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There is difficulty in finding an independent peer review group. 

 Many people are established in the region and have some kind of 

 gain in the region itself. If you take an independent peer review 

 that has no resource management responsibilities, they look at 

 something maybe completely different than a resource management 

 agency with responsibilities would look at it. There may be a way 

 to meld those two processes so you can have the best of both 

 worlds, an independent peer review oversight team and then get- 

 ting the input possibly from those people that are in the region who 

 have something at stake in terms of resource management. 



Senator Kempthorne. We've heard from some of your colleagues 

 that they were serving in a peer review capacity, they were on a 

 panel, but that perhaps their science was not in keeping with per- 

 haps where the policy was going and therefore, we had a dis- 

 connect. 



Ms. FiLARDO. I'd like the opportunity to address that. I'm a tech- 

 nical individual; I come at this from the perspective of monitoring 

 programs and my role in the overall management. I have been in- 

 volved in a committee that is presently co-chaired by the Environ- 

 mental Protection Agency and by the National Marine Fisheries 

 Service that has been set up to address the biological monitoring 

 program. In developing our portion of the biological monitoring pro- 

 gram, we took into consideration all the implementable information 

 that had been given to us by the oversight team that NMFS con- 

 vened last year. 



The biological monitoring group is co-chaired by EPA and Na- 

 tional Marine Fisheries Service. The first couple of meetings were 

 spent just looking at each of the individual elements that had been 

 recommended for near-term implementation and for long-term 

 studies. All of those were addressed to the best of our ability in the 

 program for 1995. I think that the work of the panel has taken into 

 consideration the overall development of the program. 



Senator Kempthorne. Thank you. 



Mr. Bouck, your views, please. How can we construct peer review 

 so that it works? 



Mr. BouCK. That's a very interesting question. I've been involved 

 in that for a very long time and I think there are plenty of models 

 of how and how not to do peer review and project selection. My in- 

 volvement in that sort of thing goes back to the old National Insti- 

 tutes of Health and their research review system. In 1983, when 

 I went to work in the Fish and Wildlife Division of the Bonneville 

 Power Administration, I tried to implement a peer review system 

 there, but it wasn't accepted by the fishery agencies. So I would say 

 that one of the very first problems is to get acceptance by the peo- 

 ple who are going to be judged. If they won't accept it, and if you're 

 not operating in a context in which those peer judgments have to 

 be addressed somehow or other, then you're wasting your time. 



Before I forget it, I'm talking about getting peer review and open- 

 ing up this relatively closed fishery shop to the private sector and 

 all, but I should point out that I don't have a conflict of interest. 

 I'm not here trying to get money for myself because when I retired, 

 I took the voluntary separation incentive and I can't contract with 

 or work for the Government for another 5 years. So when I say I 



