As the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reduces its use of chimpanzees in invasive biomedical research, it is moving more chimps to retirement homes. But the agency could face a problem in paying for their continuing support. At the beginning of 2013, the NIH announced that it would move 113 chimpanzees it owns from the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana to Chimp Haven, the national chimpanzee sanctuary, also in Louisiana. The sanctuary is set in 200 acres of pine woods in Keithville and is currently home to 132 chimps that live in more natural surroundings and social conditions than those available at research institutes. Chimps live in a variety of cages and enclosures, including concrete-walled play yards of about a quarter of an acre, open to the sky, and two forested habitats, one four acres and the other five, bounded by a moat and fences.
Biomedical research on chimps helped produce a vaccine for hepatitis B. Another vaccine is aimed at hepatitis C, which infects 170 million people worldwide. Nevertheless, there has long been an outcry against the research as cruel and unnecessary. As it is, the United States is one of only two countries that conduct invasive research on chimpanzees. The other is the African nation of Gabon.
Using captive chimpanzees for research in the US dates to the 1920s, when Robert Yerkes, a Yale psychology professor, began to bring them into the country. During the 1950s, the Air Force bred chimps for the space program, starting with 65 caught in the wild. Chimps were also bred for AIDS research in the 1980s, which met a dead end. By the mid-1970s, support for preservation of threatened species had grown, and the importing of wild-caught chimps was prohibited. In 2000, the US government passed a law requiring it to provide for retirement of chimps it owned after their use in experiments was over, and Chimp Haven opened near Shreveport, Louisiana, to care for these chimps and others. It was an attempt to bring some semi-retired chimps at the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico back into research that prompted part of the recent surge of opposition. The NIH wanted to move about 200 chimps it owned from Alamogordo to the San Antonio center, which is part of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute. The Humane Society of the US and other groups pushed the NIH to commission the report on the usefulness of chimps in research. The society joined with the Jane Goodall Institute, the Wildlife Conservation Society and others to petition federal agencies to declare captive chimps endangered, as wild chimps already are, giving them new protections. In response to a congressional inquiry, the NIH relented, asking the Institute of Medicine (IOM), an advisory board, to conduct an in-depth analysis of the scientific necessity of chimpanzees for NIH-funded biomedical and behavioural research. The report, Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research: Assessing the Necessity was released in 2011.
For many years, experiments using chimpanzees have been instrumental in advancing scientific knowledge and have led to new medicines to prevent life-threatening and debilitating diseases. However, recent advances in alternate research tools have rendered chimpanzees largely unnecessary as research subjects. The report did not endorse an outright ban on chimpanzee research. Rather, it established a set of uniform criteria for determining when research use of chimpanzees is necessary for public health reasons. To illustrate how these criteria could be applied to existing research using chimpanzees, numerous case studies were examined for whether chimpanzees are necessary or could be replaced by new or alternative research methods. The committee concluded that while the chimpanzee has been valuable in the past, most current biomedical research use is not necessary. However, the committee made clear that it is impossible to predict whether research on emerging or new diseases may necessitate chimpanzees in the future.
After the report came out, Francis S. Collins, the agency’s director, announced that it would suspend all new grants for research on chimps that it owns or for which it is responsible. It also accepted guidelines that will allow the use of agency chimps in research only if the studies are necessary for human health, and cannot be done any other way. A further report, on how to put these guidelines into effect, is to be issued by a working group on January 22.
In 2011, the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act was narrowly defeated in congress. It would have banned invasive research on all great apes (including bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans). Senator John Kerry was one of the bill’s sponsors. He was also a sponsor of the Viral Hepatitis and Liver Cancer Control and Prevention Act of 2010, which calls for a national strategy to prevent and control Hepatitis B and C – and would have involved the use of chimpanzees.
The IOM committee identified two areas where the use of chimpanzees could be necessary. One is research on a preventive vaccine for hepatitis C. The committee could not agree on whether this research fit the criteria and so left that decision open. In the second area, research on immunology involving monoclonal antibodies, the committee concluded that experimenting on chimps was not necessary because of new technology, but because the new technology was not widespread, projects now under way should be allowed to reach completion. The report offered two sets of criteria, one for biomedical experiments, which it said could be considered necessary when there was no other way to do the research — with other animals, lab techniques or human subjects — and if not doing the research would “significantly slow or prevent important advancements to prevent, control and/or treat life-threatening or debilitating conditions.”
For behavioural and genomic experiments, the report recommended that the research should be done on chimps only if the animals are cooperative, and in a way that minimises pain and distress. It also said that the studies should “provide otherwise unattainable insight into comparative genomics, normal and abnormal behaviour, mental health, emotion or cognition.” The report also recommended that chimpanzees be housed in conditions that are behaviourally, socially and physically appropriate. The Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care, which met the committee’s recommendation, already accredits all United States primate research centres. That was one area where the Humane Society disagreed with the report, primarily because it could mean that chimps that were not in experiments would stay at research centres.
With the move of the New Iberia chimps, the total number of chimps in research facilities, some owned by universities or private companies, will be down to about 800. Of those, the NIH owns nearly 300. In September, 2012 the New Iberia Research Center, which has more than 200 chimps of its own, had chosen not to renew its application for money to house and maintain the NIH chimps, so the agency decided to retire them, and in early December announced that the animals would be moved. Initially it was proposed about 20 animals would go to Chimp Haven and the other 180+ to the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio; but now it appears only about 100 will go to Texas. However, there is a problem. The NIH, because of the US congressional deadlock over spending and tax cuts has no money to contribute before Chimp Haven can finish work on additional housing and enclosures and take all the chimps. The cost is estimated at $2.3 million. Furthermore, the NIH is nearing a cumulative cap of $30 million on support for the sanctuary, set in the law that created it. No such limit exists for support of chimps in the research population, and the result of this difference is that as research is being phased out and chimps are moving to sanctuaries, the money to support them is rapidly disappearing. The cap will probably be reached in the 2013 fiscal year.
The total dollars that are needed to support the chimpanzees will remain steady or perhaps even drop, but since money for research chimps and money for sanctuary chimps comes from two different government funds, a lifting of the $30 million is necessary. However, with the current congressional deadlock, it is unlikely more money will be made available to support Chimp Haven or other sanctuaries. Consequently, chimps at research centres might not move at all, even if research is stopped. They might simply stay where they are, exempt from invasive studies.
TOM DONNELLY