The Role of IACUC Organizations

In the United States, the need for an oversight and regulatory committee for animal research has led to the formation of IACUC. This organization, whose initials are short for Institutional Animal Care and Use Comittees, is reponsible for making sure that all animal testing, including fish testing, is done along the lines with certain IACUC protocol regulations. Members of the committee make regular visits to facilities to make sure that the laboratory animals are being treated in a manner that is coherent with the organization’s mission.

Although animal testing has been prevalent for many years, the existence of IACUC only came about in the last five decades. Before this time, there was no regulatory commission and the inspections were maintained by state agencies. However, in the year of 1961, the Animal Care Panel was created by a group of concerned veterinarians and they published literature which described the best ways to treat the laboratory animals while research was taking place. Many different organizations were created to attend to this need and in 1986, the IACUC term started being used to group all of the organizations under a single umbrella.

Members of an IACUC team must come from a certain background and there must be at least five members on the team. One of these members must be a trained veterinarian that has adequate experience in dealing with the individual species that will be used in the animal testing. Another of the team’s members must be a scientist that has worked in animal research settings before. An additional requirement for a team’s member must be that at least one person can not be related to the institution in question apart from being on the IACUC board. With these various backgrounds, there will be no conflict of interest and the research animals will receive the correct treatment in the institution’s experiments.