How Should Treatment of Animals Beyond the Lab Factor Into Institutional Review?

Discussions of nonhuman research ethics tend to focus on what we owe nonhuman research subjects in laboratory settings only. But humans make critical decisions about these animals outside the lab, too, during breeding, transportation, and end-of-study protocols. This article reviews extra-lab risks and harms to nonhuman research subjects, focusing on the most commonly and intensively used animals like rodents and fishes, and argues that extra-lab risks and harms merit ethical consideration by researchers and institutional review.

How Should We Improve How Medical and Veterinary Students Learn About Human and Nonhuman Animals?

This article presents 5 general points that every clinician should know about animals, health, and the environment, focusing on why animals matter for their own sakes, why animals matter for health and environmental threats, why health and environmental threats matter for animals, and how the medical and veterinary industries interact with animals. This article then offers practical advice about how to address these issues.

Human, Nonhuman, and Chimeric Research: Considering Old Issues with New Research.

Human-nonhuman chimeric research-research on nonhuman animals who contain human cells-is being used to understand human disease and development and to create potential human treatments such as transplantable organs. A proposed advantage of chimeric models is that they can approximate human biology and therefore allow scientists to learn about and improve human health without risking harms to humans. Among the emerging ethical issues being explored is the question of at what point chimeras are "human enough" to have human rights and thus be owed higher standards of research protection than that currently afforded to nonhuman animals.

Clarifying the Ethics and Oversight of Chimeric Research.

This article is the lead piece in a special report that presents the results of a bioethical investigation into chimeric research, which involves the insertion of human cells into nonhuman animals and nonhuman animal embryos, including into their brains. Rapid scientific developments in this field may advance knowledge and could lead to new therapies for humans. They also reveal the conceptual, ethical, and procedural limitations of existing ethics guidance for human-nonhuman chimeric research.

One Health, COVID-19, and a Right to Health for Human and Nonhuman Animals.

COVID-19 is a reminder that human, nonhuman, and environmental health are linked, and so efforts to improve human, nonhuman, and environmental health should be linked as well. But current efforts to link these issues fall short by not doing enough for humans, not doing enough for nonhumans, and focusing narrowly on health instead of expansively on health, welfare, and rights. This paper surveys the case for respecting and promoting human and nonhuman welfare, health, and rights simultaneously.

Can Knowledge Itself Justify Harmful Research?

In our paper, we argue for three necessary conditions for morally permissible animal research: (1) an assertion (or expectation) of sufficient net benefit, (2) a worthwhile-life condition, and (3) a no-unnecessary-harm/qualified-basic-needs condition.1 We argue that these conditions are necessary, without taking a position on whether they are jointly sufficient. In their excellent commentary on our paper, Matthias Eggel, Carolyn Neuhaus, and Herwig Grimm (hereafter, the authors) argue for a friendly amendment to one of our three conditions.

Necessary conditions for morally responsible animal research.

In this article, we present three necessary conditions for morally responsible animal research that we believe people on both sides of this debate can accept. Specifically, we argue that, even if human beings have higher moral status than nonhuman animals, animal research is morally permissible only if it satisfies (1) an expectation of sufficient net benefit, (2) a worthwhile-life condition, and (3) a no-unnecessary-harm/qualified-basic-needs condition. We then claim that, whether or not these necessary conditions are jointly sufficient for justified animal research, they are relatively demanding, with the consequence that many animal experiments may fail to satisfy them.