing of babies." This is a reversal of positions he took in two different interviews in 2001, in which he expressed support for federally funding research on leftover fertility-clinic embryos which would otherwise be discarded. Over this weekend Gingrich also indicated that he would create a commission to look into the ethics of IVF: “I believe life begins at conception, and the question I was raising was what happens to embryos in fertility clinics, and I would favor a commission to look seriously at the ethics of how we manage fertility clinics....If you have in vitro fertilization, you are creating life; therefore, we should look seriously at what the rules should be for clinics that are doing that, because they are creating life.”

The roughly $125 million saved by cutting all of NIH's human embryonic stem-cell research funding could presumably be used to help offset some of the billions and billions of dollars required to create the new moon-base Gingrich says he wants by the end of his second term.

Hepatitis C Vaccine Success and Chimpanzees

This article from Science Translational Medicine shows excellent results in a phase-1 trial of a new hepatitis C vaccine. This is a huge deal: hepatitis C infects 170 million globally, and causes a great deal of the world's liver damage. It kills more people in the US annually than HIV/AIDS.

The new vaccine was developed using chimpanzees as research subjects. I submit that this is exactly the sort of research for which the IOM's recent report on use of chimps in research left room. But I submit, also, that there aren't many more examples of this sort.

Egg Donors and Stem Cell Research

This piece from the Atlantic (summarizing this article from Fertility and Sterility) says that most fertility clinics which accept donor eggs for fertility treatments, and which donate at least some "excess" embryos for research, fail to inform egg donors of the possibility that their eggs might be used in stem-cell research. Most of the surveyed clinics told donors that they would not have control over the future uses of their eggs or the embryos made from them, and 30% mentioned the possibility of research use, but very few mentioned stem-cell research by name. This ought to be remedied. I doubt that most women who are willing to donate eggs for fertility treatment have serious opposition to the use of their eggs in fertility research or in stem-cell research, but a few might. They should be given the information.