Dr. Richard Cornish was the new chairperson of the Great Eastern University IACUC. Cornish believed that his primary responsibilities were to get protocols approved and support the school's faculty. He was always looking for shortcuts to approve protocols and ways to sidestep regulations he believed to be potentially deleterious to the faculty. Therefore, it did not surprise anybody on the committee that Cornish wanted to suppress the dissemination of information about a faculty member who received a written rebuke from the IACUC for telling his staff to ignore any critiques originating from the IACUC pre-review process and just submit the protocol as it was originally written. Cornish did not support the reprimand but it was nevertheless approved by the committee.
To prevent further harm to the faculty member, Cornish waited until the next IACUC meeting and then made a suggestion that seemed reasonable to some members. He proposed a policy that stated, “Minutes of IACUC meetings, including records of attendance, activities of the committee and committee deliberations shall be maintained by the IACUC. The chairperson shall review the minutes and append or redact any information therein judged to be omitted or superfluous.” He explained that it was a federal requirement to maintain meeting minutes but there was no policy requiring the minutes to be approved by the IACUC, which had been the previous procedure. Therefore, he said, his suggested policy would save time and effort for the committee.
The IACUC administrator and one other member spoke up against the proposal, arguing that everybody should be privy to the minutes and only the full committee should be allowed to approve any alteration of the minutes. Cornish forcefully defended his position, noting that the minutes are posted on a secure internet site where anybody on the committee could read them. He quickly called for a vote and the new policy was approved.
Do you think that the new policy would be acceptable to the appropriate federal regulatory and oversight agencies? How would you approach this situation?
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Silverman, J. Should the chairperson control IACUC meeting minutes?. Lab Anim 44, 167 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/laban.760
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/laban.760
