We are privileged to have Dr Manuel Berdoy with us on the evening of 28th August 2017 to give us a talk on :

Experimental Design, Behaviour and the Avoidance of Unnecessary Suffering in the Biomedical Sciences.

Experimental Design in biology is mostly about logic, common sense and the systematic application of relatively simple techniques to produce un-biased experimental results. This is good news because this should be relatively straightforward. Yet this is where the biggest blunders continue to be made in the fields of Biomedical Sciences, with expensive consequences on results, animal suffering and funding.

I aim to address some of the essential principles that are behind designing good animal experiments. This will range from a reminder of the traps in which we have all fallen into, to the importance of understanding animal behaviour, all in a short session where I hope that words “enjoyment” and “statistics” can belong in the same sentence.

A little background on him.

Dr. Manuel Berdoy is Director of the FELASA-accredited training programme on Animal Management and Welfare at Oxford University, UK. His interests, usually within an evolutionary framework, have ranged from animal social behaviour to parasite manipulation and, in the last 15 years, animal welfare, experimental design and statistics, and education in some fields of biomedical sciences. His film “The Laboratory Rat: A Natural History” (now freely available at https://youtu.be/giu5WjUt2GA) was nominated for 14 international awards. He is one of the co-authors with Michael Festing of book on the “The Design of Animal Experiments” and Manuel was awarded the RSPCA Sir Peter Moore award for outstanding contribution to animal welfare science last year.