ABOVE: Animal procedures are down 3.7 percent from 2016.
ISTOCK, UNOL
The UK government published its annual statistics last week (July 19) on the number of scientific procedures undertaken in Great Britain, tallying up almost 3.8 million in 2017, a 3.7 percent drop from 2016. The number reflects both experiments and other interventions, such as genetic modification, involving lab animals.
“I was surprised” at the decrease, says geneticist Robin Lovell-Badge, head of the division of stem cell biology and developmental genetics at the London-based Francis Crick Institute. He would have expected numbers to have gone up, given the increasing adoption of technologies such as CRISPR that make the creation of genetically altered animals less cumbersome.
The reasons for the decrease are unclear. But Lovell-Badge says he thinks that the increasing costs of maintaining animals for research might play a role. This is driven largely by recent pushes for more-sophisticated equipment for ...
