Hey readers, "The NIH tends to give anybody on their pay line the benefit of the doubt," neuroscientist Katherine Roe, who worked at NIH for more than eight years and is now chief of PETA's Science Advancement and Outreach division, told me. (PETA, despite its reputation, has a top-notch team of scientists challenging unethical animal research). "The penalties for research fraud are not what they should be." On a higher level, we have to start seeing it as the public's right and duty to make democratic decisions about whether and how animals are used in scientific research, especially when our money is paying for it. Scientists are an exalted class, often allowed to self-regulate, but their expertise in a narrow subject matter shouldn't let them overrule democratic governance of research ethics. Ethics belongs to us all. And the public expects a much higher bar than too many animal researchers currently set for themselves. To shift the incentive structure, we need better federal regulation that raises the cost of torturing animals for botched experiments. Right now, the consequences for misconduct in federally funded research don't take into account whether the work involved animal testing, Roe said. Federal research regulations could be amended so that scientists found responsible for misconduct in work involving vulnerable populations, including non-human animals, be permanently barred from testing on them in future federally sponsored research, a change that's been proposed by PETA, explained Emily Trunnell, a senior scientist for the organization. That would be a good start. But it would require the authorities who oversee science to view the animal experiments themselves, and not just lying about their results, as morally implicated, something the research community has been loath to do because it threatens to undermine the whole endeavor of animal testing. —Marina Bolotnikova, staff editor
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