Associated organisationsUniversity of Exeter · University of Manchester · University of Nottingham · University of Oxford · University of SouthamptonEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£1.7M
PeriodMay 2017 — Oct 2022
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Laboratory animal research is a tangle of conflicting responsibilities—between scientific progress, animal welfare, and public trust—and this programme will map how those connections actually work. The problem is that debates about animal research often talk past each other. Scientists, veterinarians, animal suppliers, patients, and the public each hold different assumptions about what counts as good care, necessary harm, or acceptable risk. No one has systematically studied how these groups interact, or how their relationships shape the rules and practices that govern animal research. This programme fills that gap by treating animal research not as a single issue but as a "nexus"—a web of interdependent relationships that shift over time. If successful, the research could change how policy is made and how public engagement happens. Instead of one-size-fits-all regulations or polarised public debates, the programme aims to create communication tools and policy recommendations that reflect the real complexity of the system. This is fundamental social science: it will not directly reduce animal use or speed up drug development, but it could reshape the infrastructure of trust and accountability that quietly underpins all biomedical research.
View original technical description
This five-year collaborative programme will develop approaches for understanding laboratory animal research as a nexus, asking how reconceptualising connections and generating communication across different perspectives can contribute to improving the future of animal research. New research will draw attention to historical independencies between science, health and welfare; identify challenges emerging at the interfaces of animal research and create opportunities for informing policy and public engagement. We suggest collaborative approaches are essential for understanding how rapid transformations across science and society are changing the patterns of responsibility, trust and care which hold together, or constitute, this nexus. We will deliver new: • integrated research across the social sciences and humanities, using historical research to inform understanding of present challenges and create new engagement opportunities for the future; • interactive research projects, co-produced with researchers, animal suppliers, veterinarians, publics and patients, to investigate the contemporary dynamics of animal research; • interfaces for generating cultures of communication with publics, policy-makers and practitioners across the animal research nexus. This programme brings together five leading researchers on the social and historical dimensions of animal research, uniting the strengths of five institutions, engaging creative practitioners, and advancing the work of five early career researchers and three PhD students.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
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