Australia harmonizesbioethics guidelines

NATURE MEDICINE • VOLUME 5 • NUMBER 9 • SEPTEMBER 1999 973

NEWS

Universities offer animal rights coursesLaw schools at three US universities,which also house substantial biomedicalresearch programs, are to join a small butgrowing number of schools around thecountry offering courses in animalrights. In response to a demand from lawstudents, Harvard, Georgetown andNorthwestern University,Chicago, will join theUniversity of California LosAngeles (UCLA), in providinglegal tuition in this field.

Membership of the AnimalLegal Defense Fund (ALDF), anational organization that ispushing for stricter regulationof laboratory animals under the1966 Animal Welfare Act, hasgrown from around 100 to 700over the past 15 years. And the move-ment was buoyed by ALDF’s SupremeCourt victory this May in obtaining per-mission to represent laboratory animals-legal standing-in a case against the USDepartment of Agriculture (Nature, 400,197; 1999).

Tutor of the new Harvard course andwell-known animal rights lawyer StevenWise says that activist groups are muchbetter funded and more likely to take tothe courts than in the past. In response,more lawyers want to specialize in thefield. “Many of our students can expect toface an animal law issue at some point intheir careers,” admits Harvard’s assistantdean for Academic Affairs, Alan Ray.

But will the course also train lawyersinclined to sue biomedical research cen-ters like Harvard someday? UCLA’s

Italy’s largest biomedical research char-ity, the Italian Association for CancerResearch (AIRC) has announced that itwill open a new high-tech cancer re-search center in Milan at the start of nextyear.

The IL60 billion (US$30 million) 7,500m2 Institute for Molecular Oncology(IFOM) will employ 200 researchers andis to be located on the former BoehringerMannheim industry research campus. Itsnovelty lies in the fact that it representsthe first time a charity-funded researchcenter has been supported by leading re-search institutions from both the publicand private sector—the University ofMilan, the National Institute ofOncology, the European Institute of

course, which has been running for fiveyears and is also taught by a prominentanimal rights campaigner, Tamie Bryant,has seen no campus conflict with the uni-versity’s biomedical research depart-ments. But Wise is predicting anexplosion of cases of the courts uphold

the legal standing issue. In ad-dition, he and others say thatthe rise in cloning and trans-genic animal techniques areraising new legal questions.

Wise has already won accessto laboratory animal records atthe University of Vermont andhas been involved with animalrights groups in lawsuits seek-ing access to such informationfrom other universitives. Wise’s

prejudice, says executive director of theNational Association for BiomedicalResearch Barbara Rich, makes him unsuit-able to teach the course: “The issue here isnot that the subject shouldn’t be taught,what I would be concerned about is bal-ance.” However, Wise claims that he sim-ply encourages his student to engage in a“vigorous” debate over whether animalshave any legal rights.

As director of Harvard’s AnimalResources Center, Arthur Lage overseesthe care of the university’s lab animalsincluding 58,000 mice, 1,300 rats as wellas hamsters, rabbits and guinea pigs.Lage does not feel threatened by the ad-dition of the course to the Harvard cur-riculum and hopes to sit in on theclasses.

TINKER READY, BOSTON

Cancer center combines public and private groupsOncology, the Scientific Institute SanRaffaele and the Mario Negri institute.Paolo Di Fiore from the EuropeanInstitute of Oncology, is tipped to headthe IFOM.

Italy’s scientific community has wel-comed the enterprise as a solution to itscurrent public funding crisis, which wasaccentuated this year when the govern-ment suspended its five-year IL30 billiononcology research program at theNational Research Council. AIRC has do-nated IL40 billion annually to cancer re-search over the past five years,demonstrating the increased activity ofthe private sector in funding cancer re-search in Italy.

MARTINA BALLMAIER, MILAN

Steven Wise

Australia has become only the seconddeveloped country after Canada toconsolidate its approach to ethical con-duct of research involving humans in acomprehensive new set of guidingprinciples agreed by all major players.The ‘National Statement on EthicalConduct of Research InvolvingHumans’ broadens the focus frommedical research to encompass disci-plines including sociology, anthropol-ogy and education, says DonChalmers, who chairs the health ethicscommittee within the government’sbiomedical advisory body, theNational Health and Medical ResearchCouncil (NHMRC).

The Statement marks the first timethat the major research funding organ-isations have collectively addressed theissue of ethics, bringing together notonly the NHMRC but the Australianvice-chancellors committee, the Aus-tralian Research Council and the lead-ing national academies.

Chalmers believes the consistency inapproach will facilitate multicenterresearch, which in the past has beenhampered by conflicting demandsfrom different ethics committees. Thenew director of the John Curtin Schoolof Medical Research in Canberra andformer chief government medical offi-cer, Judith Whitworth, sees the bid forconsistency as a “great benefit” in a cli-mate of “increasing forays by Aus-tralians into international collabora-tive research.” Whitworth adds, “Thesuperiority of diverse ethics commit-tees and their individual requirementshas been a vexed question, sometimesleading to delays and to some centreshaving to drop out of multinationalstudies.”

The new guidelines stipulate that ifthe core ethics committee membershipis boosted by extra researchers, thenumbers of lay members and outsidersmust also be increased in the same pro-portion.

The document stipulates that ethicscommittees should comprise a mini-mum of seven members, two of whichmust be lay members, and at least onewith experience in the area of researchbeing considered, a religious ministerand at least one lawyer.

RADA ROUSE, BRISBANE

© 1999 Nature America Inc. • http://medicine.nature.com©

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