Animal Rights Groups Say Oversight Board at OHSU Primate Center Has Too Many Internal Employees

Two animal rights groups sent written complaints to government agencies today, alleging that the committee overseeing the Oregon National Primate Research Center is overstaffed with members who work for the center, which if true is a violation of the Animal Welfare Act of 1966.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine each sent two complaints, one to the National Institutes of Health and another to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, two federal agencies that regulate animal research.

Both animal-rights groups say that Oregon Health and Science University has stacked the center’s 15-member Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, or IACUC, with insiders. Under the Animal Welfare Act, if a center’s committee has more than three members, no more than three can be from the same administrative unit of the facility, they say.

The Physicians Committee says at least seven IACUC members are on the primate center’s staff. PETA says 10 are directly affiliated with the center.

“This composition appears to substantially exceed the regulatory limit on representation from a single administrative unit,” PETA said in its complaint to the USDA.

Membership of the IACUC isn’t public. PETA tried to get them through a public records request in July but was denied, according to a copy of the denial provided to WW. Later, someone leaked the names, which PETA listed in its USDA complaint.

“It turns out that OHSU’s animal experimentation oversight committee is a 15-member rubber-stamp club,” PETA senior vice president Kathy Guillermo said in a statement. “Any experiments approved by this purposely improperly constituted committee should be immediately suspended.”

OHSU didn’t immediately provide a comment on the complaints.

Because the IACUC is improperly weighted toward primate center employees, it can’t fulfill its legal obligations to ensure that staff there considered alternatives to animal testing in every case, or that unnecessary experiments on animals weren’t duplicated, the Physicians Committee says.

“Taken together,” the Physicians Committee’s complaint says, “these issues demonstrate a pattern of disregard for federal animal ethics standards warranting federal investigation.”

The Physicians Committee has been fighting to close the Oregon primate center, one of seven in the nation, alleging that animals are mistreated in experiments made obsolete by new, non-animal technologies. OHSU has said that substitutes for animal studies aren’t good enough yet.

The Physicians Committee started shelling OHSU a year ago with a television campaign showing macaques in rocking and pacing in small cages. Audio on television and radio described infant monkeys being torn from their mothers for “fear experiments” and monkeys being scalded to death by a cage-cleaning system.

Animal rights groups won a critical victory last year when Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek (D), responding to a WW inquiry, said she would like researchers to wrap up their work and close the center amid concern about how animals there are treated.