2.02 Bella Lear

Bella Lear has worked in science communication for over 20 years and worked with the Science Media Centre, Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust to initiate the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research. She has now brought her expertise to Australia to encourage organizations to sign up to the Australian Openness Agreement on Animal Research and Teaching.

You can find Bella at UAR Oceania.

0:00:11 Bella Lear: I was very small when we had cats when I was a kid. I grew up in quite a rural part of the UK, so animals were all around me, though not necessarily mine. But when I visited my grandmother, she had lots of cats. I feel like she had lots, maybe four or five, and I was very attached to one of them. She had one that was a tomcat, big black tomcat, and we were very friendly. So I spent a lot of time with him as a child, sitting on the stool, and I think just personalities.

I kind of got on with him probably better than I did with either of my cats at home or quite a few others. And then when I was an adult and I had my own animals, then that experience emerged again.

0:01:14 Adam Walsh: In the UK, how have the public changed their view of animal research since the implementation of the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research? Sorry, it’s a mouthful.

0:01:25 Bella Lear: It is a bit of a mouthful of a title, isn’t it? I have to say I wouldn’t have chosen it had it been entirely my choice. I hate the word Concordat, personally. I think it’s a word where you have to explain what you mean to a lot of people. But Concordat has a very specific meaning within the context of the academic sector in the UK. So that’s how we got stuck with that.

I think, in terms of your question, the last time we measured things in the UK, they had changed a lot, [the] public opinion. But it wasn’t because of the Concordat, at least not directly, because we had this huge event that happened in 2020. So during the pandemic, I thought it would be interesting to do a public attitude survey to find out what was going on for people in the space of their attitudes to the use of animals in research. And I don’t know if it was surprising or unsurprising, but what I found was that the public polled were massively accepting of the use of animals in research.

Even if I asked them things that I knew would be quite divisive, like, ‘Would you accept the use of primates or dogs to test vaccines?’ And overwhelmingly, I got back from the public that they would. Now, I suspect that that was very temporary at that time, and we don’t have the survey data to show how temporary it was. But for me, that was really interesting because it showed that the pandemic really redrew the lines around bioethics, at least during that time period, where people were very, very focused on their health.

So what it also did was that… They’re were also the anti group. There was also the fringe group, the fringe group who didn’t believe any of it, and they became absolutely hardlined the other way. So we had this big shift that happened due to this massive external event. But then behind all of that and around the Concordat, the Concordat on Openness was never really about getting people to think differently or change public opinion, at least in that way.

Now, there were certainly people on the research side who thought it was, and that was why they wanted to do it, because they wanted to get out there and change their opinion. But that was never my intention. My intention was all about getting the sector, the research sector, and the scientists to do things differently, communicate differently. And the purpose of that was really to limit the impact of misinformation. So just to stop things that clearly weren’t true, making their way out and becoming part of the public consciousness.

What I wanted to achieve was a shift in public consciousness. And I think that that, in turn, can lead to a shift in public opinion. So you wouldn’t go to a restaurant with no reviews. And in the same way, people can’t possibly understand why people would do science using animals if nobody tells them why they do science using animals.

So that was really where I was coming from with the Concordat and where my team were coming from when we put that piece of work together.

0:04:51 Adam Walsh: Are you hoping that something similar will happen in Australia to help Australians understand animal use in research? Or, is the intention here a little bit different?

0:05:01 Bella Lear: I think it’s quite similar. Right now, I think there’s an idea in Australia, particularly within the scientific community, and people might hear this now and shout at me, that if people have more information about how animal research is done, it might create a problem or create a bigger problem than there already is. And I don’t think that’s true. For me in almost all circumstances, and I use it as a tool for life as much as just a tool for work, giving people more information so that they can make better informed decisions is almost always a good thing.

So this is really about encouraging information sharing, and I think that’s true in Australia as well as in the UK. It’s just, there’s currently no record of people doing this. It’s very, very new. So everybody’s a little nervous about what might happen. And hopefully that will clear.

0:05:56 Adam Walsh: How important is it that organizations using animals sign up to the Australian Openness Agreement on Animal Research and Teaching?

0:06:04 Bella Lear: The Openness Agreement, for me, is a tool, and it’s one that supports an outlook, and it also shows that the leadership in an organization are on board. So for people who work in very large organizations and universities, for example, are very large organizations without somebody right at the very top agreeing that it’s okay to do this and to work in this way, it’s very difficult to get any kind of change to happen at all or really be part of anything.

So, what’s needed is buy in from everyone. And the Openness Agreement gives that. So in itself, it’s not creating a change, but it’s creating an environment where that can happen. For the organizations, it gives them a lot of support. So they might feel very nervous about making what feels like a big change for them on their own, but in the company of others, that can make it a lot easier. So the organizations can do all of this stuff. They can be open without signing up, but sign up shows a direction and it shows an intention.

0:07:11 Adam Walsh: When they have signed up, how will researchers or research organizations be encouraged to use the Openness Agreement to add the context to their work?

0:07:24 Bella Lear: I think that really depends on the individuals, quite a lot of the time and on the organizations, because we’re not asking people to do anything that they feel truly uncomfortable with. But what I do is I go out and I provide the organizations and people who want it with tools and some information so that they feel better able to have these conversations, certainly if they’ve never had them before.

And for the researchers themselves, this is a bit like being involved in anything divisive, right? If you’re gay, if you’re trans, if you’ve got mental health issues, if you’ve got problems with your family, or if you work in a job where you think people might not like what you do, obviously you avoid that subject and you avoid talking about it. And this impacts your life in all sorts of small ways, but they’re very, very cumulative. So having this huge part of your life that you’re unable to talk about, I think that’s generally problematic, not just for the people that you’re not talking to, but for you as well.

So it’s to try and get people to think that this is something that they can discuss in a way that won’t lead to confrontation, won’t lead them into difficulties, but it will mean that they can share information more openly. So part of my role in all of this is to go out and give all those institutions tools and support so that the researchers feel comfortable to have those conversations.

There is some wider stuff around that, more institutional as well. Having more information on websites, going out and doing more public engagement events, talking about the animals they use in press releases. So there’s stuff that’s a lot more functional in there. But for me, a lot of this is just about enabling people to feel that they can have those conversations without getting themselves into a lot of hot water.

0:09:21 Adam Walsh: What are the consequences of keeping much of the research hidden from the public?

0:09:28 Bella Lear: I think, well, from a personal point of view, from the people on kind of the research side, it means they can’t share the truth of what they do and they can’t share how proud they are of what they do. And almost all of the people I know who work in this field, rightly or wrongly, are really proud of what they do in terms of their research. And certainly the animal care staff who are absolutely there in care side, the reason that they do it is because they love working with animals and they overwhelmingly want to be able to share that.

I think everybody in research benefits from greater scrutiny, to be honest. I think that leads to better research. So there’s that. But in terms of keeping research hidden and the consequences of that, from the public perspective, I think that where there is great misunderstanding of the science and technology that we have all around us, then ultimately that’s huge for society. That can really change the direction of progress, that can change the direction of how science is funded, how research is funded, what governments choose to invest in.

On another topic that’s not particularly this one, do we choose to invest in this wind farm or do we choose to invest in an oil refinery? They have those kind of consequences down the line. Now, my job isn’t directly influencing that, but indirectly, it’s a part of all those conversations. So having good information about why science is done and what science is done and what the regulations are and the space that people are moving in is really valuable.

I think because we don’t want to close down lines of research that could be really beneficial, could be really important, could give us technologies that will ultimately hugely benefit our society and the people in it and the animals in it, based on untrue assumptions. So the scrutiny is needed and better research is needed.

0:11:41 Adam Walsh: Absolutely, yeah. Will the Openness Agreement have an impact on the welfare of animals in research?

0:11:48 Bella Lear: I think the Openness Agreement shines a light on the welfare of animals in research. It shows what people are doing and that can only be a good thing. So I was actually told this when we ran the Concordat for a few years in the UK I started to look for impact.

So I started to go out to people and ask what they’d seen, what they thought the significant effects, impact outcomes of the Concordat had been so far. And this one came back to me that it had a huge impact on animal welfare, which I was really excited by because when I started this process initiative and I started talking to people about openness, actually my sights were on kind of science and culture change. All that piece that I said before about misinformation, that’s where I was looking. I wasn’t immediately assuming, ‘Oh, yes, and this will be great for animal welfare’. But I was told that that was a very immediate impact and the reason for that is because those people who sit right at the very top of these big research institutions, they quite often have nothing to do with the animals at all. They are very distant from what’s going on in a lab, but they hold the power, they make the decisions, they decide what money, they decide what equipment, they decide how an institution is going to work with those animals.

And so the fact that this is now more visible, that everybody from the very top to the very bottom of an organization now knows that there are animals there, this wasn’t always known, and has an awareness of how those animals are looked after and also what animal welfare looks like in other institutions. So they can see that this institution down the road might have a much better equipped kind of set of animal facilities and animal care processes than they do.

And they start thinking, ‘Okay, well, if we want to run a world beating institution, maybe our care processes should look like theirs’. So ultimately this is something that really benefits and that impacts animal welfare. So it sounds small, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s actually made a significant change. And over time I’ve had that corroborated by quite a few different people that I’ve spoken to who said, ‘Yeah, this makes a real impact’.

And some of my colleagues who work in animal welfare in the UK, who I’ve worked very closely with over the last few years, certainly since the Concordat, have seen it as an amazing tool for being able to get the research sector pulling in a direction that ultimately will have positive animal welfare impacts. Whereas before they found it very, very hard to work with the research sector.

0:14:58 Adam Walsh: Yeah, that’s very interesting. I had a brief conversation with a colleague after… it was a Guardians of the Galaxy film. In the film, one of the characters used to be used in a medical research lab. And of course, being Hollywood, it’s the worst kind of research lab. It’s rusty and there’s dripping pipes and all these kinds of things. And I kind of looked at them very confused and I said, ‘But you realize that’s not what labs actually look like. We all know that’s not what labs are like’.

We don’t want the animals there at all. But that’s where I think I’ve seen the promise in the animal welfare aspects of even just in the communication of what a lab from the inside actually looks like. Because more people will have seen this film than will have seen the inside of a lab. So that kind of anchors in their head what that might look like.

0:15:44 Bella Lear: The other part as well, around that particular film, the Guardians of the Galaxy, is, of course, none of my researchers that I work with are trying to create a talking raccoon. If they were, I wouldn’t be working with them.

0:15:55 Adam Walsh: Looking for cancer treatments and things don’t make good Hollywood films. Jurassic Park makes a good Hollywood film, but that’s not how we’re genetically modifying animals.

One comment from a 2021 Understanding Animal Research survey claimed anti-vivisection seems to be on the rise. I’m not aware of any of the kind of extremism that seems to have been present in the UK and the US. I’m not sure that we have that with anti-vivisection in Australia. Although it could be with maybe the climate movement and things like that, we see a little bit of that here, so there could be potential for that.

In the face of that perception, how can we positively encourage scientists to be more open in their communication of the research, even if they’re not signed up to the Openness Agreement?

0:16:42 Bella Lear: I thought this was a really interesting question, because it’s really interesting to reflect a little on what that means and what that meant, the idea of anti-vivsectionism being on the rise. So, in the UK, there is a very specific and coordinated campaign movement right now around anti-vivsectionism. And it comes from a backdrop of anti-vivisectionism actually being at a really low rate in the UK for quite a long time.

And then, for various reasons, partly due to the pandemic, it started to increase. But really elsewhere around the world, I think you’re absolutely right that there’s something social that happens around people getting involved with kind of movements and fringe groups, is that it becomes easy to get attached to other movements. So you join one club and you can join another club. And so when people become vegan, which is obviously quite mainstream, people find it that they’re then within a community of people where they’re exposed to lots of different ideas. And I think it’s the same with some of the kind of more activist driven ends of the environmental movement that suddenly people are in with a community of people where they can get exposed to lots of affiliated ideas. So that’s my kind of take on it.

Obviously, I work really closely with colleagues in the environmental sector who are probably more closely aligned with what I do as a scientist, and certainly in Australia, they are than people might necessarily imagine. Within the vegan movement, I know people who work in research labs and who do all of that stuff who are vegan. It’s not like one dispars you from the other, but it does kind of put you into a collective, at least as far as the social media algorithms are concerned and things like that.

I think one of the reasons why people weren’t open and they were very shut down was because of a fear of anti-vivsectionism and what that would do. I think that that is still very much the case when I go out and I speak to researchers, even in Australia, there is a lot of concern that that could be the case. But I think the world is just a very different space now to where we were. Everything is more open. There is a lot more information out there and a lot more expectation that information will be shared. So for researchers themselves, I think the experience of positively sharing what they do day to day, their beliefs, showing why they’re proud of their work and why they do the jobs they do, is of greater value to them than keeping quiet in case somebody doesn’t like.

I really, really believe that even if some people have quite extreme views, I think you can’t change that by saying nothing. And we’ve seen that. We live in a very free and permissive society here in Australia where people do have a lot of freedoms and they expect those freedoms. And I think that means that we’re in a society which encourages healthy debate and where people should feel positively about that, where people should feel that that’s a conversation they can have.

0:20:17 Adam Walsh: Fiona Fox wrote a book called Beyond the Hype, I think, and most of it was about the media, from what I remember. But there was one section in there on animals used in research. And she tells a story of the first time she walked into, I don’t know if she was doing a tour of a lab or if she was writing an article, but she said, ‘I’m here to look at your animal research facilities’. And they said, ‘No, you can’t use the a word here. These are just research facilities’.

And how that has now changed. Researchers taking control of the statistics of animal use and announcing them themselves. I would have thought with something as divisive as animal use in research, that bringing more attention to it was also going to bring much more criticism to it. But it seems in the UK, at least as part of her story, that it seems to have allowed the researchers themselves to take a bit more control of those things.

0:21:08 Bella Lear: So I know that it can feel a bit like you’re drawing attention to this topic, and I have this conversation with the research community, certainly with the leadership within the research community, an awful lot, but you’re drawing more attention to this. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be bad. More attention is not necessarily a bad thing. That’s a big assumption. More attention means that you have an opportunity to say what you know.

If you don’t feel this is a bad thing that you should be hiding, and if you do think it’s a bad thing, you shouldn’t be doing it. So if you don’t think this is a bad thing, surely you can share that pearl of wisdom with everybody else. So I know it can feel a little odd and a bit about face, but actually, I truly believe, I’m with Fiona on this, that the way that you resolve these issues is by talking about them openly, not by shutting them down, not by hiding them.

And I often think in terms of openness, when somebody asks me directly, ‘What should we do about this issue’, I think to myself, ‘Well, what’s the bold choice? What’s the courageous choice to make here so that we can open this up, so that we can have a conversation that we should be having so we can avoid hiding things?’

It’s interesting how you mentioned the ‘a-word’ and [her] going into animal facilities [and hearing'] ‘We don’t call them animal facilities here’. I think a couple of years into the Concordat, and it wasn’t very long, I was at a lecture with one of my universities, big lecture that they were having, and they were talking about openness and their openness work. And somebody stood up at the end during questions and said, ‘So we’re doing all this openness, and that’s fantastic. So can you tell me why we still call our animal facilities a BMS, a biological and medical services unit?’ And I thought, that’s very interesting.

It was so common for me that people used to describe their animal facilities with an acronym. It was so usual that I’d never questioned it because it was just a part of my life. And from that day, I never, in any of my communications, referred to them with any kind of acronym at all. I always call them animal facilities and I do when I’m working places. They can call them what they like, it’s their institution, but I always refer to the animal facility.

And for me, it’s taken away a whole layer of confusion because every single research institute has a different acronym that they used to label their animal facility.

0:23:54 Adam Walsh: It’s interesting, I think in the CSIRO facility in Geelong, it used to be called the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, which is AAHL, and it was only a year or maybe a couple of years ago that they’ve changed it to the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness, so they’ve removed the animal reference from it altogether.

0:24:15 Bella Lear: I can never know why they have the particular naming conventions that they do every time they do a rebrand on facilities, especially if it’s somewhere that’s government linked. They do this all the time and it might have nothing to do with any of that. But for me, for my purposes, I thought, well, I don’t need to buy into this. So I don’t.

0:24:40 Adam Walsh: What success have you already had, or have you had any success already in working with animal activists, anti-vivisection groups? Have you done any work with many of those in Australia or even previously in the UK?

0:24:53 Bella Lear: In the UK, we’ve had a very interesting situation. So with various groups, it really depends on what they are. So in the UK, we draw quite a strong distinction and they do themselves, between the animal welfare groups and the animal protection groups, which is the term that they use for themselves, so that’s what we use. And the animal welfare groups, and I include in that kind of RSPCA and FRAME and UFAW, who are the university’s Federation of Animal Welfare, and various others, we work reasonably closely with them. I wouldn’t say that we agree on every issue and certainly even within kind of the small team that we are in Understanding Animal Research, we obviously are people and this is an ethical issue and we come with different views and different perspectives.

So I personally am very strong on the welfare side. So other individuals, we broadly agree with each other, but they might have different views on certain things. But we worked for a long time, pretty closely with some of those other groups and it’s been really productive where we have. So they’re longtime colleagues, they’ve hugely helped. There’s no way we could have put together the Concordat on Openness in any way that was credible and really took account of the diversity of public views without their support.

That said, when we were trying to put that project together, there were groups on the animal protection side who were trying very hard to make it not happen and tried very hard to kind of stop that project from going ahead and make it really difficult for us. But I think their view was that it was PR for the research sector and they needed to stop it.

0:27:01 Adam Walsh: Yeah, I would have thought even any level of openness or transparency, even if it was a small step, would be one in the right direction, that they may not be what their end goal would like to be, but it would at least be something that they would say, ‘Well, this is a good start’.

0:27:18 Bella Lear: It wasn’t the change they were looking for. The change they were looking for was actually kind of something that we didn’t get to in this particular line of questions. But what they were looking for was a policy change. So they were looking for the regulator to step in and mandate, through legislation, greater openness. They didn’t really want what we were putting together, which was a voluntary commitment to provide more information.

That was a very different thing. It would have been a very different set of circumstances. So over here, I’ve had various conversations with various people. So ANZCCART, who put together the Openness Agreement on Animal Research and Teaching in Australia and New Zealand, they are charitable, they consider themselves to be an animal welfare based, but center-ground. And so they work quite closely with lots of different groups. I know that Jodie Salinsky, who did a lot of that openness work in New Zealand, she works very closely with the New Zealand Anti-Vivsection Section Society, and they’ve done a piece of work together on trying to drive more funding for the 3R’s in New Zealand, which is absolutely needed. I think in that context, we really need that in Australia as well.

And I’ve had some really productive and helpful meetings, again, facilitated through ANZCCART. So yeah, I am slowly building those connections, and I really hope that they’ll continue and continue to be productive.

0:29:08 Adam Walsh: And if there’s any other animal advocate organizations who aren’t involved with either supporting that Openness Agreement or in communicating with Understanding Animal Research, how might they be able to work with you to move towards removing animals from research?

0:29:25 Bella Lear: For me, I think the important step that needs to take place here, certainly in Australia, is around supporting the 3Rs. There’s currently, apart from a tiny pot in New South Wales, there’s currently no ring-fence funding, really, for the 3R’s. And that pot is focused very entirely on replacement. I think replacement is a great thing, it’s absolutely what we should be aiming for, but the other R’s are there for a reason.

I think my personal belief is that Australia is kind of really trying to run before it can walk with a lot of these technologies and it needs more wholesale investment in getting this piece around how animals are used and reducing and all of that, it needs to get that right first before it can think about, ‘Right, now we’re going to do everything we can with replacement’, because otherwise they’re selling short a lot of really great research that’s going on that could be better and could be better funded.

If anybody is interested in how groups can work together to provide better support for the 3R’s in Australia or in New Zealand, then I’d be really happy to hear from them. My website is uaroceania.org. Anybody can reach out to us through that website and yeah, it’d be great to hear.

Transcribed with Deciphr.AI