In general the trend appears to be towards an
increase in animal experimentation. The total of all of the National
Institutes of Health-funded projects involving the listed animals (macaca,
saimiri, rat, mouse, dog, cat, guinea pig, hamster& rabbit,) for
fiscal 2001 is 29,441. This means that there are literally tens of
thousands of different animal experiments funded by the NIH every
year. The total for 1997 (a five-year span) is 24,891. The increase
from 1997 to 2001 is 4,550 new grants, or an increase of 18.3%. The
1992 total is 21,448. Using this number we now have a ten-year span to
examine. This shows an increase of 7,993 projects or 37.3%. This trend
does not involve dollars spent or animals used. It examines only the
actual number of grants awarded by the NIH.
The numbers of projects involving dogs, cats,
rabbits, guinea pigs, and hamsters have all decreased. The down side
of this is that the experiments using macaque monkeys, squirrel
monkeys, chimpanzees, baboons, rats, and mice have all increased, in
some cases dramatically. Mouse projects have increased by almost 51%
over the last five years, and by 127% since 1992. Chimpanzee
experiments have increased by 81.3% in the last ten years. Baboon
protocols have increased by 82% in the last ten years. Other species
have seen slower increases over the last ten years with macaque monkey
experiments increasing by 50% and squirrel monkey projects going up by
a mere 36%.
We may be able to come up with a very general
approximation of how much the NIH spends on animal experiments every
year. The NIH publishes average dollar amounts per grant. For the year
2000, the average grant was $291,502. For 2000, there were 29,855
projects listed from our searches. This gives us a potential total of
more than $8,7 billion. There are another 651 projects involving
species that were not mentioned above. However, for a final estimate
we should be conservative. The use of the CRISP system introduces a
potential for duplication in the searches discussed above (i.e. the
same grant could use more than one species and therefore show up in
the totals multiple times). This can be counteracted to some degree by
the non-inclusion of the 651 projects listed above. And, again, to be
conservative, I would estimate that the NIH spends $8 – $8.5 billion a
year on animal experiments. This estimate is also on the conservative
side because it does not include a component for the indirect costs
associated with all NIH grants.
If specific institutions are examined in the same
way, we can arrive at estimates for the funding received for specific
laboratories from the NIH for the performance of animal
experimentation. Many facilities receive well over $100 million a year
for the performance of animal experiments, with funding amounts for
some labs approaching $200 million (please see Appendix A for funding
estimates for specific facilities). Thirty facilities were examined
for NIH annual funding estimations; 56.7% of the facilities examined
received over $100 million a year from the NIH for performing animal
experiments.
This finding of a significant increase in the number
of grants funded by the National Institutes of Health leads to several
questions. Perhaps the most important of these questions deals with
the issue of duplication. Are all of these research projects
necessary? Are any of these grants redundant? Are those researchers
who are being trusted by the NIH to perform medical research
defrauding the American taxpayer?
While it is not within the scope of this audit to
answer questions of this nature, certain conclusions can be drawn from
a relatively limited number of additional searches that have been run
using the CRISP system.
In order to deal with this potential for duplication
within the NIH grant system some basic searches were performed via the
CRISP system. Three species were used: rats, mice and macaque monkeys
(chosen to illustrate both ends of the evolutionary scale). The
results of these searches were very disturbing. There are currently
(for fiscal 2001) 171 separate projects that examine neural
information processing in macaque monkeys. Since neural information
processing could still be a potentially large area, the topic was
refined further.
Visual neural information processing in macaque
monkeys brought up 123 separate projects within the CRISP system, 286
projects study cocaine in rats, 109 projects study cocaine in mice,
and 55 projects study cocaine in macaque monkeys. This is a total of
450 projects studying cocaine in three different species (please see
Appendices B – F for specific grant listings). If we use the average
grant amount posted by the NIH on their website ($291,502), this gives
us an estimated total of $131,175,900 annually spent on addiction
research in only three species of animals.
It must also be noted that some of these grants have
been in existence for decades. Specifically, several of the grants in
the area of neural information processing in macaque monkeys have been
in existence for over 30 years, with one reaching 38 years of age.
This type of information spawns several further questions. If this
area has been studied by dozens of researchers for decades, why are
new grants continually appearing in this field? If decades of study
have not garnered worthwhile information, why are more grants being
approved? If the decades-old grants are not sufficient to examine the
field, necessitating new grants, why do the old grants continue to be
renewed?
From a monetary point of view this kind of
duplication is potentially catastrophic. The hundreds of millions of
dollars that the NIH spends every year to fund medical research using
animals may well be going into a bottomless pit of duplication that
accomplishes nothing other than funneling hundreds of millions of tax
dollars into the coffers of nationally known laboratories.
We may be told that this funding system is well
supervised and that the system does not allow for waste. However,
animal based experimentation potentially brings hundreds of millions
of dollars into many U.S. laboratories on an annual basis. In light of
the fact that these institutions receive so much federal funding, it
is highly likely that duplicative experimentation is funded on a
regular basis. Many of the people that evaluate these projects are
part of the animal experimentation system themselves. We may be
dealing with a good ol’ boys network where "I’ll approve your research
if you’ll approve mine." There may be far too little independent
oversight, with far too many of the individuals involved in the
approval process having a vested interest in the outcome of any
decision regarding the validity of a project.
At the facility level, the membership of
Institutional Animal Care & Use Committees (which is responsible for
institutional protocol approval) are heavily weighted with people who
either perform animal experiments or individuals who otherwise have a
vested interest (affiliated veterinarians) in the performance of
animal experimentation. Do they have any real motivation for declining
to approve a project? It appears that the only real motivation may be
to approve every project because each additional grant brings more
money into the laboratory.
