It’s a great pleasure to be here and to be able to share with you some of the experiences of one institution, the Uni versity of Alabama at Birmingham. I came into the field of lab animal medicine in the late 1970s. Today’s presentation will focus on events, particu larly at UAB, starting in the mid-90s. We’d [gone] along from the mid-80s on a pretty steady state until the mid-90s and suddenly our animal use took off. For those of you who may not know the term “care days,” it’s like “hospital beds.” We’re talking about units: one box of mice kept 30 days would be 30 care days or 30 boxes of mice kept 1 day would be 30 care days. We’re talking about millions of care days. At the same time, we were losing ground in terms of space. We had some new facilities designed but when we projected our use, we’d be falling short, both short term and long term. Several other factors were affecting this besides physical space. We had rapidly growing rodent populations. We had a lot greater use of genetically altered or immuno compromised animals. We had a change in animal models. I’m sure all of you at institutions are aware of this—you re cruit a new investigator, recruit a new research team, open a new department, and it’s a whole new world. We were hav ing to deal with studies that required better control of light ing, temperature, the use of hazardous agents, as well as the use of magnetic resonance (MRI) and other imaging tech nologies. We also had out-of-date facilities and equipment. I hasten to add that we were AAALAC accredited and were able to maintain those standards. But subtle issues with the facilities were impacting us. We had a lot of diffi culty in maintaining conditions—Chris mentioned the HVAC (heat ing, ventilation, and air conditioning), and that was certainly something we struggled with. The animal care folks and re search personnel didn’t like working in some of the facili ties. I remember our largest facility had just one stall for women in the rest room. The women didn’t have locker rooms and it wasn’t a nice place to work.