HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 229 
There are those who will try to defeat the Moulder bill on the ground that 
it would be costly to administer. The entirely new agency which it would 
establish and the administration of the proposed law, however, would require 
less than half a million dollars a year in the view of the Humane Society of 
the United States at whose request the bill was introduced. That modest amount 
would represent only 1/2, 448th of the National Institutes of Health appropria- 
tion for research grants for fiscal 1963. I am confident that the merciful people 
of this country think that the protection of millions of animals from cruelty and 
suffering in research is worth 1/2, 488th of the annual budget for research. 
LEGISLATION TO PBEVENT DUPLICATION AND REPETITION 
In addition to the suffering caused laboratory animals by neglect, callous indif- 
ference, and plain cruelty, both animal suffering and waste of the taxpayers’ 
money are caused by duplication and repetition of research projects. Duplica- 
tion and repetition occur because existing clearinghouse facilities, providing 
information and conclusions on projects already researched or in progress, are 
very little used. For example, only 30,000 active projects are registered with 
the Bio-Sciences Information Exchange, according to the Senate Subcommittee on 
Reorganization and international Organizations which has made a searching study 
of coordination of activities of Federal agencies in research. The subcommittee 
found that in 1959 only 520 subject-type inquiries were made to the Exchange 
from all supporting agencies and only 130 from nonsupporting Government 
agencies. In other words few of the thousands of researchers in this country 
cared enough to inform themselves of past and current research on the very 
projects in which they are engaged. 
On the basis of published reports of research projects alone, it is obvious 
that experiments are senselessly and wastefully repeated and duplicated. The 
consequent waste of the taxpayers’ money and suffering of laboratory animals 
cannot possibly be justified. Both will continue until there is legislation 
compelling the use of clearinghouse facilities to prevent researchers from em- 
barking on projects already exhaustively studied. The current repetition 
and duplication of projects is as grossly unscientific as it is wasteful of animals 
and money. 
Section 12(a) of the Moulder bill (H.R. 3556) provides for reduction of the 
number of animals by means of the application of statistical techniques, a very 
necessary provision. However, so urgent is the need to prevent duplication and 
repetition in research that we believe supplementary legislation which would 
insure the fullest possible enforcement of section 12(a) of the Moulder bill is 
indicated. 
The reasons for preventing repetition and duplication in research are three- 
fold: 
(1) to prevent the unjustifiable infliction of suffering in animals that 
occurs when animals are senselessly used in projects already conclusively 
studied ; 
(2) to insure the most useful investment of the researchers’ time and effort, 
thus serving the interests of science itself ; 
(3) to prevent the waste of the taxpayers’ money that occurs when 
researchers duplicate or repeat the work of others simply because they are 
too lazy or indifferent to inform themselves of work already done or in 
progress. 
We recommend legislation that would : 
(а) Expand existing clearinghouse facilities such as those of the Bio- 
Sciences Information Exchange ; 
(б) Require every researcher receiving Federal grants to provide a 
central clearinghouse with a detailed description of his project and the 
conclusions reached ; 
(c) Require approval of applications for Federal research grants on the 
basis of full use of the clearinghouse facilities. 
In summary the National Catholic Society for Animal Welfare : 
(1) Believes that legislation for the humane treatment of laboratory ani- 
mals is urgently needed to prevent their abuse and misuse. 
(2) Supports the Moulder bill (H.R. 3556) provided that lines 1, 2, and 3 
of page 8, being the phrase “unless the project plan approved by the Com- 
missioner states that anesthesia would frustrate the purpose of the project,” 
are deleted ; 
(3) Recommends additional legislation providing for expansion of exist- 
ing clearinghouse facilities to prevent duplication and repetition of research 
projects by requiring full use of clearinghouse facilities before the approval 
of applications for Federal research grants. 
