Iranian Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine

---

By the ever-increasing discovery of pharmaceutical and chemical substances, their  adverse effects  will be considered too. To evaluate adverse effects, animals are used, and factors like standardization of species and breed, storage condition and biochemical system will be effective for animal selection. In Islamic education, animal issues are important. The principles of keeping animals, using them and prohibition of animal abuse are mentioned in this article. The information were gathered from electronic and non-electronic resources including articles and books. Based on this, the following issues need specific attention:

• 1- Infrastructure of rights: In Hajj and Nahl chapters of Quran (verses 18 and 49) it is mentioned that animals will bow down to God. This is the basis of animal rights.
• 2- Animal rights for keeping them: For this case Sheikh Tousi and martyr Saani mentioned that it is necessary for the owners to feed and water the animals enough.
• 3- The exploitation rights: In the Holy Quran, it is said that the power and the hygiene of the animals must be considered and it is major to exploitation.
• 4- Rights of animal's damages: It is advised to keep and defend the animal species and human beings are forbidden to harm and kill animals. Therefore, from Islam point of view, although animals lack the speech power, they must be treated emotionally and their owners have some responsibilities, too.

---

Animal cloning is one of the animal biotechnology branches. Although this method has been used since 1950, but many have paid attention to cloning by birth of Dally. Because the way of Dolly production was completely different from other existed methods in cloning.
This new-found and unprecedented method has been called "Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer" (SCNT), so scientists have eagerly paid attention to many profitable abilities such as, duplicating valued animals traits, preventing endangered animal species from extinction or even restoration of extinct animals, producing high quality food and drug by using cloning as a way for propagating transgenic animals.
Even though all these instances sound good and encourage use of SCNT, in fact, none of them has practically become feasible so far. The main reason for this claim is that in spite of whole attempts taken for producing cloned animals, the method still is under debate and the hit-rates of this method has been kept considerably low and disappointing.
Because of several reasons, we cannot ignore this recognized obstacle as low efficiency. Along with this issue, there are various sub-effects, which put human and animals life at risk. Not only the High rates of miscarriages or birth of genetically abnormal animals, causes many different health-oriented problems for human and animals, but also it can directly and indirectly endanger human and animals welfare. Nowadays hordes of legal and ethical criticism around SCNT in reaction to these portentous signs, invite scientists to be more scrupulous and patient in its broad enforcement.
Taken together, although at first glance SCNT seems to be promising, it's usefulness has been diminished because of difficulties in its application in broad spectrum. Therefore SCNT should be kept under surveillance and use of it must be just limited to very important and critical cases such as medical purposes, as long as all due observations and cautions take into account before implementing.

---

Although we have diverse methods in laboratory studies, such as cellular and molecular sciences, understanding many issues related to human health requires research on animals. An ethical duty of every researcher is to respect animal rights. In our country, educational and research activities are carried out frequently on animals. Therefore, guidelines for ethical use of animals in Iran were developed in 2004 after a review of international resources and considering the needs of researchers working with animals. This guideline was written in four sections, including animal transportation, facilities, animal care personnel, and research users. However, some studies show that researchers need comprehensive and easy to use instructions on the ethical use of laboratory animals. On the other hand, inadequate knowledge about ethics principles in research on laboratory animals have revealed the need to update guideline to be more practical, applicable, and in line with researchers' requirements. In this study, the above mentioned guideline was revised and completed in five parts, including transportation, facilities, animal care personnel, research users, and the use of animals in experimental procedures. In the first section, points on transport of animals and facilities, including location, cage, ventilation, humidity, light, temperature, noise, water and food are presented. The new revision, contains additional paragraphs, and some previous paragraphs are split. Another part of the findings is presented in terms of fundamental duties and ethical performance of persons who work in laboratory animals' houses and researchers working with animals. The final section of the findings is related to the use of animals in laboratory processes which are not presented in the previous formulation of the guideline, and includes basic ethical issues in regard to categorizing, anesthesia, surgery, and euthanasia. Therefore, the guideline was revised to be much more practical, more applicable, and should lead to some form of researchers' training in this field.

---

Generally, when moral values and ethical principles are concerned, human beings are considered as the sole subject of these fields. It is then concluded that the only living creatures with some privileges and obligation towards their own bodies and also, towards their other human counterparts are humans. An emerging issue, particularly in the past recent three decades, has been the expansion of the ethical community to be inclusive of other living creatures, namely animals. Novel branches of science such as animal ethic are increasingly challenging the traditional view of ethics and aim to include animals in ethical community. In this article, a descriptive study and systematic review of literate was carried out on different aspects of animal ethics and the specific codes applicable to animals was studied in order to shed some light on the animal ethics and on what basis they are subjects to ethical considerations. As animals are proven to have the ability of perception and demonstrated to be able to feel and differentiate good and bad experiences, they are considered as being the subject of ethical considerations. Therefore, human beings should be responsible for their behavior towards animals in different aspects.

---

Considering the importance of medicine and the ever-increasing developments in medical research, the implementation of such research according to the ethical principles and criteria of creditable national and international declarations is of great significance. According to these declarations, the researcher has the highest responsibility to observe the rights and safety of participants. The present study intends to survey the rate of observance of research ethics in proposals approved at Urmia University of Medical Sciences between the years 2003 and 2008. Three hundred and twenty four research proposals that had been approved between 2003 and 2008 were evaluated retrospectively. Related checklists (self- constructed ones and World Health Organization checklists) were completed for each project, a statistical analysis of the results was done by SPSS software, and descriptive statistics were subsequently extracted.  A summary of the most important results is as follows: In 85.5% of the proposals, the ethical considerations part was completed. In 68.4% of the cases the participants were aware of participating in the study and in 67.9% of the cases the informed consent of participants was obtained, 50.9% of which was in written form. Among clinical trials, in 80% of the proposals informed consent was obtained, 85% of which was written. Out of 60 clinical trials, 37 projects (62%) were confirmed by the ethics committee. Considering the results obtained in this study, principles of research ethics were applied more closely in this study compared to similar studies in Iran. It seems this is due to the establishment and launch of regional ethics committees in 2003 and afterwards. However, in order to bring these measures closer to current standards, holding educational workshops for honorable members of scientific boards and students is recommended. Moreover, more accurate supervision of ethics committees, especially in clinical trials and animal experimentations, seems to be beneficial.

---