September 2002 News

CAAT Recognition Award Presented to Paul Flecknell

September 30, 2002

Paul Flecknell, one of the world's leading experts in identifying and managing pain in laboratory animals, received the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) Recognition Award for 2002. The award was presented at the recent Fourth World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences in New Orleans.

The CAAT award, presented at every World Congress, honors an individual (or organization) who has made an outstanding contribution to the development of alternative methods or the field of in vitro science. Flecknell was chosen from a list of international nominees for his "unceasing dedication to the identification and elimination of pain in laboratory animal experiments."

For more than 25 years, Flecknell has attempted to make life less painful for laboratory animals by bringing them better analgesia and anesthesia. His work is cited in nearly every paper that discusses pain in laboratory animals.

Currently director of the Comparative Biology Centre at the University of Newcastle, he qualified from Cambridge Veterinary School in 1976 and worked for a year at the University of Bristol as a F.A.B. Scholar. He then joined the Medical Research Council's Clinical Research Centre at Harrow, where he was responsible for animal health and welfare in the research animal facility. During this period he completed his doctorate in neonatal physiology and developed his major interest in animal anesthesia and analgesia. He holds the Diploma in Laboratory Animal Science of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons and is also a Diplomate of the European College of Veterinary Anaesthesia and the European College of Labaoratory Animal Medicine. He was appointed to a personal professorship in Laboratory Animal Science in 1997.

Today he is president of the Association of Veterinary Anaesthetists, vice-chairman of the editorial board of "Laboratory Animals," and a member of the editorial board of the "Veterinary Journal" and "Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia." He is a member of the board of both the British Veterinary Association Animal Welfare Foundation and the Doerenkamp and Zbinden Foundation. He is a member of the UK Home Office Animal Procedures Committee.

Flecknell was awarded the Livesey Medal by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in 1986 for work on anaesthesia and analgesia of laboratory animals, the GV-SOLAS Prize for Laboratory Animal Science and the Doerenkamp-Zbinden Foundation for Realistic Animal Protection in Scientific Research award in 1991, the Research Defence Society--SmithKline Beecham Laboratory Animal Welfare Prize in 1993 and the WARDS Refinement Project Award in 1996. In 1992 he visited Guelph as a Canadian Commonwealth Fellow, and in 1997 was elected an Honorary Associate of the British Laboratory Animal Veterinary Association.

For more information on the Recognition Award, please see the CAAT web site at http://caat.jhsph.edu/about-us/awards.htm.