July 2000 News

Danish Toxicologist Receives Nordic Prize for Alternatives to Animal Experiments

July 20, 2000

This year's Nordic Prize for Alternatives to Animal Experiments was awarded to Eva Selzer Rasmussen, a toxicologist with the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration. She has been conducting research into alternatives to animal experiments for 20 years.

Denmark's Minister of the Interior, Karen Jespersen, presented the prize to Rasmussen during the Conference on Alternatives to Animal Experiments, held May 3-4 in Copenhagen. The Nordic Prize, established in 1996, seeks to support scientists who work to replace animal experiments with other methods. Three organizations jointly fund the prize: the Danish Alternativfondet, the Swedish Stifelsen Forskning utan Djurforsok, and the Finnish Juliana von Wendts Stifelse.

Rasmussen has served as a senior scientist at the Institute of Food Safety and Toxicology under the Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Fisheries since 1986. She has been active in the development of toxicological in vitro methods, focusing especially on alternatives to cancer experimentation, eye irritation tests, and animal experiments resulting in death by poisoning. She has published many scientific articles and reports on the use of non-animal alternatives, including an extensive monograph on the "Prospects for Use of In Vitro Methods for Assessment of Human Safety."

The conference on alternatives was the first of its kind in Denmark. The Danish Society for the Protection of Laboratory Animals (Forsøgsdyrenes Værn) organized the conference, with talks by some of the world's leading experts in the alternatives field, in an effort to spur the development and use of alternative methods in Denmark. "With this conference we hope that both decision-makers and the research industry will become aware that research into alternatives to animal experiments should be advanced and given a high priority," said Bente Lakjer, the society's director.