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From Nature magazine
Loretta, Ricky, Tiffany and Torian lead increasingly quiet lives, munching peppers and plums, perching and swinging in their 16-cubic-metre glass enclosures. They are the last four chimpanzees at Bioqual, a contract firm in Rockville, Maryland, that since 1986 has housed young chimpanzees for use by the nearby National Institutes of Health (NIH). Now an animal-advocacy group is demanding that the animals' roles as research subjects is brought to an end.
Researchers at the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Food and Drug Administration have used the juvenile chimpanzees to study hepatitis C and malaria, as well as other causes of human infection, such as respiratory syncytial virus and norovirus. But now the NIH’s demand for ready access to chimpanzees is on the wane as the scientists who relied on them retire and social and political pressures against their use grow. The four remaining chimps are set to be returned soon to their owner, the New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) near Lafayette, Louisiana.
“Much of what I have done over the past years has been research in chimps,” says Robert Purcell, 76, who heads the hepatitis viruses section at the NIAID’s Laboratory of Infectious Diseases. “It’s just a good time now [to retire] as the chimps are essentially no longer available.”
Last December, a report from the US Institute of Medicine concluded that most chimpanzee research was scientifically unnecessary and recommended that the NIH sharply curtail its support. The agency has since set up a working group to review existing studies and advise on whether they should be ended. Purcell and his team have formally requested that one study on liver disease, involving three of the remaining chimps at Bioqual, should be allowed to continue.
But animal activists say that the Bioqual chimpanzees, which could undergo decades more research at the NIRC, should be retired. On 5 July, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an animal-advocacy group in Washington DC, launched a petition and wrote to NIH director Francis Collins urging him to intervene to ensure that the animals are placed in a federally supported sanctuary in Louisiana called Chimp Haven.
In reply, the NIH issued a statement noting that the Bioqual animals are leased, but not owned, by the agency. As a result, it said, “NIH does not have authority over privately owned chimpanzees and cannot decide where they are placed”.
Travel costs
The NIRC, the chimps’ owner, and part of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, houses around 350 research chimpanzees and conducts studies on them for commercial clients. It has for decades leased young animals to NIAID. Thomas Rowell, the NIRC's director, could not be reached for comment.
The activists are also concerned because last year one chimpanzee, an 8-year-old male called Chaos, died during transit from Bioqual to the NIRC. The US Department of Agriculture, which enforces the Animal Welfare Act, is investigating the incident. Procedures have changed since; when eleven other chimps were shipped back to the NIRC last month, the truck was driven by a vet, and an animal technician rode with the animals.
The remaining four chimps at Bioqual are scheduled to be shipped back to the NIRC soon: Loretta, a three-year-old that has just completed a two-year study probing how malaria parasites resist chloroquine and artemisinin, two key drugs against the disease, will travel to Louisiana within weeks. Seven-year-old Ricky, with Tiffany and Torian, who are both four years old, will follow a few months later. Purcell is using them to study a possible infectious trigger of primary biliary cirrhosis, a chronic autoimmune disease of the liver that is usually fatal without a liver transplant.
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15 Comments
Add CommentWhy couldn't the researchers get blood samples from the chimps in the long term studies while they reside at Chimp Heaven?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe NIH accidentally introduced HIV through unclean Hepatitis B vaccine that they grew in chimps and were testing on gay men at the epicenters of the outbreak in 1977: San Francisco and New York. Well, we all know the story of how African bush hunters caught HIV from chimps through a cut on their skin ... yeah right! I call that deflecting criticism to avoid paying for your mistakes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSanctuaries that are designed appropriately enable the residents to be accessed for health examinations. Some specimens and measurements can be taken during such exams. But, be aware that the conditions in most research facilities are quite good. If the demand is to end INVASIVE procedures, that policy could be enacted in the best existing facilities. Sometimes the rhetoric seems mostly designed to tear down science and scientists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlease don't believe crazy rumors like the one in message 2. That is purely paranoid delusion that is inconsistent with all evidence.
What evidence?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVapur, where is the evidence for your reckless assertion? The burden of proof is on you if you are going to say such incredibly bizarre things.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJoeErvin, That's the spirit! Where are the cites, vapur? Did you read it in an article or were you there? That evidence.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisquote Alan Cantwell, "The man-made theory of AIDS is generally dismissed as "conspiracy theory." Nevertheless, AIDS researchers and writers like myself, Dr. Leonard G Horowitz, Dr. Robert Strecker, Professor Robert Lee, and others have proposed for two decades that HIV was seeded into gay men when they volunteered for the experimental hepatitis B vaccine experiment which took place in Manhattan, beginning in November 1978. Additional similar hepatitis B experiments using gay men as guinea pigs continued in other American cities until 1981 -the year the AIDS epidemic became official. Some of the cities included Los Angeles and San Francisco which, along with New York City, became the three big epicenters of the epidemic. ... The experimental hepatitis B vaccine injected into gays was unlike any other vaccine previously made. It was developed in chimpanzees and manufactured in a year-long process of sterilization and purification of the pooled blood of 30 gay men who were hepatitis B virus carriers. During the first gay experiment (November 1978-October 1979) at the New York Blood Center, there was great concern that the vaccine might be contaminated. According to June Goodfield's Quest for the Killers, p 86, "This was no theoretical fear, contamination having been suspected in one batch made by the National Institutes of Health, though never in Merck's."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm glad that this animal rights group and others
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisare pushing, even demanding that these poor chimps,
distant cousins of humanity, and effectively slaves,
be given immediate retirement. They have gone through
more than any humans should have ever had to, with
only arguably justifiable results. Not only should
they get and deserve their highest needs met, for
once, but in allowing them to do so, it strengthens
our own highest angels. Which have not been consulted
on much in recent decades. :-[
stargene
If not me, who? If
not now, when?
Seriously, that's your "evidence"? An article from the Uber-conspiracy theory site, rense.com? Why do you even bother reading anything science-based, no less feel compelled to share?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm glad that these chimps are finally being retired as they deserve.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese animals are highly social and like us (since they are our relatives. We do share DNA) they have feelings...that is they grieve when a member of their family dies and they also communicate with each other in sophisticated ways (this has been proven) AND they can make and use tools...For all these reasons (and more) I think that using chimps in scientific experiments and housing them in facilities where they are confined in small cages and not allowed to socialize with each other and play should be abolished and should have been abolished long ago.
Please, retire them. Then perhaps it will come a day when no animals are employed for experiments, or entertainment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a scientist and teacher, it is my deep conviction I cannot exclude moral consideration/compassion from my practice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI look forward to the day when this research is outlawed all together.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHmm, nope; that site doesn't look familiar to me. In any case, you seem to not understand what "theory" means, dismissing what facts have been presented like anyone else would (aside from the fact that the theory is supported by PhD's presenting their evidence). I wouldn't hold it past Pharma to act as clueless as a bank when something goes wrong.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf I were part of the NIH decision teams, I'll immediately and strongly endorse the ban of experiments in chimps, not only these animals are developed enough as to have a possibility of sufferings, but is hard to imagine any company that can afford the continued use of that high-cost elements of experimentation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this