The Public Affairs Committee advises the APS Council on policy issues and how best to address them. The Committee also informs Council of specific initiatives undertaken by the Committee itself. The Committee recognizes the importance of careful integration of its activities with Council's goals as well as with activities of the Animal Care and Experimentation Committee, the Communications Committee, and the Science Policy Committee of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). It has worked closely with these groups to define and reach common goals. Likewise, the Public Affairs Committee works closely with the APS Office of Public Affairs both to coordinate activities and to more effectively communicate relevant issues to Council and, when appropriate, to the general membership.

A major focus of the Public Affairs Committee is to advocate for federal funding of biomedical research. As was true at the time of last year's report, results of our efforts over the past year have been disappointing. With much of the legislative and executive attention being devoted to funding US military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, funding for NIH, in particular, suffered and continued to lose ground taken during the doubling effort. While the slightly increased NIH budget does not keep up with inflation, the budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs will actually decline. APS and its Public Affairs Committee continue to work with elected representatives to assure their having all the information that they need to realize that stagnant (or declining) funding of NIH, VA, and NSF would have a negative short and long-term impact on the health of research in our country. However, it is essential that members of the Society take every possible opportunity to act as their own advocates in that regard. Calls to advocacy through the FASEB Legislative Action Center (LAC) need action from our members. Calls and other communications from scientists clearly can have an impact on Congressional opinion and votes as exemplified by recent successes in the House when it considered expanding access to embryonic stem cells.

In order to promote advocacy amongst its members APS participates with the (FASEB) to expedite and enhance advocacy through the LAC, which is run by FASEB after being initially developed by APS.  The LAC can now be accessed on the FASEB web site at http://capwiz.com/faseb/home/. The Public Affairs Committee urges APS members to act through that site to promote issues that they feel are critical for American biomedical science and to stay alert to calls for action that can be made through that site.

One critical issue for physiologists is continued use of animals in research and teaching. Therefore, the Chair of the Public Affairs Committee, serving as Chair of the FASEB Animal Issues Subcommittee, has prepared and installed on the FASEB website a page that deals with use of animals in research. Among other informative features on that page is a Power Point presentation that deals with benefits derived by use of animals in research, counterarguments to statements made by animal rights advocates, and mechanisms that are in place to assure proper, humane use of animals in research. The user can select any or all slides from the website for insertion in lectures to emphasize the important role that animal studies have had in physiological work.

Federal funding of biomedical research has remained a top priority for the Public Affairs Committee. The Committee recognizes that not only have budget legislation and external forces contributed to reduce NIH (and other federal) dollars for research, but also that reorientations of priorities within the support agencies have led to the potential for redirection of support. Therefore, the Public Affairs Committee has worked with Council to revisit the relationship between APS and the "Bridging the Sciences Initiative," which seeks to expand NIH support of cooperative ventures between the non-biomedical and the biomedical sciences. In a time of decreased legislated support for NIH such a redirection of support could lead to reduced investigator initiated grant support in the biomedical sciences, an outcome that would be counter to the interests of the APS membership.  Similarly APS and FASEB have sought to provide input to the NIH to assure that implementation of the roadmap would not itself compromise access to investigator-initiated grant support.

The Public Affairs Committee and APS continue to work closely with FASEB on numerous other public affairs issues. These include scientific ethics, peer review, use of animals in research, postdoctoral training and postdoctoral support, conflict of interest issues at NIH, advanced public access policies by NIH, and open access publishing. The Chair of the APS Public Affairs Committee serves on FASEB's Science Policy Committee (SPC) and, on that committee, chairs the Animal Issues Subcommittee. Further, he is a member of the NIH Issues Subcommittee, the Public Access Subcommittee, and the ad hoc committee on oversight by the Office of Management and Budget. Through that membership APS has been represented on FASEB position papers and letters regarding conflict of interest policy at NIH, advanced public access and its potentially deleterious effects on societies and journals, OMB efforts to apply the Program Rating Assessment Tool (PART) to assess the product of federal funding of research, and policies on embryonic stem cell research. The Chair of the APS Public Affairs Committee has recently accepted appointment for a three-year term as the FASEB representative to the Board of Trustees of the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC) where he joins the Chair of the APS Animal Care and Experimentation Committee as a member.

The Public Affairs Committee continues to work with officials at NIH in efforts to promote training and retention of scientists in integrative or systems physiology. APS efforts have com�plimented those of other FASEB societies such as ASPET and AAA. The organizations seek to emphasize the need for development of scientists who can bring the innovations allowed by molecular biological approaches to whole animal research and the study of mechanisms that underlie systems physiology. Such a multifaceted approach to the study of physiology is in keeping with the NIH Roadmap and promotes integrative and systems science as a partner with more cellular approaches. 

The Public Affairs Committee recognizes that it is an instrument of the Society as a whole and must work to respond to the needs of the Society as directed by its leadership. Within the next year Council and the Executive leadership of APS will seek to revitalize the Society's strategic plan. The Public Affairs Committee has begun it analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT analysis) as they relate to public affairs efforts of our society. To promote Public Affairs and make it even more responsive, the Committee will seek to enhance further its communication with Council and with the Section Advisory Committee, thus providing an expanded avenue for membership to have the needs that it recognizes addressed.  Implicit in that responsibility, however, is recognition that advocacy cannot be effectively applied through committee. It is the responsibility of each member of the Society to speak forth on issues that affect us all. Public Affairs will continue to seek to provide members the most "user-friendly" means to do so.

William T. Talman, Chair

Council Actions

• Council accepted the report of the Public Affairs Committee.

• Council authorized the Committee to make broad based announcements to APS members prior to annual corporate shareholder meetings so that APS members can be made aware of resolutions brought by organizations such as PETA and choose to vote against such resolutions.