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.?"

Comments

Observation vs experimentation

[DanTheStone]

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?

Re:Observation vs experimentation

[Defenestrar]

It's not a total prohibition. It's a new requirement that you must show that the usage of pan troglodytes and possibly pan paniscus (common chimp and bonobo respectively), is required for the research and that there is no other alternative. You must also show that the research is valuable and worth the cost (in addition to the grants own merits). You currently already need IRB approval/exemptions for human subject research (and animal trials for that matter), but this is to make sure you really need a chimp for your research when another model might work (many IRBs wouldn't make this a requirement for the research - they'd worry more about the treatment, conditions, etc... along the way).

Furthermore, this is the NIH which funds research grants, and not the FDA which approves preclinical trials on animal subjects (they aren't clinical trials until you use humans) for new drugs and medical devices. There's still plenty of chances for chimps to get experimented on and sacrificed for R&D. These new rules should just tighten up how often people pick chimps as a model. Not that expense, care, attachment, PR, and other factors haven't already moved the ball along. This'll have more impact on the focused-to-oblivion researcher who wanted to test his thingy on something as close to human as he could, not worrying about any of the above factors because he's got his grant and that lets him keep ignoring the rest of the world.

Cannon fodder for our Overlords

[EasyTarget]

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.

Re:Third worst thing I've ever seen...

[mdarksbane]

Here's an idea - if you're going to shit on scientists for using animal testing for research, maybe next time you go to the hospital for a procedure you can decline anything that is the result of animal testing. Which, by the way, is practically all of modern medicine.

I have a couple friends who worked in some of these labs. They said that you very quickly:

1) Felt sorry for the monkeys, because it is a pretty awful life.
and
2) Hated the fuckers, because they are meanest, nastiest things on the planet. They'll try to lure you to the cage then bite your arm off, if they could. Not that they don't have reason.

They also said that they have to do any transfers of animals in the middle of the night because of death threats by animal rights activists.

All that said, I have no problem with having to ethically justify testing on apes as a last resort, not something that you can just do whatever the hell you want to. I just hope these regulations actually do that, instead of just being another weird hoop to jump through.

Failed Ethical Argument

[RazorSharp]

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.

Re:Third worst thing I've ever seen...

[SFtheWolf]

So your friends hated the monkeys because they got aggressive when locked in a tiny box and tortured for reasons they don't understand? Imagine that. You can't reasonably imply that anyone using anything which is a product of animal testing is a hypocrite, because it is far too ingrained in society to be avoidable. That'd be like saying anyone who ethically opposes slavery or stealing from native Americans should leave North America, because so much of what we have is a direct result of the advantages those practices gave us. The point is that this is 2011 and we have more modern methods for many things which don't require testing on animals. When alternatives exist, it's unethical to not use them. That's what the NIH themselves are saying, and they're not exactly a bleeding-heart animal welfare society.