Chapter 07: The Veterinarian as Research Collaborator
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Description
Dr. Satterfield here talks about the role he has served as Attending Veterinarian. He explains that this title was established as a result of FDA’s and the animal welfare act administered by the Animal Care and Use Committee. Though an Attending Veterinarian must report all violations of guidelines to the committee, Dr. Satterfield sees his role as a problem solver who helps investigators to think through protocols and clearly define their purposes and methods. He stresses that he sees his role as a facilitator who develops teams and fosters effective collaboration. He then describes how the FDA animal welfare regulations were set in place because of very public instances in which animals were mistreated –in some cases in the course of practicing poor science. At the time, the public also believed that pets were being used for research; he insists that MD Anderson has never used any dogs previously owned as pets for research. He notes the Tumor Referral Program, begun prior to his arrival in 1983, and run in both Bastrop and Houston, which enables the public to bring dogs suffering from canine lymphoma for treatment. He tells a touching story of a mother who brought in a dog that had belonged to her 10-year-old son who had been killed. The animal was all she felt she had left of her son. Dr. Satterfield notes that the Program’s purpose is to extend the life of pets.
Identifier
SatterfieldWC_01_20120724_C07
Publication Date
7-24-2012
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
William C. Satterfield, DVM, Oral History Interview, July 24, 2012
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - The ResearcherThe Administrator MD Anderson and Government Overview Definitions, Explanations, Translations Ethics Human Stories
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That's wonderful. Can I ask you about your other responsibilities and research activities now? Is that—? Can we do that?
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
Sure. We've got a couple of minutes. I'm going to— Probably in five minutes I'm going to have to break for this evening because I've got another conference call that I have to take with a study that we're trying to start. I think Mary Jane had set you up for—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, okay. I had on my calendar, actually, until 4:00, but that's okay.
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
Okay. All right.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And then we have another session tomorrow?
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
You get me at 3:30. She said 3:30.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, okay. There was a miscommunication, because I actually didn't communicate directly with her. I was communicating with—
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
We'll go to 3:30.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
We'll go to 3:30, okay. You may have already answered this question sort of obliquely, but maybe I misunderstood. In 1983 you came here, and it said that you were attending veterinarian. Did that mean for all of the animals or just for the chimpanzees?
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
No. Actually that title of attending veterinarian is a position that is mandated by the Department of Agriculture for the Animal Welfare Act.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Can you tell me about that—animal welfare? When did that go into effect?
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
The Animal Welfare Act's been around quite a while. I want to say probably in the ‘70s. I'm not sure exactly when, but I know at least when I came here in '83 the Animal Welfare Act had been—was already—but it's been amended several times. Sometime around '86 or something like that, they mandated that they set up Animal Care and Use Committees to review all studies that were going to be done. Part of that was that each facility should have what they call an attending veterinarian that is the person that was responsible to the committee—to report to the committee—anything that's not being done in accordance to their—if it's in violation of the Animal Welfare Act. Everybody self-reports problems, but the attending veterinarian is a person that is a veterinarian, a DVM, but is a liaison between the researchers and the committee.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I'm trying to get a picture of what kind of problems there might be. What sorts of violations would you—?
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
You'd have researchers maybe do surgeries that they weren't approved for. You could have them ordering animals that they didn't have authorization to order. You could have animals die unexpectedly from a study that needed to be reviewed by the committee. There are lots of different items that crop up.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now when I've talked—
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
It's oversight.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, when I've spoken to some other individuals who have worked in this oversight role or who have been conducting studies and have worked from the other side with these regulations, some of them have pretty strong opinions about how this kind of regulation actually interferes with research. What's your view of that in the case of these animal use regulations?
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
You see me smiling because I deal with that. The investigators seem to think that the IACUC, the Animal Care and Use Committee—that's the I-A-C-U-C—is there to cause problems to them. Actually, I think we solve a lot of their problems because we ask them to clearly think through what they're going to do, to have a purpose, have an endpoint, to have the number of animals that they're going to use, justify it statistically. If they can't do that, then they need to go back and think about it some more. In fact, the government—NIH—requires anybody getting any money from them to have IACUC approval. Also, some of those things that they may be using—chemicals and so forth—also have to be approved by the Institutional Biosafety Committee. We make sure that they get approval by Biosafety, and Biosafety— On the other hand, when they apply for the use of a chemical that the IACUC reviewed, they are reviewed and approve their animal use. Our primary use is to make sure the animals are treated humanely. That's all we care about. We don't review their science, although if their science is dumb—to use a real lay term—we'll say, "Why are you doing this? It's already been done," or "Justify it." Sometimes you need to repeat studies. There's no question about that, but if this is something that has been done ad infinitum, and they're doing it again, it's like, "Why are you doing that? What do you hope to get out of this that hasn't already been done?" or "That's not the appropriate use of this animal. There are other animals.” A lot of times we'll say, "Consult with this particular individual. They can help you design a better study that costs less and is less costly to animals."
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I'm starting to get this sense of your all-facilitator role that you've taken on and a lot of—
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
I hope I've been able to do that—facilitate. That's what I try to do. I try to develop teams. That's our goal is to develop teams. I love working with the Skorackis and the Millers and the Hassenbusches. Things that I can do, they can't do. Things that they know and their experience and their training—it helps us do cutting-edge type of science.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Raising the humanity with which everything involved is being treated.
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
Right.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
We just have a couple minutes left before I know you need to close off, and I wanted to ask you, why do you think these regulations about animal care and safety were instituted when they were? Historically, what was kind of the thinking in the country or in the Zeitgeist, if you were, that was creating that need?
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
There are people that can answer that probably better than I but I think there was a general concern that things were not being—that animals were being mistreated. There was one case where there was a head trauma study in Pennsylvania, I believe it was. It didn't look good. Not only that, it probably wasn't good science. It made a lot of national—had a lot of national exposure. People were righteously upset. Part of it— But then the other part— There was another part where they felt like a lot of pets were going into research. I don't know if that ever happened. We used to have—back when I first started here—we had random source dogs come in here from Abilene that were turned into the pound. I had dogs that we would actually call Abilene and say, "Are you sure this is a dog—?" "Yeah, somebody turned it in." But we never had a pet dog here. I had thousands of dogs come through here. I don't know. There's a real— Now we have all these no-kill shelters and so forth, but there's always been a problem with pet overpopulation. Having said that, one of the early things that we did, too, is we had a tumor referral program here when I first came, and that was one of the things I was charged with was maintaining what we call Central Services. I was in charge of Central Services, and part of what we did was private individuals or pet owners, if their dog was diagnosed with canine lymphoma, we had some protocols that we were trying out, and we would treat them here at no charge to the owner. We asked for donations, but we couldn't charge them according to state regulations. We treated a lot of animals over a number— I treated a lot of animals for lymphoma over a number of years for the community.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, was that also part of—? Were you trying new procedures on those animals or—?
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
Not really. We just had protocols, and we worked with Texas A&M and we tried— There is no cure for canine lymphoma. We were trying to extend the life of these pets that— I had one lady come in with her dog. Her husband said, "This dog is so important to her" because her son—and she had a picture of her son—who was like 10, had just been tragically killed. That was her link to her son. He said, "Whatever you can do, Doc, to prolong this animal's life, we would be most grateful for." I did everything I could do to prolong that animal's life because it meant so much to her because of her attachment to that dog through her boy.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Why did you begin that program of treating canines?
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
It was already going on when I came here. They had— That was one of the things that Dr. Jardine and Dr. Keeling had started. They were actually doing it in Houston, too. It was a joint program. We treated them. They treated them down there, and we compared our results to see if we could make any big breakthroughs. We didn't actually make any big breakthroughs. There have been some breakthroughs in the last few years in canine lymphoma, but that's twenty-something years, twenty-nine years. Just like hepatitis and AIDS. Still don't have a cure for AIDS.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Again, that slow process.
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
Takes a lot of little, small nicks here and there to try to understand how to defeat a particular disease.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
We're at 3:30, so why don't we stop for today?
William C. Satterfield, DVM:
Okay. I'll be able to spend more time—we'll be able to spend more time in the morning, I guess. I want to give you a tour as well.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That will be great. All right. Thank you. It's 3:30, and I'm turning off the recorder. ( End of Audio Session 1) MDA-RML_Satterfield, William C., DVM Session 2: July 25, 2012
Recommended Citation
Satterfield, William C. DVM and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 07: The Veterinarian as Research Collaborator" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1509.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1509
Conditions Governing Access
Open
