We urgently need moredata to improve the livesof laboratory animals Sir — One of the tasks of the internationalOrganisation for Economic Co-operationand Development (OECD) is to producestandardized guidelines for harmonizingnational regulations. The Paris-basedOECD’s environmental directorate iscurrently preparing a draft guidancedocument on the recognition, assessmentand use of clinical signs as humaneendpoints for experimental animals usedin safety evaluation (OECD Series onTesting and Assessment, N.19, www.oecd.org/ehs/test/flags.htm). Experts andinterested people are invited to submitcomments through national coordinators.

Comments, including ours, have beendelivered to OECD in the past few weeks.But we are concerned that some importantscientific and ethical issues may not bereceiving the attention they deserve. Onother occasions we have pointed out someshortcomings in guidelines for the care oflaboratory animals. For example, the recentUS National Research Council guide ismore concerned with dogs than withrodents, possibly because of the influenceof veterinarians, who are trained to care forpet animals, in preparing the guidelines1.Yet rodents are by far the most commonlyused experimental species of mammal.

The current OECD document risksoverlooking some behavioural features oflaboratory animals that could help inimproving their general level of welfare. Totake one example, behavioural observa-tions aid in judging the vitality of the new-born rodent pup. The degree of spatial dis-persion at the nest site provides an assess-ment that is otherwise difficult in newbornsbefore their eyes are open, but under cur-rent guidelines is vital to the declaration ofthe ‘moribund’ state which compulsorilyprecedes euthanasia. In our experience, the ultrasonic calling pattern is also highly informative.

Furthermore, refined ethological tech-niques (some devised in our laboratory)provide improved, lower-suffering meth-ods for measuring the reaction of rodentstoward painful stimuli2. These experimen-tal protocols, protecting both data qualityand psychophysical welfare, received sub-stantial approval at the third internationalcongress on alternatives in animal use, heldin Bologna last summer3.

The care and maintenance of laboratoryanimals has to take into account the evolu-tionary history of the species under study.This is particularly true when the subjectsare laboratory-maintained male mice orfemale rats, living all their lives in unnatural

social settings which fairly frequently resultin fighting4. The need to consider behav-ioural and species-specific characteristics isalso relevant when primates are used asexperimental animals. The European Fed-eration of Primatology ( http://www.unipv.it/webbio/efp/efp.htm), through itsprimate expert group, is currently prepar-ing a series of recommendations on mini-mal cage-sizes and specific environmentalenrichment techniques, to be proposed tothe Council of Europe.

There is still much work to do, and weurgently need more reliable behaviouraldata. This is particularly true for animalsused for neuroscience research, where thereis possibly most potential for stress andovert suffering. The ethologist’s perspectivewill also be of great use given the explosionin use of transgenic mouse strains, some ofwhich have unexpectedly been found to behyperalgesic or to have abnormal levels offear and inter-male aggressive behaviour. Enrico Alleva, Augusto VitaleLaboratory of Physiopathology of Organ andSystem, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Viale ReginaElena 299, 1-00161 Rome, Italy1. Alleva, E. & Santucci, D. Ethology 103, 1072–1073 (1997).

2. Cirulli, F., De Acetis, L. & Alleva, E. in Progress in the Reduction,

Refinement and Replacement of Animal Experimentation (eds

Balls, M. et al.) (Elsevier, Amsterdam, in the press).

3. Balls, M. van Zeller, A.-M., Halder, M.(eds) Progress in the

Reduction, Refinement and Replacement of Animal

Experimentation (Elsevier, Amsterdam, in the press).

4. Alleva, E., Petruzzi, S. & Ricceri, L. in Behavioural Brain

Research in Naturalistic and Semi-Naturalistic Settings (eds

Alleva, E. et al.) 359–374 (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1995).

Planck family paid a highprice for opposing Hitler Sir — Your News item “German sciencestarts facing up to its historical amnesia”1

should rivet the attention of the livinggeneration of scientific workers on thetragic descent of broad sections of Germanscience and medicine into the embrace ofHitler and Goebbels.

Under the Third Reich, 45 per cent ofGerman physicians became Nazi partymembers2, and physicists of the rank ofStark and Lenard, together with the world-class mathematician Bieberbach, robustlyespoused Nazi doctrine and practice andrailed against contamination of the Ger-man academy by ‘Jewish physics’, notablyEinstein’s special relativity theory3.

Unfortunately, the doctored and undoc-tored 1934 group photo of Max Planckwhich accompanies your news item maymislead readers into conceiving Max Plankhimself to be a willing fraternizer with German fascism. In fact, Planck and hisclosest associate, Max von Laue, wereamong the first to assimilate and respond toEinstein’s great 1905 paper. As Einstein’sbiographer Abraham Pais notes4: “The

rapidity with which special relativitybecame a topic of discussion is largely dueto Planck’s early interest”.

These events in the first decade of thetwentieth century were followed by at leastthree memorable events under the ThirdReich. In 1933, during a face-to-face show-down, Planck pleaded in vain with a highlyagitated Führer to stop the Nazi purge of theGerman academy5. In 1935 Planck officiallydefied Hitler by publicly commemoratingFritz Haber at the Kaiser WilhelmInstitute6. And, in 1945, the Gestapo exe-cuted Planck’s last surviving child, ErwinPlanck, for complicity in the Stauffenbergconspiracy to assassinate Hitler.William Steinsmith239 Castenada Avenue, San Francisco, California94116, USA1. Abbott, A. Nature 403, 474 (2000).

2. The Value of the Human Being: Medicine in Germany,

1918–1945 (Ärztekammer, Berlin, 1991).

3. Nature 133, 290 (1934); 137, 93 & 141 (1936).

4. Pais, A. Subtle is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein

149–150 (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 1982).

5. Heilbron, J. L. The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck as

a Spokesman for German Science (Univ. of California Press,

Berkeley, 1986).

6. Nature 135, 216 (1935); 158, 170 (1946).

How to make diplomatsscientifically literate Sir — I read with great interest theOpinion article (Nature 404, 1; 2000)concerning attempts by the US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, to produce ascientifically literate State Department.Such attempts will, of course, fail in theend, since the approach being taken byAlbright and State Department officials is at best inconsequential, and at worst, perverse.

Hiring an upper-echelon official merelyexacerbates the already deleterious hierar-chical structure that exists in the US StateDepartment and does not achieve anyobjective whatsoever. The clear and obvi-ous way to improve the ‘scientific literacy’of State Department officials is, first, toremove the bias against scientists presentamong many diplomats in the StateDepartment and, second, to hire more (notfewer) scientists as foreign service officersand science attachés at embassies overseas,particularly those scientists who haveabundant international affairs experience,knowledge of foreign languages and exper-tise in global science policy.

Until the prejudiced belief that scientistssomehow cannot make competent diplo-mats is completely removed from the USState Department, actions like Albright’sare mere window-dressing.Peter CohenThe Herbarium, University of Michigan, AnnArbor, Michigan 48109, USA

correspondence

116 NATURE | VOL 405 | 11 MAY 2000 | www.nature.com© 2000 Macmillan Magazines Ltd