Reporting from Albuquerque —
Ever since the first of their number arrived in New Mexico half a century ago as test subjects in the fledgling U.S. space program, nearly 200 government-owned chimpanzees were routinely injected with viruses and used to test everything from experimental vaccines to insecticides.
They have enjoyed a decade-long respite from research at an indoor-outdoor habitat on Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, but now the government wants to move the chimpanzees to a Texas laboratory, where they might face renewed testing.
The plan has animal welfare groups and elected officials squaring off against federal scientists at a time when Congress is considering legislation that could shut down federal chimpanzee testing altogether.
Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, sharing between 94% and 98% of our DNA, which is why some scientists see them as ideal research subjects. The similarity extends to their cognitive abilities. Chimps are intelligent and self-aware, even able to plan future actions.
"These animals have been put through the wringer and they deserve to be retired," says Kathleen Conlee, a program manager with the Humane Society of the United States, who has worked in a primate breeding facility and a great ape sanctuary. "The Humane Society doesn't think a laboratory environment can ever meet the psychological needs of a chimpanzee."
Moving the chimpanzees to the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio is expected to save $2 million a year in upkeep, while making more of a dwindling number of research animals available for crucial medical testing, said Harold Watson, a program director in the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health.
John L. VandeBerg, director of the San Antonio primate center, says the chimpanzees are needed to test potential vaccines for diseases, such as hepatitis C and hepatitis B, because they are the only species other than humans that can become infected with those viruses.
"We only use chimpanzees when it's not possible to do critical experiments with any other species," VandeBerg said. The primates are well cared for, he said, and only about 100 are used in research at any time.
"They are not people, they are animals," he said. "I believe it's our ethical responsibility to do the research to alleviate the pain, suffering and deaths of millions of human beings."
VandeBerg concedes past abuses in chimpanzee experiments, but he says research now "involves procedures that are no different than those that are used every day in human clinical medicine. It generally involves drawing blood samples from a vein, just as we do with people; we've all had that done."
There are fewer than 1,000 research chimpanzees in the U.S., about half of them under NIH management. Their numbers are slowly declining because of a federal moratorium on breeding and deaths due to old age. The oldest, a female named Flo, turns 53 on Sept. 29.
Although the U.S. is virtually the last country in the world to permit invasive testing of chimpanzees, VandeBerg and others have argued for the resumption of a breeding program to permit further biomedical research.
Meanwhile, the Great Ape Protection Act, which would phase out invasive research on federally owned chimps and retire them to sanctuaries, has been introduced in Congress with bipartisan support.
Announcement of the plan to relocate the chimpanzees when the current third-party management contract at the Holloman facility expires in May 2011 prompted New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Tom Udall, the state's junior U.S. senator, to urge the NIH to reconsider. Richardson paid a visit to NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Md., in August to press the point but made little headway.
The Holloman chimpanzee colony traces its origins to the 1950s, when NASA acquired chimps for research during the early days of Project Mercury. By the 1970s they had become part of a breeding program, and the Holloman facility was leased to the late Dr. Frederick Coulston, a controversial toxicology researcher who used them to test insecticides and cosmetics.
Later, the chimps were managed by New Mexico State University, but during the early 1990s ownership was transferred to Coulston, who by then had started the nonprofit Coulston Foundation and built a nearby private facility in which the chimpanzees were housed in cramped steel-and-concrete cages with little room for exercise.
There were persistent accusations of severe abuse and neglect on Coulston's watch, with nearly 50 chimpanzees and monkeys dying from disease, poor veterinary care and experimentation amid documented violations of the Animal Welfare Act.
