It would be wrong to gloss over the fact that some animals suffer when they are used for scientific research. Just as people suffer from painful diseases like arthritis, so we know that animals will get some of the same symptoms when used to study that disease.

Nonetheless, the aim is to minimise suffering wherever possible. A good example would be a comparison with a woman who found an early stage lump in her breast. She would not necessarily be suffering a great deal. If we were studying the development of breast cancer in animals, we would aim to finish the research at a similar early stage whenever possible, so that they were spared any unnecessary discomfort.

This is not to downplay what does happen to animals. Our Director was recently asked on a radio interview if some animals suffer ‘exquisite pain’ during the course of medical research. The answer, of course, was yes. Migraine research, for example, is classified as being of the most substantial severity for an animal research project. Any migraine sufferer will be able to verify that. But such projects are a tiny fraction of all animal research.

Nonetheless, years of relentless propaganda from animal rights groups has grossly distorted public perceptions of animal research. Many people still imagine that there is blood on the walls of every animal laboratory.

So it is helpful that senior individuals who are totally independent of animal research are able to verify what is closer to the truth. In this Saturday’s Times is an article from the new chair of the Animal Procedures Committee (APC), Sara Nathan—who was formerly editor of Channel 4 News.

Ms Nathan claims to want to do something that RDS has been trying to achieve for years – to ‘open up a subject that the British find almost unbearable to discuss in any reasonable way’.

She believes that those of us in the scientific community in Britain should become ‘as honest as possible about what is going on behind the locked gates of the fortified laboratories’. This is apparently not because what she has found there in the months since she took up the job is so appalling. But for quite the opposite reasons. Ms Nathan states about her first visit to animal research centres that:

‘When I did go, it was more OK than I thought it was going to be. A lot of those images go back a long way — the smoking beagles was the Seventies. This is why I am in favour of more information and more openness. I came into it with the usual, not much more than the public, view. I was expecting to be a little more shocked than I have been’

The article bears some interesting parallels to a similar article by the former chair of the APC, Professor Michael Banner, in the Telegraph in 2004. He also acknowledged the suffering of some animals, but pointed out that:

During visits to laboratories, you might see a lab assistant taking a small sample of blood from a mouse, or monitoring the reactions of a monkey as it plays various games on a computer, or placing a cat in a room with a prototype repellent chemical intended to deter it from digging up gardens. To most people, these and many other fairly benign ‘procedures’ are not what they would think of as experiments.

Professor Banner finished his article with a call for greater openness to ‘dispel the climate of mistrust and misunderstanding’. We could not agree more.