new delhi

The National Academy of Sciences of India has urged the prime minister to intervene to prevent the implementation of new rules on using animals in research.

The controversial rules, which scientists say would strangle research with red tape, were framed by a committee led by Maneka Gandhi, minister for welfare and an ardent animal activist (see Nature 394, 516; 1998).

“Some of the rules formulated by this committee are likely to stall essential animal-based research rather than regulating it rationally,” Prakash Tendon, the academy's president, told the prime minister.

Heads of India's biomedical research agencies and secretaries of scientific departments who met last week agreed unanimously that the legislation should be reversed. In a letter to Gandhi, Nirmal Ganguli, chief of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), warned of “far-reaching consequences” if the rules were implemented, and strongly urged her to wait until they had been debated by the scientific community.

Under the new regulations, no research institute would be able to acquire animals without the committee's permission, or begin any experiment without its clearance. Funding agencies like ICMR would have to submit detailed monthly reports of the experiments they are funding and the number of animals used. Researchers would not be allowed to import animals.

“If the guidelines are accepted by the government, much biological research in India will come to a standstill as scientists grapple with a mountain of red tape,” said the Indian journal Current Science in an editorial. Gandhi, however, argues that scientists are killing animals unnecessarily, especially in research by pharmaceutical companies.

Vulimiri Ramalingaswami, former president of ICMR and now professor at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, says that instead of framing new rules the committee should strengthen existing guidelines “that are working reasonably well”. At present, each research institute has an animal ethical committee that follows the guidelines specified in the 1960 Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act.

Nitya Nand, former director of the Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow, says the new rules are “most unimaginative, coming at a time when our laboratories are struggling hard to be internationally competitive”. He says the committee should have just laid down guidelines for animal housing and husbandry to minimize pain and suffering: “All other functions should be left to institute ethical committees.”