E is for Ethics? the Formation of Animal Experiments Committees in the Netherlands (1978-1997)

Animal Ethics Committees (aec s) have, for decades, been deciding on the permissibility of experiments using nonhuman animals and thereby also on the fate of millions of nonhuman animals. To deepen our understanding of how aec s function and what this has meant for the nonhuman animals tested upon, this article analyzes how a legally required ethics review by aec s came about in the Netherlands and how regulators and committee members dealt with the new task of ethical decision making and judging the suffering of other animals. To get a better sense of how the aec s functioned in practice and what this has meant for specific nonhuman animals, the creation and development of the aec of the Dutch National Institute of Public Health and Environment (rivm) is also described. This analysis shows that while the question of what an ethics review is or should be remained unresolved, aec s at the same time became an accepted part of scientific practice and took on a legitimizing function, moreover, despite the lack of ethical clarity.