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Animal welfare prize awarded to Norwegian Centre
The 2003 GlaxoSmithKline Laboratory Animal Welfare Prize has been awarded to the Norwegian Reference Centre for Laboratory Animal Science and Alternatives at the Oslo Veterinary School. The award was made to recognise not only the NORINA database of alternative methods, for which the centre is best known, but also for its broad contribution to laboratory animal welfare in Scandinavia and Europe.
The Norwegian Reference Centre was founded by Professor Adrian Smith and his wife Karina in 1991 with the establishment of the NORINA database of alternatives to animals in training and education at all levels from junior school to university. The database now has over 3,700 entries and receives approximately 500,000 hits a year. This was later expanded to include Textbase, a database of textbooks in laboratory science and welfare. When Johns Hopkins University set up the AltWeb project in 1997, Adrian and Karina Smith were founder members of the project team.
In addition to a web-based collection of training materials in the three Rs, the Norwegian Reference Centre also provides a considerable amount of direct training and education in laboratory animal science and welfare, based on the FELASA guidelines. In 1998, this was adopted by the Norwegian government as the required education and training under EU Directive 86/609.
The GSK Laboratory Animal Welfare Prize is the largest of its kind in Europe, consisting of a specially designed plaque and an award of ECU 3,000. It is awarded annually by RDS. Previous winners have included Bill Russell and Rex Burch, the founders of the three Rs concept., and Professor Michael Balls, then director of the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods.