1.02 Cindy Buckmaster

Cindy Buckmaster has a PhD in Neurobiology and Behavior and has worked in research and laboratory animal science for nearly 30 years. Cindy is also the host of the Get Real podcast which lays out the facts so you have the power to make informed decisions about the future health of your loved ones - both people and animals.

You can find Cindy on Instagram, Facebook, and X.

0:00:11 Cindy Buckmaster

My very first career I was a teacher. I taught high school biology and chemistry. And after I was tenured and I had my master's degree, I lost my mind and decided I wanted to study the brain. So I went off to get a PHD in neurobiology and I studied the parts of the brain involved in learning and memory.

And this part of the brain is very critical for us to understand how the brain processes cognition and memory, because in order for us to understand some of the complex diseases we're dealing with now, like Alzheimer's disease and some of the other dementias, you have to first understand how the system, in this case the brain, works and is organized and functions when it's healthy, or else you really wouldn't be able to recognize what the problem is, right. Sort of like a car engine, right. If a car engine isn't working well, unless you know what it looks like and how it's put together, when it is working properly, you're not going to be able to figure out what's wrong with it and then apply a fix.

So I went outside of the parts of the brain involved in learning, and in the course of doing this, I met Danny. So I ended up working with research monkeys. These were cinemalgous monkeys, right? Macaques, long tailed macaques. And they're primates. So if you're going to understand how the primate brain functions and is put together and you can't go and look in human brains directly, certainly not with the resolution needed to understand things at that level, at the cellular level, then you would have to work with monkeys, right?

So this was new to me because I had only ever heard what everybody else ever heard, mainly from groups opposed to research with animals or any use of animals, in some cases, these awful things, and so I got there and I wasn't sure what to expect. And then I met these monkeys and I saw how they were cared for and who cared for them and quickly realized that what I was hearing out in the public was not true or accurate. But at the same time that was back in the nineties also saw a lot of opportunities for improvement, lots of opportunities to engage their natural behaviors that maybe weren't being focused on at the time.

And like anybody else who works with animals, over time, fields that work with animals learn so much more about their actual needs and stuff. But the bottom line is that I create a lot of improvements for my animals just because I had a very strong relationship with them. But one in particular I was intensely bonded with and that was Danny. And for a lot of reasons, but we were very close, actually.

Monkeys are very dangerous animals. You're not supposed to touch them and all of this other stuff. And Danny and I, we had a lot of physical engagement. We played together, basically, right? He was just a very unusual monkey, and I just adored him so much. But I made a promise to Danny and I promised him that while I understood the need for animals and research, I didn't like it. I still don't. I wish it weren't still necessary, like just about everybody in the world. But I promised him that I would change things and that I thought there could be a solution moving forward and that I promised him I would do what I could to find out what that was.

So now I’m at this, I've done a lot. The entire trajectory of my career was defined by that promise I made to Danny. I have run one of the largest animal research care programs in the nation, here in the United States. I did that for a number of years. We created a model for how that work should be done in academia, and we shared a lot of our new developments with others in the field. So that sort of lives on. But the other bigger piece is we all want to move in this direction of what I call in Get Real: Stronger science, faster cures, and fewer animals, until maybe one day we won't need animals at all for biomedical research and progress, which would be amazing, right?

But we really can't do that until we have an informed public. Because if people in the public are thinking what I did when I walked into a research institution where I was sort of, I would say, brainwashed by what I was hearing from these groups, the mainstream groups in the US, about animals in research and a good deal of it untrue, almost all of it untrue or mischaracterized greatly. If you have a population of people who are living in that space, then you can't have fruitful discussions with anyone about reality and about how we can come together as an informed public and work together collaboratively to develop truly compassionate and loving solutions that are good for animals and people, right? So we can't do that until we can have this sort of truthful discussion with the public and really engage with them. And so a lot of my time now is spent, like I said, on that.

I have Get Real as a website, but there's a podcast that goes with it, and it's Get Real, one word, capital G, capital R, with an exclamation point at the end and a monkey in the G. So you really can't miss it! And so the point is to share the truth. And I do a lot of public speaking internationally as well. And I've been doing that for probably about 15 years now, trying to truly educate the public and also encourage the people who care for research animals. And that's something a lot of folks don't understand, right?

The researchers don't directly care for their animals. There's an entire profession of people in something called laboratory animal science who have specialized training and certifications in husbandry, vet tech care, specially boarded vets, animal behaviorists, compliance people, you name it, right? And so I've also spent a lot of time encouraging those people to be really transparent about the work they do with animals and more importantly, how they feel about these animals, right?

We love these animals and we share that. We share that, that's a common sentiment among most people with hearts. And so it's a good starting place to start having real conversations about the truth because in the end, we all want the same thing, right: A future which hopefully will not involve animals and research at some point, but we can't get there if we're in these pretend places and we're not having productive conversations because we're not interested in actual facts.

So all of that was based on my promise to Danny. So that's who Danny is.

0:06:47 Adam Walsh

That future is going to involve a lot of non animal methods, some of the modern technologies. In which part of the research process have non animal methods already been effective?

0:06:59 Cindy Buckmaster

Yea, so effective is the word we should focus on. Effective for what, right? So first of all, there's a legal, a regulatory as well as a moral obligation for people if they're going to do research and include animals, they have to justify that there is no other way for them to get answers to those questions, and that's long standing, right? And so all of research probably at every level has involved, for as long as I've known about it, some integration of non animal as well as animal methodologies for understanding what it is we're trying to understand or for screening whatever it is we're trying to screen.

Once we've turned something from basic understanding into maybe some sort of therapeutic intervention. Right? So there have always been cell cultures and computer modeling and these things are not uncommon. Some of the newer advanced technologies I think that you're referring to are these stem cell based technologies which offer a lot of promise and hope. The organoids, the organ on chips, human on chips, organ systems on chips, these chip technologies.

But the thing about it is this, right? These technologies have all been developed around what we've learned from studying intact living systems, people and animals, right. And so we're limited in terms of how much they can tell us because they're designed around what we've been able to figure out sofar by working with intact complex living systems to begin with. And none of them can behave in exactly the same way as a fully intact living system.

There isn't anything that exists currently that can fully replace an animal model, and, again, that's because we're still trying to understand biology. When people think about medical research or biomedical research, they often just go straight to drug tests, right? Testing drugs on animals, with animals, for the development of medications. But that's just sort of the icing on the cake, right? The biggest part of research is the basic research that leads us to our ability to maybe apply what we've learned to the development of some kind of a medication, right? The biggest part is just understanding biological systems. There isn't anything that you can think of that is as complex as a biological system.

And believe it or not, after centuries and centuries of trying to study them, we know very little, actually. We get clues about how some aspect of the system works and eventually thousands of people all over the world are looking at these things and they put it all out into the information highway and you grab up enough clues and you put them together that you at some point say, okay, you know what, and I'm going to simplify this. I think we know now after all of this work, right, and all of these studies with animals and human beings and intact living systems, we finally know that, okay, we think Disease X happens because somebody doesn't make Protein X, right? So if we can develop some kind of compound that behaves like Protein X, right, a drug, then maybe we can alleviate the symptoms of Disease X. And that's pretty much where we are right now. Right? And so it's complicated.

So you get very specific pieces of information about a very specific thing from these sort of non animal systems, but you also have to combine that with sort of what it is you learn from the fully intact organism. Because we don't quite understand how everything works when it's put together, yet we're still trying to learn.

That brings me to a very popular question. When people say, ‘Well, why do you have to use animals? You don't have to use animals anymore, you just use computers.’ People say this to me all the time, and they've said it for years. And that's when I try to explain to folks, well, in order for me to get a computer to behave in every way like a fully intact living system, I have to know everything there is to know about a fully intact living system in order to program it. And I don't, I know just a little bit, right. And not me personally, but the collective whole of what we know is just a little bit. So what you're suggesting then is that you want me to program a computer to behave like something I don't fully understand in order for me to understand more about what I don't understand.

And when I say it like that, people realize, ‘Oh, I guess I get it.’ And I think the thing that people aren't understanding is we really don't fully understand how the body works and everything we have today, and it's massive, the amount of preventatives and medical treatments we have in the form of drugs and surgeries and everything else. Everything we have today was based on this limited amount of information we have been able to obtain from intact living systems, wo we have to know a lot more before we can ever get to the point of developing something that can fully replace an animal or designing something that can behave like an intact living system.

That said, though, the specific uses for some of these stem cell based technologies that we're talking about can be very powerful, right, and they're still limited, right. People are still working them out and there's a lot we need to know even about how to standardize their use, for example, how to train people to use them reliably with rigor, right so we don't have a reproducibility crisis for non animal models like the one we have for animal models, right.

So we're still limited in scope that way, but they are useful already. Some of the stem cell based technologies, for example, in the drug development process, right, so you can take tissue cells from human beings, for example, so now, very species specific questions.

And I'll give you a good example: Drug induced liver toxicity is an issue in the drug development process, and it's one of the reasons for some of the failures we see in translation, right? There are two types of drug induced liver toxicity. There's this sort of intrinsic toxicity and then there's sort of this idiosyncratic toxicity that people can't really get their arms around, and a lot of the toxicity tests are done with mice and sometimes those models aren't used the best way because, remember when we use animals to model anything that is supposed to relate to humans, we're supposed to have an obligation to choose wisely. We're choosing them because they model a specific thing and there's information about that, there's data about that. But the problem with liver induced drug induced liver toxicity is that the mechanisms for toxicity are still a bit unknown, right? And so sometimes people aren't always using animal models the best possible way. And there have been papers where people are trying to sort this out, right?

Well, at the same time though, Emulate, which is one of these really big companies that is making stem cell organs on chips, right, they did come up with a liver model, a liver on a chip model, and they've been able to, by assembling this model, go back and screen some of these drugs that made it through the animal toxicity phase and then were pulled they were pulled, by the time they got to the clinical trials with people, they were pulled because they were toxic and so on and so forth. And in that particular prep, they've been able to see the toxicity, like, 87% of the time.

So there are some very specific uses for these technologies. What I would love to see is a global initiative that instead of focusing on one or the other, because that's not realistic, focuses on the integration of these technologies, right? Integrate these technologies into the processes that we use currently that depend mainly on animals and start creating some more predictive information, right. Together you cannot have a fully predictive non animal model and apply it to the human condition. That doesn't exist yet. And we know that you can't have a fully predictive animal model and apply it to the human condition that also does not exist and it's not going to exist because they're not people, and we could talk about that in a minute too, because people themselves are not the best models for the human condition because of inherent variability.

But if we can start pulling these things together, so, for example, in the drug development process, you can pull in some supercomputers and look at some of the molecular structures of compounds that have been successful in the past to treat a particular thing for a particular reason, right? And you can also take some of these candidates that you pull then and test them on some of these organ on a chip preparations and pick the best candidates before you then go start putting them into the intact living systems, the animals, to screen for safety. That will reduce the number of animals used, right? And probably reduce the number of candidates you have to run through, and you have a better chance, I would say, at finding a candidate drug that is really going to do what you want it to do as safely as you want it to do it, right?

That's really the way this needs to go. There needs to be an integration of these non animal methodologies with the animal work and these non animal methodologies need to be developed. That's like I was saying before, right, the non animal methodologies and they're informed by the animal work and if we could get all of these people to work together, then we would probably start developing these things more rapidly and more accurately as well, right? So to me, that is the direction we need to head in and I think if we do that, then we will come to a place where we are doing stronger science and developing cures faster with fewer animals.

We use them all the time, it's just that you just can't replace animals with them. We've got to start thinking about these things integratively or we're not going to get anywhere and that's not going to help animals or people.

0:17:35 Adam Walsh

I read a book recently, or a little while ago actually, by A J Jacobs, one of my favourite writers actually. He decided he wanted to go about thanking everybody who was involved in his morning coffee, involved in making it. And he ended up thanking over a thousand people, just for his cup of coffee. So, as animal advocates, if we say, ‘Look, it’s pretty easy, just stop using animals’, that seems like a simple suggestion. But, how complex is the process, or would the process be, of replacing animals in medical research?

0:18:13 Cindy Buckmaster

Yeah, well, so, I mean, I did kind of touch on that. We can't replace them until we understand them. And by them, I mean, you know, there there's a tremendous amount of biological conservation across species, right. We contain the same proteins. Many of our genes code for the same proteins so the commonalities are there and that's why we've been so tremendously successful in curing disease, or in treating disease. We haven't really cured anything, we prevent and treat. That's what we do. But that's made a huge difference in the survival rate of people and pets, right, and agricultural animals across the board.

So we understand very little, but we've made a lot of progress. But it's not realistic. That's not even going to happen in our lifetime. There's just still too much to actually know. But that doesn't mean we can't move in the right direction, like I said right, and start integrating things and get better at it and come up there. We could end up with some other ways to do this work that will allow us to get better answers and get them more safely. We just have to get off of this, we have in our minds that we can just replace things and we can't.

For example, there's a group here that says, and the public buys this, right, ‘We've sent people to the moon, right, and we've miniaturized computers to the size of cell phones that we can put in our pocket. Why on earth are we still doing research with animals?’ And the answer is, well, we developed rocket ships and we created computers and we developed cell phones. RWe could figure that out. Those things aren't anywhere near as complicated as biological systems., right. We didn't create them, we are them and we're still trying to sort it out and so we aren't anywhere close to being able to come up with some device, some way to replace something we just don't understand. It’s just, it’s not a realistic discussion.

0:20:11 Adam Walsh

Using a human sample, we would say that a smaller number is less representative. If the number of animals used in a project is being reduced, or we're attempting to reduce the number of animals in a project, how would that impact the accuracy of the results?

0:20:25 Cindy Buckmaster

Yeah, that's a really good question. In biomedical research, there's something that we abide by called the 3Rs. And those 3Rs are replacement. So we're talking about that now, right? Replace, use something other than animals whenever you can and the development, the continued development of NAMS will be a great addition to that part of the equation. And then there's refinement, which is like refine your studies and make sure you're doing things as effectively as possible.

And also refine animal care, right. The source of all of the information at the end of the day comes from these animals. So you can't have great science and great information and meaningful data unless you also provide tremendous animal care. So they go hand in hand, they're two sides of the same coin, right? So that's refinement. And then the third R is reduction. Here's the thing with reduction, you have to use the fewest number of animals possible that will still allow you to get statistically significant results, right? So there's a lot of stats in sorting this out. There are power calculations, and a lot of this is based on what people have done before and whether or not their findings achieved the appropriate confidence level and all of that. So there's a lot of math in that and stats.

And so it's not just use as few animals, use very few animals. Because if you use too few animals and you don't get statistically significant results because there wasn't enough power in that study, well, then you've also committed a mortal sin and wasted animal lives for no reason, right? So you can use too many and you can use too few. The goal is to try and right size that and it can be tricky. So biostatisticians are involved and information from previous publications are involved and all of that feeds into the machine. So the reduction piece is actually more complicated than people think, right?

Just use a few animals, it doesn't work like that. And then all of that has to be validated and evaluated by an oversight body, right? So in this country [United States], we have, in most countries, there's some sort of an animal care use and use oversight body there. In your part of the world [Australia], they call them an animal ethics committee. Here [United States], they call them an institutional animal care and use committee. But all of these experts have to evaluate that.

I don't think most of them actually include a biostatistician, so that's something that we could work on right away. But many of these folks do have a very good grasp of stats. That would be an improvement I would toss into the mix: Biostatisticians.

0:23:06 Adam Walsh

One of the contradictions of many animal advocates is that we criticize failure rates of research using animals, but then attempt to encourage publication of negative research results so we understand the scope of what research is being performed on animals. In addition to animals, what factors make up the infamous 95% failure rate? And how can animal advocates encourage researchers to be more forthcoming in publishing negative results?

0:23:40 Cindy Buckmaster

These are sort of two questions. Let me answer the easier one first: The negative results. So the world has experienced what we're calling it as being called a reproducibility crisis, right? And there are questions about how rigorously studies with animals are being done and with people, for that matter, just across the board, right? And so part of the issue with being unable to reproduce studies is that the scientific journals are really mainly interested in publishing what we call positive findings. You find something and that's really newsworthy and that's exciting. And so when you don't find something that you set out to look for in a study, or you do a study and you're hoping you'll find something and you don't, that hasn't been published generally, and those are what we call negative results.

But the non-publication of negative results can contribute in part to the reproducibility issue, right, because it's important also to know what you don't find out when you do a particular study. Now, you know, if you don't know that, you might go and do it again for one thing, which is waste of animals, number one, and a waste of everybody's time and money, number two, right?

But all of that is part of the knowledge equation, right? In order to address this sort of little tiny sliver of what's the larger equation that's being considered as the basis for this reproducibility crisis, there are some initiatives in place to get negative data published, and I think there's one journal in particular that's committed to that. Or maybe it's an online journal and I don't know the name of it, but I've heard about it. So that is sort of being corrected.

As far as openness and transparency goes there are a ton of worldwide initiatives related to certainly, and this is all connected to the reproducibility crisis. There's a book that was written by Richard Harris called Rigor Mortis, which pointed this out, and the public was like, ‘What's going on?’ Because researchers haven't really traditionally been very transparent about anything and in large part that's because they've been attacked, actually physically and are still being harassed on a regular basis by groups opposed to research with animals that have an ideology and aren't really looking for a solution so much as fulfilling this ideological sort of political agenda. And so that's just sort of shoved everybody back into the shadows but a large faction of the research community worldwide has realized, ‘Hey, you know what, the public needs to know this information’, so that, again, we can engage in real conversations and work together toward real solutions moving forward for animals and people.

And so the UK was the first to start something called Concordat on Openness. And there's a bunch of agreements in there. I think there's four major agreements and I don't remember them all at the top of my head, but it's basically you're going to share what you're doing with animals and why with the public, you're going to share it with the media, you're going to write reports about what it is you've done to be transparent and all of that's going to be tracked to gauge the success with regard to how the public understands research with animals. And that sort of model has been replicated in many countries throughout Europe. It's been replicated in New Zealand recently, and also just recently in Australia, where you are, and the US is working on an initiative like that. We are a gigantic, enormous place and so it's a bit more complicated. Lots and lots of stakeholders involved and lots of people to talk to. But many of us realize that this is something we really want to strive for as well. And so that's in the works. So all of that is sort of happening.

Now, let's get back to the 95% stat, because this comes up all the time and the way that it's usually presented is there's a 95% failure rate. Only 5% of the drugs that are tested in animals actually make it to market, or something like this is how it's said. And the implication then is that animals are just useless models for translational impact to the human condition. Let's correct that.

First of all, when a drug is developed and it's time for it to be tested, right after we do all that other stuff I talked about, right now, they have picked a candidate drug and they want to test it for marketability. The first thing they're going to do well, the biggest part of that test is in human beings, right? The clinical trials with human beings, that's where the bulk of this pre market testing for a drug happens and there's three major phases and maybe sometimes there's another one. But we learned a lot about that during COVID, right, the first clinical phase and the second clinical phase, the third clinical phase, these clinical trials. And they start in smaller numbers, the first trial is smaller numbers, and then the numbers get larger as you get to the second phase of clinical trials and then even larger and when you get to the third.

But before we're allowed to take some experimental compound that we know something about right, and drop it into human volunteers in clinical trials, we need to screen them for safety. And that's the preclinical testing that really happens with animals and that's really the major part, the major reason for that testing. Because, as I mentioned before, the biological conservations are great, right? And so about 70% of the time, animals predict accurately toxicities in the human condition and it could be greater or lesser, depending on the species. And you're always trying to use the best species to model the particular situation we're after, right, but they do a pretty good job of screening drugs before we drop them into clinical trials. It's very unusual for us to hear about people dying in clinical trials. So they do a pretty good job of that.

Now, the other thing I want to tell you about this, because the argument is, well, that means that animals are useless, this is a silly model for human translation. Let's talk about the fact that when the animals predict safety, right, and they do a pretty good job of that, and then we put this compound now into that first round of clinical trials with maybe a few hundred volunteers and they do well there and then they move into the later trials. Well, after that first clinical trial, about 86% of the drugs fail in later clinical trials in human beings.

So what does that suggest? It suggests that there's a lot going on here that eliminates the drugs as final marketable candidates. There's human variability. So as the clinical trials progress, the number of human beings involved increases and so you start to see different genetic profiles and different health situations and different environmental exposures. Lots of variability. So you start to see different side effects and you start to see maybe different levels of risk that you didn't see in that first trial with a few hundred people. Now you're starting to see things you didn't see just because you have more people involved.

Don't forget, we live in a very litigious society too, right. The risks at the end of the day have to be outweighed by the benefits. Otherwise we're just going to voice this medication out into the public and cause as much damage as we cause good. And sometimes drugs don't get pulled until massive and massive numbers after it's marketed, right. Then you have thousands and hundreds of thousands of people using it. And that's when you find out, oh, there's an issue and you pull it.

But at the end of the day, the drug makers, the drug companies don't want to release something that's going to allow them to get sued because they didn't vet it very carefully as well. So this is a really complicated process, right? And to diminish it to this, 95% of the drugs that are tested in animals don't make it to market and implying directly then, or maybe indirectly, and sometimes it is directly, that means that animals information that comes from animals is not translatable to humans. It's a complete mischaracterization of the facts. There's a lot happening there because if that was the case, we should also be talking about the fact that after the first clinical trials in human beings, 86% of the drugs never make it to market. And why don't they make it to market? I guess that means that people aren't good models for people. So it's sort of a silly argument and it aggravates me, you can tell it aggravates me. It aggravates me because, again, it causes a hurdle, it creates an obstacle between people who all have a common goal, and that is to reduce or eliminate the use of animals in biomedical research.

And we can't do that until we're all speaking from the same place, right? A place of facts. We have to understand the facts involved in order for us to have any kind of productive discussion and move forward in a compassionate and loving way. And so these kinds of characterizations aggravate the hell out of me because they get in the way of us being able to do that.

0:33:00 Adam Walsh

I agree. That's why I brought it up because it's one of the things that I've questioned since the minute I started in animal advocacy. Something just didn't make sense with that for me.

Among researchers, is there a separation between compassion for the animals and the necessity of the research?

0:33:18 Cindy Buckmaster

Yeah, so that's a really interesting question, and I would say that the opposite is mainly true. I'm sure there are some people, I mean, I really, really love them. The gradient for how much you care about animals is different for everybody across the world. But in research, in my personal experiences, most of the folks, well certainly the lab animal care people, we're the people who actually care for the animals, they don't live in labs. They live in Vivariums with all those lab animal science people, and that's the field I was in after I left research, I went into lab animal science. Certainly all of us are animal lovers, and we're there because we're with the animals every day, every single day. And many of us are on call 24/7 for them and their needs. So certainly we really love them. But the question is, what about the researchers doing the actual studies? And from my personal experience, I will tell you that the majority of researchers that I've known and worked with really do care about their animals.

Animals in general, but also their particular animals. There's an expression, and I actually said it before, animal welfare in research goes hand in hand with reliable and meaningful data. You can't have one without the other. And so for the most part, people who work with animals do care about them and if there are a handful who don't, they certainly know that they're not going to get good information if their animals aren't treated well.

I can't say that everybody loves animals. I don't understand people who don't. But that's just my personal thing. And I have met a few researchers where I just think maybe they're I wouldn't say they don't like animals, but maybe they certainly don't think about them the way I do, let's say.

But they certainly do understand the need for them to get appropriate care. And in those cases, they often look to us, the people who actually have the training to do that, to give them the information they need or provide the care directly. So I would say that the opposite of that is probably true. I don't think there's much of a separation between compassion for the animals and necessity for research with animals.

0:35:19 Adam Walsh

How much of the current research paradigm is based on the way that it has always been done.

0:35:25 Cindy Buckmaster

Yeah, well, that's true of just about everything you hear about.

And so I guess I don't know exactly what you mean by ‘The way it has always been done’. If you mean we're only using animals because that's always how we've done it, I think I've covered that. We don't have an alternative right now.

In lab animal, in biomedical research, in the research enterprise that involves animals, we have animal welfare scientists, for example, who specialize in research animal welfare. And these are folks who study the animals and their needs. So we know a lot about animals in the wild and we know a lot of the sort of biological predispositions because we have to address all their needs. It's not just their physical needs and their dietary needs. We have to address their social needs and they vary on these things. We have to address their behavioral needs. What are their species typical behaviors? Mice like to nest. This is something they must do to feel whole and healthy, right? So we have to address those behaviors. Pigs need to root. These are just examples I'm giving you. And I could go on and on. Monkeys need to forage social interaction, they establish social hierarchy. So those sorts of the options to be able to do all of that, the ability to do all of that is also part of this animal welfare that contributes then to meaningful data.

So we have animal welfare scientists that spend a lot of time sorting out, ‘How do we do that for animals in these more captive settings?’ And so we've learned a lot over time about what they need. And then we have a document in the US called the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. And it gets reprinted, I don't know, every eight to ten years or so because there's new information. So now we know more things, and this book basically tells you everything it is you need to actually do for your animals, even what temperature your final rinse water has to be when you wash cages. I mean, it's that prescriptive, but also not in an engineering sort of way.

So it tells you what the bottom line needs to be and you have the flexibility, depending on your infrastructure, to get to that place. But you have to get to that place. That's the expectation, right? And to go along with that, then there's an international accrediting organization which is called AAALAC International. And they go right by the Guide, word for word. So research institutions all over the world volunteer to be accredited by this organization. It's comprised of experts in laboratory animal science and medicine. So these aren't just random people. These are the people who know which rugs to look under when they come to your home, right?

And they look at everything your training program, your oversight, your compliance stuff, animal well being, the training of your people, they look at everything and they go by the requirements in the Guide, at least in this country and then in other countries, they have their own what do they call them? Well, they have their own criteria. They have their own directives about how animal care should be carried out and then they'll go and accredit them based on those directives.

But these folks, we volunteer to have them come every three years and turn everything upside down. And it's really a great process because they share, because they go all over the world, they will share with us other great ideas. Like, oh, we found this really cool way to enrich rabbits when we were over in wherever you might want to incorporate that. This is really fantastic process. It's not a regulatory body, but I will tell you there's a lot of pressure by journals, very good journals, and also by granting agencies for institutions to be AAALAC accredited before they get money or before they get published, right? So it's a big deal.

And so we're constantly making improvements like everyone else. So, yeah, there are still some things that are done because that's how we've done it. But primarily that's because we haven't figured out a better way to do it know, we're still working on that. And as we learn more, we incorporate that into the fabric of what we do them. Because like I said before, strong science is going to come from strong animal welfare.

And that's the lab animal science, that's our gig, right? We're all about that.

0:39:39 Adam Walsh

And finally, if animal advocacy groups want to enact rapid change, how might they better work with researchers?

0:39:48 Cindy Buckmaster

Yeah, so this is complicated. When you say animal advocacy groups, they differ somewhat from country to country. And here in the United States, I don't think we have any true animal advocacy groups. You know, we have this, we have just groups opposed to biomedical research with animals. And there's a constant campaign of harassment toward individual researchers and institutions that are doing work with animals. And sometimes there's some bad apple out there, like in every walk of life that shouldn't be working with animals I don't disagree. Then those people should be pulled from the equation. They should go.

But the problem is that they will then paint the entire field as a group of people and demonize everybody who's actually doing good work as a consequence of the bad behavior of one person. Or more commonly, they invest a lot of time and energy and resources in deliberately mischaracterizing how animals are cared for in research. So this constant demonization of researchers in their institution and of the process, which is based almost entirely on mischaracterizations and half truths or just outright fabrications, has to stop or we're never going to be able to work together.

You know, honestly, Adam, I'm not sure we need to pull the four or five people who are leading these organizations and really orchestrating this. They're mischaracterizing things and then exploiting the goodwill of the public and their love for animals and their lack of information about what's real to carry forth an agenda that they probably wouldn't agree with if they knew what was really going on. And here it's just about ending our relationships with animals on every level. So even if we just ignore those people who are pulling the strings, if we can get the public to just start understanding the full scope of facts, then we can move forward and those people can just sit around and philosophize for the rest of their lives about how they want the world to look, even though it's not going to happen that way, because it's not reality for the rest of the world besides the five or ten or twelve of them. So really, that's the first step.

And again, I'm not even sure we have to engage with those people directly. It's the public. People have to learn the facts so that we can engage together in an informed way, and put our minds and our hearts together and do this thing we really want to do. And move in the direction of, like I say in Get Real. It's my tagline: Stronger science, faster cures, fewer animals. Let's move in that direction and we'll all be very happy with that. And I also think when we do that and we can feel more comfortable as a research community being fully transparent with the public, and I think that's important. To me, I think the public deserves to know everything there is to know about our work with animals. They pay for it for one thing, and they benefit from it extraordinarily for another, right? And if you ignore the contributions of animals, then I think that's ungrateful and disrespectful.

And so I think that's another thing. We have to be fully transparent. If we can get enough people to see the truth and engage more and more of them, then we'll move faster in the direction of real solutions. So I wouldn't wait on at least the groups here to get on board, at least not the heads of these groups who are really the ones that are sort of pulling everybody else along like Marionettes.

There are a lot of people, who work for some of these groups who are opposed to animal research in the United States, who really do love animals. And they kind of gravitate to these groups, toward these groups, because they believe that the heads of these organizations also really care about animals. And I don't think that's entirely true. There's an agenda there that is ideological and political that is separate from what these people believe. And so there are large factions of these groups themselves of people who really do care about animals and those are the people I think we can speak to and pull along. We just have to get them to listen.

And that's, again, what aggravates me about this. We can't get them to listen when there are these constant obstacles being put in place based on mischaracterizations and half truths and outright fabrications. They're impeding our ability to reduce the number of animals in research, right? That's unforgivable, if you love animals. They need to stop.

Transcribed with Deciphr.AI