Animal Class: Week 3

I feel like I'm taking Mike's EU class with details on regulations and bureaucracy.

Quotes of the week, typed directly with >95% accuracy.

You may feel that we're being picky. Well, we're being picky for a reason. Someone from USDA comes once a year, unannounced. This year, he was here for 4 DAYS! He spent 3 days reading through our protocols!

Subcommittee chairs spend 3 hours in their meetings and 4 hours in the full committee meeting. That's 7 hours of someone's time...this shows how much we care! The full committee meets once a month and there must be a quorum - we can't do it by email. The whole point is to have a discussion, and you can't have a discussion by email. People don't necessarily say what they want in email.

If you have to submit edits and changes, it's a good idea to highlight what you changed to make it easier for us to figure that out.

The whole filling out forms on Microsoft Word, that's over. Now you fill out your forms online...basically the internet. You'll be filling out an internet type form on a secure website. These forms are what they call quote unquote smart forms. You'll be asked a series of questions and it's kinda like a credit card application, if you haven't filled out a box, they won't let you submit it. This is a big committment for the university. It's $200,000 and paying people for 6 months to get these user-friendly forms for you.

Lay language for the IRB is on a 6th grade level. It's hard for our investigators to go down to that level. We have a non-scientist on the committee and that member has to be able to understand it.