Ban experiments on monkeys?
America Decides Whether to Stop Medical Experiments on Chimpanzees
Scientists, businessmen, politicians, animal advocates and journalists participate in a lively discussion.Nikolay Tretyakov, Compulenta
The USA is one of two countries where medical experiments on chimpanzees are allowed (the second is Gabon). The research here is organized as follows. There are three centers conducting experiments – two in Texas (with direct state and mixed grant funding) and one self-funded in Louisiana (New Iberia Research Center, NIRC); some of the chimpanzees contained in the centers belong to the state organization National Institutes of Health (NIH, the research branch of the American Ministry of Health). NIH maintains two nursing homes for the spent (spent?) primates – in Louisiana and New Mexico.
In 2010, NIH provoked a discussion in society, intending to return 186 retired chimpanzees to service. Animal advocates Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), primatologist Jane Goodall and many activists led NIH to appeal in January 2011 to the American Institute of Medicine (IOM) with a request for an independent examination of the feasibility of further medical experiments on chimpanzees. Public opinion was warmed up back in 2009 by a TV documentary about the center in Louisiana: an HSUS agent worked in it "undercover" for nine months, recording on a hidden camera how a biting baby chimpanzee was beaten on the head, how an adult chimpanzee fell from a height on a concrete floor under anesthesia, etc. Fines and inspections by NIRC state organs – followed.
The center in Louisiana is also under fire because 85% of its revenue comes from private pharmaceutical companies that rent monkeys for experiments. Proponents of continuing experiments on primates believe that this is necessary to work on a hepatitis C vaccine (170 million infected), create more effective drugs for the treatment of hepatitis A and B, multi-purpose testing of monoclonal antibodies, develop a vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus (66 thousand child deaths per year worldwide). Defenders of the interests of humanity (and the pharmaceutical industry) point out that keeping monkeys costs the NIH only $12 million a year, and direct and indirect losses from slowing down work on vaccines will result in billions. And in general, foreign companies have conducted experiments on Louisiana chimpanzees 27 times since 2005, and an HSUS activist could catch a monkey falling on a concrete floor, and not shoot it on camera!
Legislators also intervened in the situation. The Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act was submitted to Congress for consideration in April 2011. (Read the title, enjoy!) Its main author, Republican member of the Maryland House of Representatives Roscoe Bartlett (a physiologist who worked with monkeys at NASA in the 1960s), believes that experiments on chimpanzees are not justified primarily economically: primates, they say, are too little used in research. "We have a great opportunity to save taxpayers' money and help animals," says Mr. Bartlett.
Thus, there are different prospects for the development of the situation. First: if the NIH refuses to use monkeys according to the conclusions of the still-sitting commission of the Institute of Medicine, the center in Louisiana will lose government orders, but may benefit from the closure of state-related competitors (the director modestly promises to "survive"). The second perspective: if the law "On saving monkeys in order to save money" is adopted, chimpanzees will stop infecting with hepatitis, but they will be deprived of pension allowances and released into the wild God knows where, and pharmaceutical companies will calmly experiment on chimpanzees in Gabon, where legislators are mentally simpler, and animal defenders are fewer, and fresh monkeys are found (international the trade in primates for experiments is prohibited, and the threat of an investigation on charges of illegal breeding of chimpanzees hangs over the naturalists from Louisiana).
Opponents of experiments on primates claim that, although the DNA of chimpanzees is 99% the same as human and the closest relatives of humans are infected with human diseases, primates do not react to them quite the same as humans; that the first hepatitis B vaccine was created based on the blood of infected people; that the technology of breeding and observation of bacteria and viruses in vitro improving. On the other hand, if thalidomide had been tested on monkeys (and not on mice genetically less similar to humans), thousands of human tragedies could have been avoided.
In any case, the problem of American chimpanzees is a difficult but useful exercise in practical ethics (or rather, case study).
Prepared by Nature News – Animal rights: Chimpanzee research on trial.
From the comments of the readers of "Compulents"
(the shortest and most capacious fragment is not given here for censored expressions – VM :)
Vaccines and all that need to be tested on animal rights activists - they are genetically the same as humans, but differ in some details of behavior. I think humanists will not object to this.
Let the supporters of the closure personally face to face, for example, explain the ethical expediency of the decision to a couple of patients slowly dying from hepatitis C. This will refresh the mind somewhat.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru20.06.2011