IACUC Proposal Instructions Assume you are a member of an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). Besides yourself, the committee includes a veterinarian, a biologist, a philosopher, and a respected business executive in the community.

The following is a summary of a research proposal that has been submitted to the IACUC for review.

You are asked to consider what questions you might want to ask the investigator and whether you would approve carrying out this study at your institution in its present form, whether modification should be made before approval, or whether the proposal should not be approved. (An actual research proposal submitted to an IACUC would include more details than we present here.)

Rationale The researchers seek to investigate the role of subcortical structures in the limbic system in moderating emotion and aggression.

This proposal is based on previous research from this laboratory which has shown a significant relationship between damage in various subcortical brain areas of monkey subjects and changes in eating, aggression, and other social behaviors (e.g., courtship). The areas under investigation are those that sometimes have been excised in psychosurgery with humans when attempting to control hyper aggressive and assaultive behaviors.

Moreover, the particular subcortical area that is the focus of the present proposal has been hypothesized to be involved in controlling certain sexual activities that are sometimes the subject of psychological treatment (e.g., hypersexuality).

Previous studies have been unable to pinpoint the exact areas thought to be involved in controlling these behaviors; the proposed research seeks to improve on this knowledge.

Method Two groups of rhesus monkeys will be the subjects. One group ( N 5 4) will be a control group. These animals will undergo a sham operation, which involves anesthetizing them and drilling a hole in the skull. These animals then will be tested and evaluated in the same manner as the experimental animals. The experimental group ( N 5 4) will undergo an operation to lesion a small part of a subcortical structure known as the amygdala. Two of the animals will have lesions in one site; the remaining two will receive lesions in another site of this structure. After recovery, all animals will be tested on a variety of tasks measuring their food preferences, social behaviors with same-sex and opposite-sex monkeys, and emotional responsiveness (e.g., reactions to a novel fear stimulus: an experimenter in a clown face).

The animals will be housed in a modern animal laboratory; the operations will be performed and recovery monitored by a licensed veterinarian.

After testing, the experimental animals will be sacrificed and the brains prepared for histological examination. (Histology is necessary to confirm the locus and extent of lesions.) The control animals will not be killed; they will be returned to the colony for use in future experiments.