Researchers Must Stick To Rules

And, as UNC Hospitals proved this week, Burns was right. The best-laid plans often do fall short, especially when they only exist on paper.

UNC officials seem concerned about the alleged inhumane treatment of research animals that an undercover investigator from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals revealed last week.

And with good reason.

Not enforcing humanitarian guidelines that UNC has agreed to follow undermines the integrity of UNC medical research.

Despite the fact that UNC's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee has put the best-laid humanitarian rules in place, UNC researchers were shown repeatedly in the PETA investigation breaking these guidelines. The IACUC's rules are more stringent than the ones the National Institutes of Health outline.

This public relations crisis is a wake-up call to UNC officials, who must enforce the humanitarian guidelines to sustain funding from the NIH. UNC received $236.8 million from the NIH in 2001, the 12th highest total in the nation.

Officials have said they are not worried about losing NIH funding as a result of PETA's investigation, but the PETA investigator allegedly uncovered researchers writing up NIH protocol in procedural reports regardless of their actions.

According to the PETA Web site, a researcher recorded that he had used correct procedures when that was not the case.

UNC officials have defended the legitimacy of their IACUC policies, but PETA's documentation of abuse proves these guidelines need to be enforced to have any meaning.

At a press conference Thursday, School of Medicine Dean Jeffrey Houpt said, "It's always possible for protocol to be broken."

But researchers will be less likely to break protocol if UNC Hospitals enforces consequences for mishandling animals.

PETA investigator Kate Turlington worked undercover in a laboratory at the Thurston Bowles Building for six months. Wearing a hidden camera under her clothes to record infractions, she did not disclose her PETA ties until her findings went public.

Turlington recorded sick and injured mice being neglected, some paralyzed or with broken necks. On the PETA Web site (http://www.peta.org), Turlington reports even finding live mice in the dead animal cooler.

Turlington told The Daily Tar Heel that the humane procedures she was taught during her two-day training were not always used after she started working. "It was very clear the way I was trained wasn't the way things were done," she said.

UNC needs to do a better job of turning IACUC policies into routine laboratory behavior by hiring more veterinary technicians, who are employed to fight for the animals' concerns.

Only two veterinary technicians monitor the treatment of more than 70,000 animals at UNC, according to the PETA Web site. Turlington also reports that on several occasions she witnessed the veterinary technicians' written recommendations being tossed into the trash by researchers' assistants.

The abuses Turlington said she witnessed were not necessary for medical research but a matter of researchers either saving time by abandoning the IACUC guidelines or just being too bored with their jobs to care.

For example, rather than putting eight-day-old mice on ice for four minutes as prescribed by IACUC rules, a researcher allegedly doused the animals with ethyl alcohol before cutting their heads off with scissors. But Turlington reports on the PETA Web site that this researcher claimed on the procedural report to have followed IACUC policy.

Without enforcement, humanitarian guidelines in UNC medical laboratories are little more than nice suggestions. Do medical researchers who are short on time have any reason to think twice about correctly euthanizing a rodent?

UNC should enforce IACUC rules to maintain respect for research, not just NIH funding.

Columnist Katy Nelson can be reached at knelson@email.unc.edu.