New Scientist interviews Albert Osterhaus, whose “virus hunter” work is widely acknowledged to be among the best in recent memory. A selection on his SARS experiment:
New Scientist: But you didn’t get approval from your university’s ethics committee for the macaque experiments. Why?
Osterhaus: We didn’t have the time to consult an animal ethics panel, as required by Dutch law. We thought it was important to do these experiments as soon as possible since there was a lot of confusion about the primary cause of SARS, and people were dying. Without the monkeys it would have taken much longer to find the cause of SARS. So we did this a little bit the “unconventional” way and got permission from the highest civil servant in the Ministry of Health. Animal rights activists got upset, and there was even more discussion in the Dutch parliament about how we could have done what we did. We don’t normally violate any laws, but this was an exceptional case.
So is there an issue with the key researcher in the discovery that SARS coronavirus was the cause of the epidemic in humans (which broke out in Hong Kong and quickly spread) making the choice to bypass ethics review for his animal studies in the interest of speed? PETA members think so. They even argue, to this day, that it is shameful that he maintains that he was able to identify that the virus may have jumped from cats (and other similar animals) to people only by destroying a “vast number” of cats.