The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) should dismantle a decades-old colony of 360 chimpanzees, retiring all but roughly 50 of the animals to a national sanctuary, the biomedical agency was told on 22 January in a long-awaited report.

The report, from a working group of external agency advisors, also counsels the NIH to end about half of 21 existing biomedical and behavioral experiments, saying they do not meet criteria established in a December, 2011 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report.

“Clearly there is going to be a reduction in the use of chimpanzees in research,” says working group co-chair Kent Lloyd, the associate dean for research at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis.

The report says that the NIH should begin planning sanctuary housing for the retiring animals “immediately”, and that a colony of about 50 animals would be sufficient for future research. The report also sets high hurdles for new chimpanzee experiments in the future, calling for the establishment of an independent committee that would vet individual study proposals after they first pass routine NIH scientific review. In cases where the burden on the animals is high, the benefit to humanity should have to be “very high” to pass muster with the committee, says Daniel Geschwind, the other co-chair of the working group and a geneticist at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The report suggests that three of nine ongoing invasive experiments, involving immunology and infectious diseases, could continue, because they meet the IOM criteria. These require that a study be needed for public health; that no alternative animal model exists; that performing the study in humans would be unethical; and that the animals be maintained in socially and physically appropriate habitats. The report also says that eight of 13 behavioral or comparative genomics studies could be allowed to continue, but in some cases only conditionally — meaning that funding for these experiments could not be renewed without passing the independent committee review.

The working group — a subgroup of NIH’s Council of Councils, a trans-agency advisory body — was chartered by NIH director Francis Collins one year ago to advise the agency on how to implement the recommendations of the IOM report, which found that most chimpanzee research was not necessary. Its recommendations are not binding; Collins is expected to respond to them in late March, after a 60-day period of public comment. But they signal yet another significant step in an ongoing retrenchment. Last month, the agency announced that it will retire 110 chimpanzees to the national Chimp Haven sanctuary in Keithville, Louisiana, after they had been first slated to move to an active NIH-supported research centre in San Antonio, Texas.

Today’s recommendations speak to the fate of an additional 360 research-eligible chimpanzees that are owned by the biomedical agency and housed at facilities in Texas and New Mexico.The fate of an additional 91 animals that the NIH pays to maintain, but does not own, was not clear; the agency cannot compel the retirement of these animals, housed at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute (TBRI) in San Antonio.

4 Comments

1. 1. RSchmidt 01:25 PM 1/23/13

   "that performing the study in humans would be unethical" it just floors me that we have a committee admitting that performing this research on humans is unethical but performing them on a chimp, which has the same emotions, the dislike of captivity, pain and chronic stress and the intellectual capacity of a human with down's syndrome is somehow ethical. The reason the chimps are being used is because they are like us, but conveniently not enough like us to warrant the same rights. Some day we are going to look back on the NIH the same way we look upon Joseph Mengele.

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2. 2. luvdavy 02:52 PM 1/24/13

   Excellent comment. Animal experimentation in any form is a testament to how far our society still has to go before we can truly call ourselves "human".

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3. 3. Chris Miller 12:11 PM 1/26/13

   I trust that if you or a family member were unfortunately stricken with some deadly disease, you would refuse any medical treatment that had been developed using animal experimentation (i.e. most of them). Because if you didn't, that would make you a hypocrite.
   No-one uses primates in research unless it's absolutely necessary - this is for obvious economic as well as perfectly valid ethical considerations. But if we want to find a cure for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, at some stage we will need to carry out experiments on species with brains similar to ours.

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4. 4. KEEP RESEARCH AFLOAT 06:14 PM 1/31/13

   
   
   Chimps in the US are one issue, but currently all mainstream hauliers are refusing to transport all animals destined for legitimate medical research (including rodents) into the UK.
   
   http://news.sciencemag.org/sci...
   
   Anti-vivisectionists have intimidated these companies into this position, who were all to eager to avoid bad publicity. The result is that UK science is being damaged, ironically, animals journeys have become longer and more animals must be bred to sustain GMO colonies because of these misguided actions.
   
   Please help us encourage the UK government to act on this issue by signing the (anonymous) e-petition. http tinyurl.com saveresearch

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