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Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2016

Three Rs

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Full-Text Articles in Laboratory and Basic Science Research

Personal Reflections On Russell And Burch, Frame, And The Hsus, Martin Stephens Jul 2016

Personal Reflections On Russell And Burch, Frame, And The Hsus, Martin Stephens

Martin Stephens, PhD

The coincidence of anniversaries associated with the publication of William Russell and Rex Burch’s The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique, the founding of the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments (FRAME), and the establishment of the collaboration between FRAME and the University of Nottingham, provides an opportunity to reflect on Russell and Burch’s legacy and how it was carried forward by FRAME. The Principles, published in 1959, was the pioneering work in what later became the alternatives or Three Rs field of replacement, reduction, and refinement of animal use. Such was the book’s initial and undeserved obscurity, …

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Strategies For Reducing Control Group Size In Experiments Using Live Animals, Matthew Kramer, Enrique Font May 2016

Strategies For Reducing Control Group Size In Experiments Using Live Animals, Matthew Kramer, Enrique Font

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

Reducing the number of animal subjects used in biomedical experiments is desirable for both ethical and practical reasons. Previous suggestions for reducing sample sizes in these experiments have focused on improving experimental designs and methods of statistical analysis; reducing the number of controls (thus, the number of overall animals used) is rarely mentioned. We discuss how the number of current control animals can be reduced, without loss of statistical power, by incorporating information from historical controls, i.e. animals used as controls in similar previous experiments. Using example data from the literature, we describe how to incorporate information from historical controls …

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Reviewing Existing Knowledge Prior To Conducting Animal Studies, Andrew Knight Apr 2016

Reviewing Existing Knowledge Prior To Conducting Animal Studies, Andrew Knight

Andrew Knight, Ph.D.

Highly polarised viewpoints about animal experimentation have often prevented agreement. However, important common ground between advocates and opponents was demonstrated within a discussion forum hosted at www.research-methodology.org.uk in July–August 2008, by the independent charity, SABRE Research UK. Agreement existed that many animal studies have methodological flaws — such as inappropriate sample sizes, lack of randomised treatments, and unblinded outcome assessments — that may introduce bias and limit statistical validity. There was also agreement that systematic reviews of the human utility of animal models yield the highest quality of evidence, as their reliance on methodical and impartial methods to select significant …

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