Animal rights activists welcomed the report. “A chimpanzee should no more live in a laboratory than a human should live in a phone booth,” says Justin Goodman, the director of laboratory investigations at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Washington, DC. But the TBRI issued a statement saying that the report’s recommendations “will slow urgently needed medical advances necessary to prevent and treat human diseases that afflict millions of Americans as well as hundreds of millions of people living in other countries.”
Alice Ra’anan, director of government relations and science policy at the American Physiological Society in Bethesda, Maryland, says that, while the IOM report deems most chimpanzee research unnecessary, “the flip side of that is: some is necessary.” The report recognizes the need for the NIH to maintain a small chimpanzee colony, she says. “We have to have a sustainable capacity going into the future.”
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on January 23, 2013.
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Add Comment"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.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExcellent 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".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI 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.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo-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.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisChimps 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