At a 1985 PRIM&R meeting titled IACUCs & the Ethics of Animal Research: A Conference on Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, David Britt, PhD, addressed the question of whether animal care and use committees can evaluate animal use proposals without considering scientific merit. Britt, then a research associate in the department of veterinary parasitology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, argued they cannot. He reasoned:
“Unsound science is unethical. If the research does not engender suffering or squander precious resources, this may be unimportant, but very little biomedical research avoids both of these. If all research projects to be reviewed ethically are evaluated elsewhere for their scientific merit, [...] Read more
