Funding Fears Prevent Researchers from Sharing Mice

Larry Reiter studies the chromosomal region 15q11-13, one of the genomic hotspots most firmly linked to autism. At his small lab at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, Reiter has sometimes relied on mutant mice — such as animals missing UBE3A, a key gene in the region — engineered by other groups for his experiments¹.But in the past couple of years, as competition has intensified in autism research, Reiter has had trouble gaining access to new mouse models. Frustrated, he has decided to focus instead on fruit flies.Reiter says he worries that others might be similarly discouraged. “People will shy away from working in this area, because they can’t get the mouse to work on,” he says.On paper, most funding organizations, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and SFARI — this website’s parent organization — as well as most scientific journals stipulate that once researchers publish details of a model animal, they must make the animals available to other labs (see list).“Failure to comply with the sharing plan may be carefully considered in future funding decisions for the investigator and their institution,” says J.P. Kim, director of the Division of Extramural Inventions and Technology Resources within the NIH Office of Extramural Research.In practice, however, many researchers intentionally delay sharing or don’t share at all.“It's sort of the ugly secret,” Reiter says. “There is a long and proud tradition in the mouse field of holding on to your mouse, sometimes for 20 years.”Read more at...SFARI, January 2012.