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UK Lords complain ofbureaucratic licensing system
Cosmetic campaign re-starts In October, the UK House of Lords finally debated their report on Animals in Scientific Procedures. The report, published in July 2002, was written by a Select Committee of the House of Lords that worked for 15 months on the subject. One of the main themes of the debate was the Lords' disappointment with the government's response to their report. The Chairman of the Select Committee, Lord Smith of Clifton, described the response as "negative and complacent". Other lords called it "grossly inadequate" and "a damp squib". Lord Winston, who is not only a leading scientist but a well-known public figure in the UK, emphasised the importance of animal research for medical progress and pointed out that British work on understanding the human genome was being thwarted because of red tape and the "considerable slowness of the Home Office, which was holding up vital animal experiments, meaning that the UK was losing out to scientific rival nations." He said, "If we are to understand the genome project at all then animal research is absolutely essential. Using the intact animal, normally a mouse, gives us a dynamic assessment of what genes are actually doing in a way no other experiment ... can possibly do. In the US, where I work a great deal of the time ... I can get properly ethically peer-reviewed licences to do work on large animals, not just mice, within two to three weeks." But, he said, British licences could take several months. "That is really unacceptable, particularly if you are working in a field which is scientifically highly competitive." Lord Taverne also criticised UK project licences, saying, "We saw some of the forms. One of them was over 300 pages long. It is ludicrous that scientists should have to go into such detail that they must fill in over 300 pages.... The simplification of the forms ought to be a high priority."