Title: Protocol Violations Putting Animal Subjects in Harm’s Way
Author: Matthew Wroblewski and Tristan McIntosh
Description: A junior researcher in charge of an experiment involving animal subjects allows several protocol violations to occur, resulting in public backlash.
Keyword(s): Animal Subjects Research, Protocol Violation, Three Rs of Animal Research
Based On: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/olaw/Guide-for-the-Care-and-Use-of-Laboratory-Animals.pdf; https://www.avma.org/KB/Policies/Documents/euthanasia.pdf
Case: Several animal rights organizations jointly filed a formal complaint with Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee officials after a report from Fox&Hound Labs, a private biomedical research facility, reveals a laundry list of protocol violations in a recent study involving cat and rat subjects. According to the report, trouble began when Fox&Hound Labs replaced a retiring senior lab member with a junior scientist, Dr. Jules. One of the projects that Dr. Jules was assigned to consisted of injecting cat and rat subjects infected with Marburg virus with various chemicals in an effort to develop a vaccine. The protocol violations by Fox&Hound Labs include the following: 1) Animal subjects were housed in the same space with no partition separating them; 2) Lab technicians with inadequate training conducted multiple surgical procedures on the animal subjects over a period of 3 months; 3) Aseptic surgery on two feline subjects was performed in a frequently trafficked, nonsterile space. Dr. Jules went on record stating, “I don’t consider these practices to be out of the ordinary. I have seen similar methods used in other studies at other institutions without repercussion.”
- What are the key ethical issues in this scenario?
- How could these protocol violations have been prevented? By whom?