Pleasant Gorge College, a small school with big ambitions, was in the process of writing its first research grant requesting Public Health Service (PHS) funding for a project in the college's Department of Biological Sciences that would use common laboratory mice. Although Biological Sciences had a growing research program, the other departments of the school remained focused on teaching, and very few faculty members or administrators were interested in serving on its IACUC. Nevertheless, an IACUC and an approved Assurance were required by the NIH's Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW), a part of the PHS, before any PHS financial support could be granted. Eventually, a consulting laboratory animal veterinarian was employed and appropriate animal housing space was developed. A properly constituted IACUC also was recruited but not without some arm twisting by the school's academic dean. Then another problem arose: none of the IACUC members wanted to be the chairperson of the new committee, claiming that they already had far too much teaching and administrative work to take on another time-consuming responsibility. Frustrated and not wanting to further alienate the faculty, the dean asked the consulting veterinarian if it would be legal and acceptable to OLAW to have a properly constituted IACUC with five voting members but a chairperson who was not a member of the IACUC and did not have a vote. The veterinarian responded that he had never heard of such an arrangement but, as far as he knew, it would be legal and potentially acceptable to OLAW. With that information, the president of the college appointed the dean as the chairperson of the IACUC.
The dean was pleased with the outcome as she believed that serving as Chair, even if it were for a limited time period, would give her first-hand insights into the operations of the IACUC, experience that would be beneficial as she led the school to further PHS funding opportunities. But do you think that the veterinarian's advice was correct? Can the dean of the school function as the Chair of the IACUC without being an IACUC member and without a vote?
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Silverman, J. An IACUC Chair who isn't a member. Lab Anim 43, 53 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/laban.456
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/laban.456