UCSF's lab fiasco

LIKE LAW ENFORCEMENT and the military, science needs civilian oversight. There are too many questions the folks in the white coats shouldn't answer for the rest of us. Cloning, pharmaceutical work, industry-financed studies ... you don't want that stuff going on without some public monitoring and input. And while it might not be as explosive as human cloning, animal experimentation belongs on the list.

When is it OK to make animals suffer – even suffer badly – for the good of human research? Is it acceptable to mangle and abuse animals if the research leads to a cure for cancer? What if it's just pure science that has no immediate human application? Is there a difference between the suffering of a dime-a-dozen lab rat and that of an intelligent monkey?

Those are valid policy questions, ones that ought to be discussed openly. But in San Francisco, the opposite is happening.

As Tali Woodward reports on page 19, the University of California at San Francisco has between 600 and 800 animal experiments going on right now – and almost nobody knows anything about them. That's because UCSF has clamped a lid of almost Pentagon-style secrecy on its animal work. The institution won't disclose which researchers are doing what, won't release even basic records without a huge fight, and won't allow outsiders to visit the labs – in fact, university officials won't even say where the animal research labs are. The reason? UCSF claims that animal-rights activists may be violent, and the lives of researchers are at stake. So everything has to be kept out of the public eye.

Yes, there have been incidents in the past in which radical activists have firebombed labs, harassed researchers, and committed other acts of vandalism. But, like the Department of Homeland Security, UCSF has used this "terrorism" threat to justify a level of secrecy way out of proportion to the situation.

Why, for example, can't journalists (who are not typically considered a terrorist threat) walk through some of the facilities and see for themselves what's going on? (Stanford permits this.) Why can't the researchers come forward and explain their own work?

There's plenty of reason for public concern. The Bush administration's Department of Agriculture – hardly a radical animal-welfare organization – filed formal charges against UCSF, listing more than 80 violations of federal law relating to the care of research animals, and on Sept. 23 UCSF agreed to pay a staggering $97,000 to settle the case. Even some UCSF supporters say that a handful of researchers are creating real problems: Neurophysiologist Stephen Lisberger, for example, has argued that the way he uses animals is an academic freedom issue, and not subject to negotiation with the veterinary staff.

The state legislature ought to look into this (particularly the university's obsession with secrecy). But there's a lot that can be done in San Francisco too. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi is considering a local ban on animal experiments, which may be a tough sell, but at the very least, the supervisors can do what the city of Cambridge, Mass., does and require that local inspectors visit all animal labs and make sure they're up to federal, state, and local standards.