Letter of the President

GET INVOLVED!

With the first 2008 issue of the Newsletter, I take the opportunity to share with you our objectives for the next two years for the SGV / SSEAL.

Communication inside our society: Get involved!

The Newsletter is a good media for inside communication. From now on we are sending you the newsletter per email in order to save time and money. It will also allow us some more speed to send you from time to time special issues about exceptional events.

The Annual Training Meetings are probably the best way to communicate between members, to share experiences and to participate to the life of the SGV / SSEAL. Surprisingly enough, if the attendance to our meetings is very high, we have observed that more non-members than SGV / SSEAL members are attending. We are more than 180 members. I wish that we will see them all at our next meeting in November (see announce-ment inside).

SGV / SSEAL is often asked to comment FELASA or other European institutions pro-jected recommendation or other legal papers. The board is heavily involved in this. As the topics are becoming more and more complex, we will from now on give to every member the opportunity to contribute to the review of these papers. You will get from time to time per email a proposal to comment new proposals. As president of our society, I hope that you will participate and contribute positively.

Finally, good communication is also based on a lively and up-to-dated website. Here we can improve a lot. We are currently working on a new website which should go public before the end of the year.

Networking in guidelines, training and research: Get Involved… again !

Networking for legal matters: our network outside of Switzerland is well represented by tight links with FELASA for what concerns guidelines and legal matters. In Switzerland, our contacts with the Federal Veterinary Office are also fruitful. I do not expect more progress in this direction

Networking for training matter: at the level of training in animal experimentation and the 3Rs, exchanges with GV-SOLAS / IGTp and the 3R Foundation have been very successful in 2007. In 2009, collaboration with ESLAV and SAVIR is planned. In the future we probably will continue exchanges with other organisations; it is always motivating and brings new ideas input. Our annual meetings are well attended and of good quality. Two other kinds of trainings could be available to the scientific community. E-training could be developed as it is more and more developed in academic teaching. This could allow people to invest in more in-depth subjects of direct interest to the experimenter. Another very important training opportunity would be special LAS skills acquired by people visiting laboratories around the country. For the latter, a database of laboratories with specific LAS specialities could be built up to provide the relevant addresses. If there are members interested to build up such database, please contact a member of the board. This would be great.

Networking for the Swiss Laboratory Animal Science community: what for me is more ambitious and still a dream is to set up a Swiss Laboratory Animal Science Network able to launch programs with researchers inside and outside Switzerland. In collaboration with the LTK of Zurich, there are certainly opportunities to grow up to a critical mass for a competitive Swiss LAS research team. How to reach this goal? Just another “Get involved” tune!

I hope that we will concretise some of the ideas presented here. I wish you a very pleasant time to read this issue of the SGV / SSEAL Newsletter and hope to see you at our next meeting in Basel.

Marcel Gyger, President