Regulations on Expts with Living Things

After reading what follows, you should be convinced that you should use invertebrates or plants for your research projects. Much less red tape and hassle.

Animals: If your work involving vertebrate subjects is supported in any way by governmental monies you must have your project approved by an institutional committee that governs research on animals. The purview of such committees is being expanded to include some invertebrates such as squid and octopus. Since your schools and science fairs usually partake of federal grants, you would fall under this regulation if you are doing your project as part of their activities such as for grades or for presentation. Even if you are not doing a project for school, you still must comply with local, state and federal laws pertaining to cruelty to animals.

Humans: If your work involves human subjects for original experimentation (not demonstration of previously approved and time-honored processes), you must comply with the Nirenberg Accords on Human Rights. This will involve having your work approved by a committee on research involving human subjects. Most commonly these are called "ethics committees." This approval is required regardless of where your funding originates. In your study of history, you should be interested to know that after World War 2, the atrocities of the Nazis sickened the world, which then met in Nirenberg, Germany, where the Human Rights Accords were composed. In brief, they say that any human subject must understand what is going to be done to them, any problems that might come from this "treatment" (pain, pyschological damages, or whatever), AND that the subject is free to withdraw from the study at any time. If you want to test a new drug, definitely an ethics committee must give approval to your techniques. If you want to prick fingers for drops of blood for demonstrating blood typing, that does not involve an ethics committee because, although there is a little pain involved, the subject will understand what is happening, AND it is a time-honored procedure. Again: use of human subjects falls under regulations covering all experimenters in nations belonging to the United Nations. In essence, all people of the world.

Body products: If you wish to use blood or urine or whatever fluids, excrement or tissues of humans, apes, monkeys and dogs in your research, you should use methods approved by an "ethics committee." The reasoning is to control of the spread of disease. While it is obvious that primates may share a large number of diseases, it is not so obvious that dogs also share a large number of human diseases as they and hominids have lived together and coevolved for the past 3 million years. Two examples: measles in humans is distemper in dogs; both dogs and humans catch colds from each other. And there are much more serious diseases shared.