Home » Bulletin 2005
UK bioethics report on animal research
Nuffield Council on Bioethics publishes a detailed report that does not raise any new questions.
The United Kingdom’s leading bioethics body, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics recently released a lengthy report of their two-year investigation into the ethics of animal experimentation. The report was written by a working party which included scientists from academia and industry, representatives of animal protection groups, philosophers and ethicists.
Despite the diverse views on the working group, there was a large area of agreement about issues such as the three R’s, the need for effective regulation and the importance of an informed public debate on the issue. Although the report does not manage to offer any particularly novel insights, it presents a very complete and detailed analysis of the ethical issues involved.
Overall it concludes that animal experimentation is a moral dilemma – that it is morally wrong to inflict suffering on animals for human benefit and morally wrong to let humans suffer by not using animals in experiments to develop better treatments for disease. However, different members of the working party had different views about the best ways of resolving this dilemma.