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| An NIH chimp in cage |
By James Gorman, The New York Times, January 22, 2013
Almost all of the
451 chimpanzees owned or supported by the National Institutes of Health that are now at
research facilities should be permanently retired from research and moved to
sanctuaries, with planning for the move to start immediately, a report from an
N.I.H. council unanimously recommended Tuesday.
The report, approved by the N.I.H. Council of Councils, is
the latest step in a process that began more than two years ago when the agency
began to review its use of chimpanzees in research. Its recommendations will be
open to public comment for 60 days, and in late March, Dr. Francis S. Collins, the N.I.H. director, will
decide whether to put them into effect.
He already accepted guidelines for reducing the use of chimpanzees
that formed the basis of the current recommendations.
Kathleen Conlee, vice president for animal research of the Humane Society
of the United States, said: “We are very pleased with these
recommendations. Importantly, they did not recommend future breeding.”
The report says that for the future, only a small colony of about 50
chimps should be kept for the possibility of new research, which would have to
be approved by an independent committee, including representation from the
public.
Of the 451 N.I.H. chimps, 282 are available for research and 169 are
considered inactive but are not permanently retired. An additional 219
chimpanzees owned or supported by the agency are already retired and are either
at a sanctuary or headed for one. About 350 more chimps at research
laboratories are owned by universities or private companies, according to the
Humane Society.
The report also proposes standards for the social and physical welfare
of N.I.H. chimps, including requirements that they live in groups of at least
seven, have a minimum of 1,000 square feet per chimp, room to climb, access to
the outdoors in all weather and opportunities to forage for food. “Not a single
laboratory in the United States meets these recommendations,” Ms. Conlee said.
Within five years, at the latest, any N.I.H. chimpanzees that are
approved for use in research will need to have housing that meets the new
criteria.
Justin Goodman, the laboratory investigations department director of People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals, issued a statement supporting the
recommendations, saying, in part, “At last, our federal government understands:
a chimpanzee should no more live in a laboratory than a human should live in a
phone booth.”
Dr. K. C. Kent Lloyd of the University of California, Davis, a
co-chairman of the working group that prepared the report, said in a hearing
Tuesday that was streamed online that his group made field trips to seven
chimpanzee facilities, including laboratories and sanctuaries.
He said the group was asked to consider what living conditions were
appropriate for chimpanzees, the species closest to humans and highly
intelligent and social. Even if experiments are approved in the future as being
necessary for human health and undoable in any other way than using chimps, he
said the animals must have “environments that not only allow but promote the
full range of natural chimp behavior.”
That means room for social groups, and, Dr. Lloyd added, “No chimp
should live alone for an extended period of time.”
The report recommends canceling six of nine current biomedical
research projects that involve immunology and infectious agents. The report
does not specify the nature of the research, but one of the few areas where
some scientists consider chimp use important is in work on hepatitis C because
no other animals provide a useful model for research, which involves infecting
the chimps with the virus.
In less invasive research on behavior and genetics, 15 projects were
approved or conditionally approved to continue and six projects ended.
The report also offers a plan for the independent committee to
evaluate future research proposals, based on the guidelines proposed in
December 2011 by the Institute of Medicine, which emphasized that
human health must be at issue and that there must be no other way to do the
research.
Tuesday’s recommendations come in the midst of efforts on several
fronts to end experiments on chimpanzees, including a bill to stop
experimentation on all great apes, which did not pass in the last Congress, but
which proponents hope to reintroduce, and a pending decision by the Fish and
Wildlife Service on whether captive chimps should be considered endangered, as
wild chimps are.
The process that led to the recommendations began in December 2010,
when the N.I.H.
decided to rethink its use of chimps in medical experiments and asked for a
report from the Institute of Medicine. That group concluded that most current
research on chimpanzees was not necessary and that chimps should be used only
when public health is on the line, no other animals are appropriate and ethical
experiments on humans are not possible.
Dr.
Collins suspended new grants for medical research on chimpanzees and sought
further guidance on how to implement the recommendations. For that he turned to
the N.I.H. Council of Councils, which set up the working group, which delivered
its report on Tuesday.
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