114 HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 
for laboratory animals without hampering legitimate research, and 
that the standard of responsibility toward these animals is much higher 
in Britain than in countries which have no such law, and immeasurably 
higher than it would be without legal sanction to give authority. 
Our law provides that nobody may experiment on animals unless he 
has a Home Office license, and this license is not granted to irrespon- 
sible persons, such as schoolchildren, or to persons who have no scien- 
tific capability but wish to mess about with animals in order to clutter 
up the literature with papers which bring them spurious prestige. 
These parasites are bad for the health of science, and the I lome Office 
kills off most of them prenatally. Premises are also licensed, but that 
by itself is insufficient ; the individual experimenter must be licensed, 
too. Heads of institutions carry a heavy responsibility of their own 
in this matter, but to devolve Home Office responsibility onto them 
would ( 1 ) deprive the system of the specialized experience and corpus 
of precedents built up by the inspectors and (2) set the “goat to guard 
the cabbages” in those exceptional instances in which the head of the 
institution is not reliably compassionate. _ 
The individual license is a powerful incentive to correct behavior. 
For instance, Prof. F. A. E. Crew, F.R.S., the distinguished geneticist 
who was, I believe, the first to turn cocks into hens, wrote thus to the 
president of UFA1V : 
You will not forget that on one occasion I slipped up, doing things for which 
I had no license. 
For a time it looked very much as though I was to lose the license that I had 
and that my career as an experimental biologist was to come to an end. Even 
during this period I was never in doubt about the value to me personally of the 
system. It helped me and it facilitated the work I was attempting to do * * *. 
I think that the kind of control that we know here is excellent in every way 
* * *. 1 think that the experimental animal should be given protection. I do 
not think that just anybody should be allowed to do just anything with a living 
creature. 
Secondly, we have the Home Office inspecfors. In a recent paper 
on the ethics of clinical trials carried out on human beings Sir Theo- 
dore Fox, editor of the Lancet, put forward the view that there ought 
to be, between the patient and the experimenter, a third party who can 
form an impartial judgment as to the ethical justification of the pro- 
posed procedure. 
Sir Theodore said 
People in research do not always realize, I think, that part of their vocational 
outfit is an extraordinary capacity for concentrating on one object at a time. 
He felt that a clinical researcher, who may be blinkered by the fever 
of the chase after truth, should be checked by an opinion from some 
unbiased third party before embarking on any procedure which might 
entn il a risk of disadvantage to the patient. 
Thus 
Between the experimenter and patient, in any serious experiment, there should 
always be someone who retains a full sense of proportion. 
In the case of experimental animals as distinct from human patients, 
this is the function fulfilled by a Home Office inspector, who specializes 
in the study of the ethics of experimentation on animals and can see 
fair play between the animals’ claim to humane treatment and the ex- 
perimenter’s enthusiasm for his research project. The guidance of 
the Home Office inspectors is welcomed nowadays because (1) it helps 
