CAAT Newsletter: Vol. 15, No. 2, Winter/Spring 1998

Visionary Group Launches Project

At CAAT's invitation, 32 people sat around a table in Baltimore, talking for two days at the end of February.

By all appearances, they were an ordinary gathering of business people having an ordinary business meeting. Until you read the name tags, that is. Or listened to the conversation. Then it quickly became clear that this meeting was, in fact, extraordinary.

Henry Spira, animal rights pioneer, sat at the same table as Katherine Stitzel of Procter & Gamble. Near them sat Karin Hakanson of Levi Strauss and Nelson Garnett of the National Institutes of Health. Not far away sat Hans Ahr of Bayer AG, Vera Baumans from Utrecht University in The Netherlands, and Myra Barker of Mary Kay Cosmetics, who sat next to...

This remarkable gathering was doing a remarkable thing: imagining a new world--a world without animal testing. How, they asked, would their companies and agencies and laboratories test the safety of products or conduct biomedical research if animals simply weren't available?

Now, these 32 people didn't come from around the world to engage in purely theoretical speculation. They came, rather, to participate in a meeting with an unusual purpose: to forge a group capable of envisioning what it will take to make the Three Rs a reality in the next century--and capable of creating the process to make it happen.

Dubbed Vision 20/20, the project brought together people from more than 20 organizations and companies to discuss realistic goals for the next 20 years and to consider approaches for achieving them. To achieve those goals, the group agreed, progress must be made in three primary areas: science and technology, communication, and animal welfare.

Science and Technology

A major barrier to progress, many participants agreed, is the lack of a process for interpreting data from new technologies. With so much information arising simultaneously from so many disciplines, it is impossible for any single scientist or lab to keep up. As a result, many potential alternatives remain unexplored. To help change this process, the group proposed:

• developing methods for interpreting data from new technologies
• identifying ways to get in-house support for new technology development
• organizing a series of forums for industry managers, scientists, and regulators to learn about new technology: how to use it and evaluate the information it provides.
• bringing together bench-level scientists to begin to evaluate a single organ system (e.g. liver or skin) and help them track the progress of research in this system and communicate the latest information about the system to regulators and management.

Communications

A second area the group decided to focus on was the lack of effective communication platforms, both internationally and between different populations of the alternatives community: scientists, regulators, managers, and animal welfare supporters. Some concerns cited included: the difficulty of locating information about alternatives, the lack of any journal or publication devoted to animal husbandry, the fragmentation of information across too many databases, Web sites, and publications to be useful or manageable.

To improve communication, the group recommended:

• establishing a single, universally used clearinghouse for information by housing resources and databases on Altweb, the Alternatives to Animal Testing Web Site created and managed by CAAT.
• encouraging the development of shared databases among industry, academia, and the regulatory community.
• developing resources for teaching scientists how to conduct better searches for alternatives methods and information.
• sponsoring a series of forums to disseminate information and encourage change when alternatives exist but have not been well-publicized.

Animal Welfare

The third major area the group considered was animal welfare. Because emphasis is frequently placed on reducing or replacing animal use, the important area of refinement--the third R--is overlooked, the group said. Important questions about animal husbandry are not addressed, and alternatives for the alleviation of pain and distress go unknown or unconsidered.

The group plans to begin to effect change by:

• supporting the development of better technology for measuring the parameters of pain, distress, illness, etc.
• working with bench scientists to develop new, more humane endpoints.
• providing a communication source for the sharing of information about animal enrichment.
• supporting the creation of a database on pain (anesthesia, analgesia, and euthanasia) and helping to publicize it and promote its use (CAAT and the Animal Welfare Information Center currently are developing the database).
• promoting a philosophy of "zero-based animal use" by educating scientists about better experimental design that considers alternatives in the experimental design before a project is begun.

If you or your organization would like more information about joining Vision 20/20, please contact us.