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From the New York Times, January 7, 2003 (For Retired Chimps, a Life of
Leisure by Sheryl Gay Stolberg)
The chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center were acting
up.
Jessie, a pink-faced 20-year-old, slapped her ample belly and hooted wildly
from behind a steel gate. Dover, a mischievous 4-year-old, spied an
unfamiliar human and served up his standard greeting for strangers, a
fistful of feces, pitched with remarkable accuracy.
Jessie and Dover do not really have to be at Yerkes, but there is nowhere
else for them to go. Bred for biomedical research, they are now unemployed,
a result of a vast surplus of laboratory chimpanzees. They pass their days
in small steel-and-concrete enclosures, playing with burlap bags and
shredding old telephone books for entertainment.
The surplus is an unexpected legacy of AIDS. In the early days of the
epidemic, scientists theorized that the chimp would be a useful model to
study the disease in people. In 1986, the health institutes began an
aggressive breeding program that doubled the laboratory chimp population,
only to find that although chimpanzees could contract the AIDS virus, they
rarely became sick from it. That distinction makes it hard to use the
animals to test [AIDS] treatments or vaccines.
With their striking genetic similarity to people ‹ chimps and humans share
the same blood types, and their DNA is more than 98 percent identical ‹ the
apes are attractive to scientists. The vaccine for hepatitis B, for
instance, was developed in chimps, and they are still used to study
hepatitis C and malaria, among other diseases.
The similarities have also created a growing sentiment, even among
scientists, that chimps, the only great apes still used in medical research
in the United States, should not be treated like other lab animals.
In 1997, a panel of scientific experts said reducing the chimp population by
euthanizing excess apes would be unethical. Citing the genetic similarities,
the experts said the government had "a moral responsibility" for
chimpanzees' long-term care. The report prompted Congress, in 2000, to pass
the law that led to the sanctuary.
Acting on a mandate from Congress, the National Institutes of Health
announced last year that it would spend $24 million to help build and
operate a chimpanzee sanctuary, in essence, a taxpayer-supported retirement
home for research chimps.
Link to article
bravenet.com