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NIH Restricts Use of Chimpanzees in Labs
vikingpower writes "The U.S. National Institutes of Health on Thursday suspended all new grants for biomedical and behavioral research on chimpanzees and accepted the first uniform criteria for assessing the necessity of such research (full report here). Those guidelines require that the research be necessary for human health, and that there be no other way to accomplish it. A San Francisco Chronicle article points out why chimpanzees are so often used for medical research, as they are evolutionarily the closest to human beings. One may wonder if Europe and Asia are to follow the U.S.?"
I guess they'll have to go back to using grad students.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
We are actually following the EU on this.
Does the US necessarily follow Europe or Asia on other pertinent matters affecting the world? If the answer to that question is "yes" then those entities will follow the US, otherwise it's wishful thinking.
With any luck, at some point we'll have good enough simulated models to more accurately represent humans biomedically than chimps do. I doubt that we'll be able to do that with behavioral research. So how can we do effective behavioral research, if we can't use humans or similar non-humans? Are we required to exclusively use gathered, instead of experimental, data in the future?
Look at all the trouble those super smart rats caused. It's probably not a good idea to be doing that stuff with something that starts out even smarter, like a chimp.
Wait. Is NIH different from NIMH?
... the most recent remake of the Rise of the Planet of the Apes might be enough to make them rethink things a little...
Perhaps they should experiment on anonymous cowards instead! Oh shi...!
They have just seen the new Planet of Apes.
Was a university's primate research laboratory. They were doing studies on addiction. So you had these metal cages, not much bigger than the monkeys, just stacked together in a room.
Look, I have disagreements with Tea Party supporters too .. but to outright ban them from labs? That doesn't seem right to me.
No more chimps. :(
Time to start doing more experiments on bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Good, I'm sick of cleaning up those heaps of dead monkeys.
Farnsworth: Well, as a man enters his 18th decade, he thinks back on the mistakes he's made in life.
Amy: Like the heaps of dead monkeys?
Farnsworth: Science cannot move forward without heaps! No, what I regret is the youth I wasted playing it safe.
Before the ban and after.
Unfortunately vivisection is an industry; and like all industries it is trying to grow; which means spending lots and lots on positive PR(*) and excusing every experiment; however marginal it's benefit.
As with War and our Economic Slavery; Greed and the Desire to profit at the expense of others know no bounds.
(*) Hi Guys! Welcome to slashdot with your preprepared accounts; this is where you earn your PR dollar at the expense of us dumb animals.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
How would you determine "no other way"?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The recent movie "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"
Fearing a similar occurrence of super-intelligent chimps that somehow would be able to over-power the human run world.
Seriously, like even a few hundred armed chimps and gorillas could handle the mass of gangs in Los Angelos. Let alone the U.S. Marines.
Thank God we had the mighty mighty Coast Guard to save us from the "Rise of the Planet of the Dolphins"
SEMPER PARATUS
I wonder how many people there are living in ivory towers that criticize this type of research whilst being oblivious on how many millions of lives have been saved because of it? How many drugs and other medical break troughs could only only have happened by using animal testing? What are people proposing, we go back to the days of using prisoners and societies undesirables? Do these people propose that we go without testing and hope for the best with live humans (which is really just going back to the question of who becomes the test subjects)?
it's the rats you have to keep an eye on.
I don't know about Europe - I doubt they will - but Asia certainly won't. Asia has a terrible animal abuse record, especially in China, where all kinds of animal parts are believed to increase your virility. If you want to really feel sick for a while, check up on "bear bile farming" as an example.
Asia treats its own human population badly enough, what makes one think that they would come close to treating animals with any respect?
Love sees no species.
Now they have to join the ranks of the unemployed. Welcome to our world.
What do you mean, Could you borrow my laptop?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
If one makes the case that it's unethical to use Chimps as test subjects then it follows that it's unethical to use any animal as a test subject. This is exactly what the animal rights whackos want.
I don't buy the "they're too similar to people" argument. I don't care how similar to people they are, they're not people. A person's ethical concerns are limited to the realm of people. There is no valid normative theory that draws a line between primates and the rest of animals. There are the theories the animal rights people rely on - such as that anything that can 'suffer' has ethical rights - but this theory is weak for various reasons ('rights' are undefined, predators become immoral beings, keeping pets becomes slavery, etc.). This attitude is the result of pussies raised on Disney cartoons who fall in love with anthropomorphic animals and fail to distinguish them from real animals.
This is similar to pro-lifers pushing through legislation to make a certain type of abortion illegal, like the 'partial birth abortion.' Even though it's not common, especially compared to standard 'procedures' (i.e. take a pill and bleed that shit out), they can use graphic pictures to appeal to one's emotion. But the goal isn't to stop partial birth abortion, which was typically only used in medical emergencies anyway, the goal was to take a step toward stopping all abortion. Similarly, this is just a step toward banning all animal testing, which is stupid because advances in medicine rely on it. No doctor recommends a woman wait until late in her pregnancy for an abortion, but in certain cases 'partial birth abortions' were used to save women's lives. No scientist uses a chimp when he can use a rat, but in certain cases the chimp's similarities to humans is what makes them valuable test subjects.
So, given that this restriction provides an exception for the very cases in which chimps are already allowed as test subjects, how does this change anything? It doesn't, except it gives the pussy vegans a sense of moral victory and motivates them to continue their zealous quest of unreasonableness.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
They were asking, now that unnecessary experiments on chimps will end, whether unnecessary experimentation on Europeans and Asians should also be stopped.
I say ban all animal testing, we have enough human population to test on ourselves first.
a) you will see (Major) less cruelty, as now you are doing it to a human, so you do care about treatment of that person during testing
b) you will see a lot less wasteful efforts and useless testing as now any pain causing agents will be again closely monitored to not have to repeat another
round of testing needlessly.
c) you will see the medical companies make less money off the public's back on testing new drugs as now they will have to make it proper right off the bat
and would also require that any "bad" situations during testing be compensated for....."such as blindness"....where as animals never got such considerations
"oops we didn't think blindness was going to happen....".....lawyer"no problem, that will be 20 million please...."
d) we will be a little more scrutinizing after each medical company says they are trying to do "this" or "that" as now the public knowing their lives
are being tested with, will be less willing to take risks for certain medications....."do we really need another hair dye on the market that testing might lead to blindness, when we already have 1 million types out there right now...."
All in all, I favor this, not only to avoid testing on animals, but I would love to see humans put in those positions rather the animals, and see the suffering and pain caused, and felt backwards, as we never really get to see how bad humans make life for other species on this planet....sort of like taking the human element out of it, we dont care, but put the human element into it, you will see a never ending flow of concern that animals never got about the testing conditions and etc....
NIH Restricts Use of Chimpanzees in Labs
If they can manage to invent their own chimps I say more power to them.
would be to grant chimpanzees the right to join the army.
There you are, staring at me again.
Otherwise, you get things like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair
Hopefully this paves the way for us to start using children instead.
I am opposed to this.
In the last several decades, improvements in chemical screening have been made. Primates are quite expensive, so it is desirable to test other organisms first. Today, it is possible to do early screening by testing of molecular simulation, liver cell extract, bacteria, then mice, before primate. Less primate testing is needed than before, but it has not been eliminated. Oh well, more bureaucracy.
while i agree that we should do it only when necessary (as in when alternative would be testing on human volunteer's - students for example), I would still like apes and other animals to continue "paying tribute" in this regard instead of humans (in a way take unfair advantage of them), for example good way to decide should we use apes is "would humans be next test subjects if we did not use these apes", i know i am selfish but i still think life of human being - whoever that is is more valuable than life of animal (even if it is extinct)
I guess that NIH wants their congressional pork and are capitulating to a single Senator for that reason.
". . . How come monkeys are all hairy, yet they have pink arses with no hair on, whilst I'm as bald as a coot and I've got a big hairy arse? Perhaps Charles Darwin [and Chimpanzee Research] could explain that!" -- Viz
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I don't think most folks who have decided that non-human animals are okay to torture for human benefit would go this far. You seem to me to be outstanding in your xenophobia.
But maybe you're just coming at it from what you think of as a practical angle, knowledge gained to cope with a possible threat (albeit at the cost of offense to an other).
I'd argue that the expectation of malice, so great that it pushes most sentient entities away from you into the conceptual category of "other", so compelling that it drives you to inflict pain on others in pre-emptive self-defense, is itself the root of evil.
I say sentience is fundamental, and it's on sentience that I base my conception of "self" (as in "self v. other"). Substrate for the sentience is not a primary determinant, nor is mere flavor of substrate. You could be an animal or a silicon-based computer AI and I would value your sentience. Quibbling over whether a chimp or a human is deserving of care is, to my mind, getting lost in the weeds.
I thought it said "NHL Restricts Use of Chimpanzees in Labs." I think that would explain a lot about hockey, actually.
I for one welcome our new and enlightened Dark Age.
Apes are mammals with brains, but we humans abused these creatures.
I hope the National Institution of Health maintains the ban on doing experiments with them and stops doing the same with Monkeys.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Thousands of chimps will die, since they are no longer needed.
Hey, code monkey, time to level up and start your new exciting career.
Medical research is a growing field and the sky's (aka heaven) the limit for the right candidate.
Benefits include free food, free housing and lots of free time for you own pursuits*.
Science needs you!
*Kibble, cage and staring at the bars thereof.
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.