Sir

Your News story “Britain seeks compromise on animal research” (Nature 428, 882; 200410.1038/428882a) focuses on the UK government's proposals to increase investment in non-animal research as a means of addressing public concern with the scientific and ethical validity of animal experimentation.

Although such a policy may have some long-term effect in reducing the level of suffering experienced by animals and producing better research methods, there are other steps that could be taken immediately to address problems with the regulatory framework surrounding animal research.

Your passing reference to the overwhelming lack of trust in the current regulatory regime hits the nail on the head. The number of government inspectors is tiny in comparison with the scale of research, and the majority of those inspectors have backgrounds in animal experimentation.

Work by our campaigning group, Uncaged, has shown that, instead of acting as neutral arbiters, inspectors often share the viewpoint of animal researchers. When granting licences, they seem to underestimate animal suffering, and/or overestimate the usefulness of the research.

Pig-to-primate xenotransplantation research conducted by Imutran at the Huntingdon Life Sciences laboratories in Cambridge, between 1994 and 2000, provides a particularly stark example. Leaked confidential documents published online by Uncaged in April 2003 (see http://www.xenodiaries.org/evidence.htm), following legal battles with Imutran, reveal that procedures leading to the collapse and death of higher primates were classified by Home Office inspectors as of merely ‘moderate’ severity — despite the government's stated policy that these procedures should be classified as ‘substantial’ or ‘severe’.

Our legal battle to publish the inside story of this research was won on the basis of our claim that the documents reveal the Home Office's failure to enforce its own rules. Yet there are no constitutional mechanisms for ensuring accountability, and the government continues to ignore a call by 153 members of parliament for an independent inquiry, as reported in The Guardian newspaper on 11 November 2003.

The public is absolutely correct to distrust our sham of a ‘regulatory’ system.