1274 
THE USE OF ANIMALS IN MEDICAL RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTATION 
have to transport their animals under FDA 
standards. If you receive animals that are not 
transported under these standards, we would 
like for you to let our inspector know. We do 
not have any jurisdiction over the common 
carrier. Again, in the new law the common 
carrier was excluded. But these animals must 
be transported to your facility under the USDA 
standards. 
Another thing I would like to mention before 
closing is that we have told our inspectors to 
identify themselves whenever they are re- 
quested to do so. I mention this because I don't 
feel that you should have any hesitancy in ask- 
ing our inspectors for identification. They know 
that they are expected to provide this and they 
will be glad to do it. 
In summary, we had an old law that dealt 
mostly with dogs and cats. We now have a new 
law that deals with all warm-blooded animals 
as designated by the Secretary. As of Decem- 
ber 24, 1971, the Secretary has designated dogs, 
cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, hamsters, non-human 
primates, and all warm-blooded animals that 
are normally found in the wild. The authority 
for additional species of course is in the New 
Act. We don't feel that these will all be so 
designated in one year. We feel that because of 
lack of funds and personnel, we'll have to phase 
into this, but nevertheless I think that, as re- 
search facilities, you are going to have to expect 
that sooner or later all warm-blooded animals 
will come under Public Law 91-579. 
Dr. Harmison: Thank you very much, Dr. 
Schwindaman. I would like to reiterate that 
point. I think that many of the viewpoints and 
information that will be presented by the 
panel will go a long way in providing much 
needed information for the researchers. The 
next formal presentation will be by Dr. Mark 
Conner, who will discuss the NIH Animal Re- 
search Guidelines. 
Dr. Conner: I think my remarks should be 
prefaced by a brief administrative identifica- 
tion because I'll be talking primarily about an 
NIH policy, yet I'll be referring to the Depart- 
ment of Health, Education, and Welfare and 
the Public Health Service and that might be a 
little confusing. I am from the Division of Re- 
search Grants at NIH, which is I think a name 
familiar to many of you because that's where 
your research grant proposals go, even though 
in many cases they are not directed to an NIH 
program. We still service a number of units of 
the Public Health Service, so that's where they 
are received, processed, and given their initial 
scientific review at the Division of Research 
Grants. That still doesn't explain why I will 
say later on that we are administering a Public 
Health Service policy or a DHEW policy. The 
fact is that this sort of thing "just grew like 
Topsy" primarily because NIH was the chief 
focus within the Department for the perform- 
ance of and support of studies in the biomedical 
discipline, so that's where the administrative 
and scientific expertise was concentrated. At 
the moment I am in a section of the Division of 
Research Grants called the Institution Relations 
Section which has two chief responsibilities — 
the administration of this animal welfare policy 
that we're going to be talking about and the 
administration of the human subjects policy of 
which I am sure most of you are aware. So, this 
is a case of an individual entity at NIH acting 
in a service capacity for the administration and 
development of policies for the Public Health 
Service and the entire Department. 
One of the things that we have been asked to 
emphasize is why should we have regulations or 
policy requirements at all on this business of 
taking care of animals. It seems that they have 
probably been taken care of fairly well for many 
years. Why do we have to be restricted by cer- 
tain procedural requirements? Well, there are 
a number of reasons for this. 
Starting back in history, I'm sure that most 
of you are familiar with the Policy Statement on 
Grants for Research Projects and a similar one 
for training grants. The Policy Statement was 
dated 1967, and at that time, it had a state- 
ment about animal procurement and care. It 
emphasized, as you might expect, the law ad- 
ministered by the USDA and went into some 
length to describe it. Then it simply said that it 
was the responsibility of each person assigned 
to or appointed to a PHS project to exercise 
every precaution to insure proper care and 
humane treatment of research animals. Well, 
this is directed toward the investigator, rather 
than the institution in which he's working. That 
