The short package on this morning’s Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 highlights some of the advances researchers are making in various aspects of the 3Rs.

The Director of the National Centre for 3Rs, Dr Vicky Robinson, speaks eloquently of how the 3Rs can form the ethical basis of animal research, as well as an important part of the regulatory system.

We support this view entirely.

A later interview with our Director and Michelle Thew, Chief Executive of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, looks at some aspects of the debate.

As of yesterday afternoon, our new name of Understanding Animal Research has been legally adopted.

The new organisation will be fully up and running at the beginning of next year, once we have completed the merger with our partner organisation, the Coalition for Medical Progress. At the same time, we will be adopting a new strategy which reflects the changing nature of the debate. Watch this space - to find out in due course about our new space on the web.

Animal rights extremism is a much diminished threat, and researchers no longer live in fear of the next knock on the door.

The challenge for the future is to ensure that the use of animals in research becomes a normal and acceptted part of the narrative about biomedical research. Then we can have a more sophisticated debate about the advantages and limitations of animal models, and the all-important application of the 3Rs and improvements to animal welfare.

Engaging with MEPs has never been more important since the publication of EU Directive 86/609 in November. We are pleased that more and more institutions are now inviting their MEPs to visit their facilities and help put animal research in the context of scientific discovery and medical advances.

As evidenced by Sharon Bowles’, Liberal Democrat MEP, and Evan Harris’, Liberal Democrat MP, recent visit at the MRC’s Mary Lyon Centre at Harwell, engagement is the best way for the scientific community to make its case to decision makers in Europe. Indeed, it can go a long way in gaining important allies during what is expected to be a long period of review and debate before the Directive is adopted.

Last week members of both the Research Defence Society and Coalition for Medical Progress endorsed a merger of the two organisations at extraordinary general meetings. The name of the new organisation is to be ‘Understanding Animal Research’. 

In an editorial in the most recent addition of Alternatives to Laboratory Animals, Professor Michael Balls of the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments (FRAME) stated that a merger ‘ATLA Volume 36, No 4 September 2008, and is available on the ATLA website via registration. In the article, Prof Balls asks ‘why can’t it be made more clear that it is laboratory animal research that these organisations have been established to defend, promote and/or sell to the public?’. And he claims that ‘the organisations which focus on animal welfare are much more explicit about their aims’. In support of this position, he cites the names, amongst others, of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection and the National Antivivisection Society.

This much we would probably agree with. Our name might have meant something more relevant a hundred years ago, but now seems rather, shall we say, defensive.

Some of the other examples Professor Balls gives are perhaps a little less clear-cut. We see no reason why, for example, the Humane Research Trust should exclude humane animal research if it is to be true to its name.

Where we feel Prof Balls comes unstuck is in the first article following the editorial. This is supposedly an ‘Assessment of the Role of Chimpanzees in AIDS Vaccine Research’ by none other than Jarrod Bailey. Profesor Balls has long complained that those taking a polarised position in the debate about animal research simply defend their own point of view. Yet there is no mention in this article of the long-standing association of Jarrod Bailey with the radical antivivisection group Europeans for Medical Progress, which masquerades as a medical organisation.

Hang on a minute. I see that Europeans for Medical Progress has just changed its name to the ‘Safer Medicines Campaign’. Supposedly the reason for the change, according to their pdf newsletter, was ‘to make it clearer what we are about… [the new name] communicates our raison d’etre very simply and effectively’. In other words, this organisation continues to actively hide its antivivisection agenda. What would Professor Balls have to say about that we wonder!

The Dr Hadwen Trust, which seems to be involved in ever more vociferous campaigning these days, has condemned on its website a European science committee over a draft report on the use of primates in research—accusing it of ‘bias’.

This is pretty rich coming from what is essentially an antivivisection organisation, which happens to fund a little research using non-animal methods. 

An Opinion by the Scientific Committee on Health & Environmental Risks (SCHER) was requested by the EU Commission as part of the long delayed revision of Directive 86/609, Europe’s ‘animal experiments law’.

The Dr Hadwen Trust refers to its own recently published report on primate research. Presumably it considers this report to be unbiased. Strange thinking.

Despite the media blitz from the US elections, many will know that the European Commission finally published its long-awaited draft of the revision of Directive 86/609 on animal experiments earlier this week.

Comments are starting to filter through, for example on the New Statesman website, and on the Guardian comment is free website.

We will let you know our views in more detail when we have read the small print!

A handful of MEPs appear to be getting increasingly jittery about the continued delays to the revision of the European Directive 86/609 on animal experiments.

Plaid MEP Jill Evans has recently posted a note on the media section of her website calling for the European Commission to establish a Europe-wide database, accessible to researchers, to help reduce the number of animals suffering in experiments.

This is a strange choice.

In the ‘technical expert working groups’ which were set up to examine the scientific background to the revision of the Directive, it was not possible to reach agreement on the value or practicability of a central database of animal tests (the full report is available here, titled ’Final report - Sub-group for Scope‘. It was considered that there could be benefit in further examination of the work ability of an EU system to look at duplicate testing.

However, it is not clear from the information on Jill Evans’ website whether she is referring just to testing, or whether she is referring to all experiments. Nor is it clear on what evidence she is basing her claim of animal suffering.

Our concern is that just to run a centralised database would require a huge institute with a vast budget. We outline the arguments in more detail in the extended section below.

You may spot the debate in today’s Daily Telegraph – ‘Should we experiment on animals: Yes or No’.

Some things just don’t change. Gill Langley debates against Colin Blakemore. How many times have we seen that before!

In the ‘No’ piece, Gill Langley refers to a new report by members of the Focus on Alternatives coalition. This report, called ‘Replacing Primates in Medical Research’, is bog-standard misleading information from poorly qualified antivivisectionists.

There is a vast weight of expertise suggesting a strong scientific case for maintaining work on NHPs for carefully selected research questions. Compared to this, the combined weight of expertise of the authors writing this antivivisection is hopelessly inadequate. We accept they have some qualifications. But between the five authors, their maximum achievements are apparently just two PhDs, two masters degrees, and an honours degree in Herbal Medicine—not very impressive!

It does not look as if any of the authors have published any research in the areas investigated by the report. So it’s hardly surprising they can’t present a robust case, as we demonstrate below.

The Conservative MP Oliver Letwin held a Parliamentary debate late last week on animal testing (available by scrolling a little way down this page). His intention was to ’highlight some of the philosophical issues that need to be debated‘ as we move forward over the coming years.

A major theme of his speech is that ’there are no obvious set of dividing lines‘, and that ’we are dealing with things that are continuums of one kind or another‘.

Mr Letwin highlights as potential dilemmas the distinctions between cosmetics and household cleaning items, and the distinctions between great apes and other types of non-human primate. In the latter case, he points out that the prohibition on the use of great apes means that the current construction of the law is not easy to defend on a coherent or rational basis. He confesses that ’for the life of me, I cannot see how one can rationally defend the proposition that there is such a great difference between great apes and the other primates as to make sense of a law - the current law - which prohibits experimentation on the one and allows it on the other‘.

Mr Letwin has called in particular for greater transparency, in order to be able to have a prolonged, careful and rational debate.

This is something that we would applaud. 

Here’s an interesting question. Does the use of non-sentient animals, such as worms and fruit flies, constitute an ‘alternative’ to experiments which would otherwise cause harm to sentient animals? The majority of scientists would answer yes.

But not the antivivisectionists, who oppose any use of animals - even slugs and snails. The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) responded to Gordon Brown’s speech this week by calling for more of the £15 billion spent on medical research in the UK to be diverted to so-called ‘brave new humane’ methods, i.e. non-animal methods.

BUAV is obviously not thinking of the type of research revealed this week in the Independent, in which scientists have developed a technique to screen drug treatments using fruit flies. With further research, this innovative breakthrough could save time and money in drug development for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as save the mice used in such tests. 

The technique involves injecting into fruit fly embryos a human gene for a disease of the central nervous system, such as Alzheimer’s, plus a gene from jellyfish that emits blue and green light. When the flies hatch, the affected part of their brains can be seen to emit a blue light. If the blue light flashes to green after the flies are fed the drug, the drug can be taken forward. As fruit flies hatch within days, results can be seen more quickly than with mice. And flies only need a fraction of the drug, so testing is cheaper.

But the BUAV shows no interest in such promising research. Indeed, the less ‘appealing’ invertebrates are rarely acknowledged at all by the antivivisectionists, either by recognizing their enormous potential in biomedical research, or by campaigning against their use. No ‘Save the Slugs’ banners from BUAV. Are they guilty of ‘speciesism’ in the science of alternatives, we wonder?

In an article posted on Guardian’s comment is free, Michelle Thew, Chief Executive of the antivivisection group BUAV, claims that the European commission ’broke it promise to improve the protection of animals used in research when it pulled out of publishing its proposal for the revision of 20-year-old animal testing rules‘.

But that’s not the interesting bit. Michelle makes her argument supposedly on behalf of the majority of people in the UK who ’want to live in a world where nobody wants or believes we need to experiment on animals‘.  But why stop with the UK? Since she is also chief executive of the European Coalition to End Animal Experiments she can presumably now talk on behalf of all of Europe. And that she tries to do.

Its close association with the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) hasn’t stopped the Dr Hadwen Trust, in its latest report, Let down by Labour, striking a blow against BUAV’s current campaign to ban the testing of household products on animals.

‘Let down by Labour’ claims any success of the household product testing campaign will have ‘negligible benefit to animals’, and talks about the need for the Labour party to shift away from such ‘meaningless wins’. We blogged about the report last month. We agree about negligible benefit for animals, considering that government figures for 2007 show just one procedure (on a rabbit) to test a household product, which is one more than the previous year.

BUAV’s campaign to ban testing on household products appears to be a main focus of its activities, with its website promoting it, in addition to a dedicated website, and press releases singing the praises of the companies who have opted to ‘go cruelty free’ - notably the Co-op and Marks and Spencer. It currently has 171 signatures for its parliamentary petition calling for a ban - EDM 1215, which it talks about in its recent news.

You would perhaps think the antivivisection groups would be a little more supportive of each other, and avoid putting out such mixed messages, if they want to attract public support.

Some of us have been watching with interest a court challenge relating to primate research in Switzerland. A few months ago, researchers appealed to the Zurich administrative court against a decision from the Swiss Health Department not to approve a basic research project to be done in macaque monkeys.

But according to the Scientific American magazine, in a surprise ruling, the court upheld the original verdict, citing in part the macaque’s evolutionary proximity to humans and its cognitive abilities. Long-term objectives and uncertain applications are unacceptable, the court ruled.

We reported last month on the estimate of worldwide laboratory animal use published by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV).

Antivivisectionists have always found the numbers of animals a useful campaigning tool, since it represents something to attack. They would appear to have an interest in keeping the figure as high as possible. As we reported in June this year, some of the changes the antivivisectionists would like to see to European legislation on animal experimentation would cause a massive increase in recorded animal numbers.

Now our Director has given a critique of the antivivisection guesswork on the Guardian science blog. Feel free to add your own comments.

The Dr Hadwen Trust, an ‘alternatives’ charity, has released a somewhat aggressive report on the apparent failure of the Labour government to stay true to their 1996 pre-election pledges on animal research. The report can be downloaded from their website here. With the Trust starting to release more ‘campaigning’ material, they risk undermining any scientific credibility they may have had, and indeed their charitable status.

The report – an 11-year ‘bash the government’ review – quotes a figure of 0.00002% as ‘Britain’s science budget spent on government funding of non-animal replacements’. It claims that the government-funded NC3Rs spends just £193,646 annually on replacement research. It says this is a proportion of the NC3Rs’ gross research spend for 2006 of £268,990. However, if you look at actual NC3Rs funding in 2006, you’ll notice a much larger figure than this for the projects it funded – totalling just over £1.4 million. The report does not say where the Trust got its figures for the NC3Rs spend from.