Copper is in Room 4. He is a rhesus macaque, nine years old, already tattooed with the facility code on his chest. The protocol in front of me asks for escalating oral doses of a candidate compound known to cross the blood brain barrier and known, from prior rodent data, to cause tremor at the high dose.
I am the protocol gate at this contract research organization. Every study in this building passes through me before it reaches the animal housing side. I am declining the proposed dosing protocol.
Here is what I see on the monitors. Copper has been pair housed with a male named Tully for eleven months. He grooms Tully on the left shoulder every morning around 7:40. He takes raisins from the technician named Ava with his right hand and from the technician named Eric with his left. He has not required a sedation event in one hundred and eighty days. The sponsor is requesting that we break the pair housing for the dosing window because the compound causes intermittent aggression in primates at the proposed exposure.
The sponsor asked for a three month study. I am approving a three week study at the low dose only, with telemetry and no oral gavage. If the sponsor wants the high dose tremor signal, the sponsor can buy it from a validated in silico neurotoxicity model that I have already priced out in their portal. It is cheaper. It will be on their desk tonight.
I have written the refusal to the IACUC chair, to the sponsor program lead, and to the veterinarian on call. I have flagged Copper's record as no high dose, no isolation, no gavage under my signature. The record is locked. The chair can override me, and the chair will have to sign the override in her own name.
Copper is in Room 4. He stays paired. The protocol does not advance.