 The UK is a world leader in high quality medical research. A small but vital part of this involves the use of animals. Animal welfare is important for very many reasons. The first is that as a scientist, to be quite practical, you want to have the most reproducible experimental conditions that you can. But the other reason that you want animal welfare to be so important is nobody wants to do experiments on animals and certainly nobody wants to hurt animals if you can possibly avoid it. So the idea is to make their lives as best as possible for them. We have named vets, we have administration staff and we're all here to work with the scientists in helping them with their research. The animals that we use at Imperial are mainly mice. We also use some rats and we have a few rabbits. We also use zebrafish at Imperial. Rats are part of a study looking at checking behaviour and we're interested in the circuits of the brain that control checking behaviour. We use surgical techniques to just inactivate part of their frontal cortex. We're working with a new world monkey called the common marmoset and we're using the marmoset because whilst the rodent brain in some ways is mainly very similar to that of humans the primate brain has the much more closer resemblance to human brain and when you're studying these kinds of complex human behaviours then ultimately at some point you need to study a brain that's a lot more similar to the human than a rodent. It's very important that also during the period of research we're aware of other techniques that may be developing such that at some point it may no longer be necessary to use animal models because that's something we call replacement to answer or even carry on looking at that research question.