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.
The total UK science spending stands at £5.4 billion. This is, admittedly, a large figure. However, this is total science spending - encompassing research into new technology, chemistry, physics, education programmes.... The list is endless. If we look at the proportion of government money spent doing animal research in the past decade (as opposed to developing alternatives to animal research), it has fallen year on year, despite a massive increase in Government bioscience and medical research (reported by RDS website here).
One particular figure caught my interest - that quoted as the amount spent by the Ministry of Defence on non-animal replacements. By the Trust’s own admission, this figure is made up (see reference 16 of the report). Following a FOI request for exact figures, the MOD said it was ‘actively seeking replacements’. This led the Trust to insert ‘the minimal amount ... that could feasibly constitute a claim’, ie a round figure of £70k each year, which is a tad suspect.
Developing alternatives to animal research and testing is no easy task. Whilst research can be conducted using computer modelling, tissue engineering, and the use of stem cells, these methods are really complementary to animal tests rather than alternatives. They offer limited information about what happens in a whole, living animal – and this is where the difficulty lies.
So while we simply do not have sufficiently advanced technology to develop large-scale replacements, funding is directed at the other 2Rs, refinement and reduction. The government estimates the total spend to be £10 million – see their FAQs on the matter.
Reduction is clearly happening - even the Dr Hadwen Trust report acknowledges this, and refinement is a key concern for all, highlighted in the recent ASPI report (we blogged about it here). The New Statesman has a recent article, written by the Communications Director of the Dr Hadwen Trust. Unsurprisingly, this is as critical of the government as the report is. Hopefully the public will make up their own minds on this score.
The Dr Hadwen Trust is less than transparent about its finances. No annual report can be found on its website; by contrast the NC3Rs provides all its annual reports since its inauguration in 2004. In that year it awarded grants of just over half a million pounds for research into replacements for animals use.(1) The figure of £268,990 quoted in DHT’s report, was the expenditure in 2006 for those initial awards.(2) Expenditure in 2007, for grants awarded in 2004, 2005 and 2006, totaling about £3 million, was £805,119.(3)
One may also compare DHT’s awards of just over £600,000 for the current financial year (2008), with those of the NC3Rs of £2.4 million for the last financial year (2007). One would expect the NC3Rs figure to be higher for the current financial year, if the trend of substantially increasing the annual amount given in awards is continued. The overall picture is of the NC3Rs starting from a base of funding roughly comparable with DHT but now outfunding them by some margin.
1. NC3Rs Annual Report 2005.
2. NC3Rs Annual Report 2006.
3. NC3Rs Annual Report 2007.
Even taken at face value the figures provided by the Dr. Hadwen Trust look suspect.
The total science budget for 2007-2008 was £3.4 billion, so 0.00002% of that would be just £680. In the 2007-8 budget the MRC and BBSRC gave the NC3Rs £2.4 million, and the NC3Rs awarded about £1.8 million of funding to projects that were largely about replacement in 2007. The NC3Rs also funded other projects which were more about the other two Rs. Perhaps the Dr Hadwen Trust is using an ultra strict definition of replacement, but one wonders how many of the projects it funds would pass the test.
Now I know it’s difficult to compare budgets directly due to different schedules and delays involved in receiving and deciding on grant applications, but if you just compare the 2007 NC3Rs figure with the total 2007-2008 science budget it’s 0.05%, and if you use the MRC and BBSRC combined funding of just under a billion (the more relevant figure) it’s almost 0.2%. Still not huge but this has to be put in perspective, the amount spent on animal research is probably only about 10% of the total biomedical science budget. And of course all these figures ignore those studies whose main objective is not to develop replacements for animal use, but which nevertheless yield technologies that can replace animal use in some experiments.
Still, you can’t expect too much from an organisation named after the infamous anti-germ theory and anti-vaccination campaigner Dr Walter Hadwen.
The Dr Hadwen Trust has been accused of publishing, in our report Let Down by Labour, ‘suspect’ figures about the NC3Rs’ spending on research that is funded via the government. In fact, our figures were correct and carefully explained in footnote 14 in our report, which said:
The NC3Rs’ gross research spend for 2006 was £268,990. Not all NC3Rs funding is from a government source and its research is divided between the Three Rs, not just replacement. Therefore, by selecting the proportion of funds of government origin (81.9%) and subtracting the proportion spent on refinement or reduction animal procedures (12.1%) we get an NC3Rs replacement spend of £193,646.
Pingu, Toots and Visigoth may have confused annual awards for research with annual expenditure. For example, in 2006 the Dr Hadwen Trust awarded £718,000 for replacement research projects (each lasting two or three years), but we actually spent £269,837. The same principle applies to the NC3Rs’ figures.
The total science budget for 2007-2008 does appear to be £5.4 billion (see page 62 of the Treasury’s 2007 report here), as we said in our report, and not £3.4 billion as suggested by Visigoth.
Finally, regarding ‘campaigning’, changes in legislation have made more explicit the freedom of registered charities to campaign, within certain boundaries. The Dr Hadwen Trust has not exceeded those boundaries and we intend, as always, to remain within the law.
Fair cop to RDS and Dr Hadwen Trust on the 5.4 billion, I’d used the figure given here which must be an error. It still doesn’t explain where the figure of 0.00002% comes from.
As for the difference between the amount allocated in grants and that spent in a given year, well there is bound to be a difference for the reasons Dr Hadwen Trust states. However I think that these very reasons show why the figure of £268,990 is a poor representation of NC3Rs actual activity. NC3Rs only awarded its first grants in 2004, and the number and value of the grants it awards has increased rapidly since then. In 2006 the research spend of NC3Rs would have represented a fraction of the initial grants awarded in 2004 and 2005. For established research funders annual spending is a good measure with which to assess funding, but for new organisations the value of research grants awarded gives a far better indication of their funding activities.
If Dr Hadwen Trust wanted to use a figure to compare with the 2007/2008 science budget they could have at least used the NC3Rs research spending for 2007. At £805,119 it was beginning to reflect the value of the grants they awarded and it will still take another year or two for the spend to catch up with allocation. The allocation itself is set to increase still further.
I still maintain that by cherry picking figures and making incorrect comparisons between different budgets the Dr Hadwen Trust is misrepresenting the facts concerning government spending on 3Rs research.
