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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.
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...
One may wonder if Europe and Asia are to follow the U.S.?
In Europe, medical tests on apes (Chimpansees, Gorillas, Oerang utans and one other race whose name eludes me at the moment) are already illegal and have been for a few years (even longer in certain member states). Fairly serious restrictions also apply to tests involving other primates.
An article from The Independent 2 years ago announcing the official legislation
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/new-eu-rules-on-animal-testing-ban-use-of-apes-2077443.html
Look, I have disagreements with Tea Party supporters too .. but to outright ban them from labs? That doesn't seem right to me.
Non sequitur. NIH banned the use of evolutionary closer relatives of humans, didn't say anything about lower species.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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.
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.
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.