生命の浪費 - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

Robin McKie “Scientists told to stop wasting animal lives” http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/18/animal-lives-wasted-in-drugs-safety-tests

英国の科学研究助成金を統括するResearch Councils UKは、科学研究、特に脳卒中や癌のための新薬の研究において、実験動物の使用が過小または過剰になる傾向が強いとして、動物を使った研究遂行の新ガイドラインを作成し、改善を求めている*1。

“There has been an increasing awareness that some animal experiments are not sufficiently robust. These guidelines should therefore be welcomed, although they have taken a long time to be introduced,” said neuroscientist Malcolm Macleod*2 of Edinburgh University.
In 2013, 4.12 million scientific procedures on animals – mostly rats and mice – were started in Great Britain. Half involved breeding genetically modified animals. The other half involved experiments on unmodified animals, of which 58% were carried out for fundamental research, 26% for human medicine and 8% for veterinary purposes.
Many of these are done to test drugs before human trials are launched. However, it takes a fairly large number of animals to reveal whether a drug is having a pharmacological effect, said Macleod. “In a typical £300,000 project – say to test a stroke drug – about a third of funds goes on equipment, a third on salaries and a third on animals. To keep costs down – and there is constant pressure to do so by agencies – you might try to limit numbers of animals. But that means the power of your research to pinpoint a real biological effect is limited. Often your results are produced purely by chance. However, to make your research more robust – to raise its statistical power from 50% to 80% – you would have to double the number of animals you use and so increase its cost, in our example, by another £100,000.”
The problem of poorly designed experiments was identified in a recent survey of scientific papers which showed details of design and statistical analysis were sometimes inadequate, said immunologist Professor Paul Kaye*3 of York University. “The new guidance will allow scientists to demonstrate to funders they have a full understanding of the issues involved in designing and analysing complex experiments involving animals.”

ところで、日本のSTAP細胞騒動*4は或る種の動物虐待、つまりマウスの無意味な殺戮として捉え直すことも可能だろう。

*1:“Updated RCUK guidance for funding applications involving animal research” http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/announcements/150415/

*2:See eg. http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/clinical-brain-sciences/people/principal-investigators/professor-malcolm-macleod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Macleod

*3:See eg. http://www.york.ac.uk/cii/staff/academic/kaye/