Long-suffering laboratory chimps will be given an honorable retirement under a sensible plan announced this week by the National Institutes of Health. They owe their reprieve mostly to their close resemblance to humans, which gave many scientists pause about causing them pain and keeping them in cramped cages, and to scientific advances that make experiments on chimpanzees less vital than they used to be.
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The N.I.H., the federal government's main supporter of biomedical research, announced that most of the chimpanzees it owns or supports — about 310 in all — will be retired in the next several years and moved to sanctuaries from which they cannot be recalled for research. About 50 will be retained for future research that would be conducted under stringent conditions and only if truly necessary. Hundreds of chimps that are privately owned are not directly affected.
The new policy was adopted after two expert groups — the Institute of Medicine and the Council of Councils, a federal advisory committee — concluded that most biomedical research on chimps is unnecessary because the same information can be gleaned through cell-based technologies, new animal models and, when ethically acceptable, testing in humans even without chimpanzee results.
The chief exception may be research on the hepatitis C virus, which infects only two species, chimpanzees and humans, and so cannot be studied in other animals. There is no consensus among experts on whether chimpanzees will be needed to test the effectiveness of a preventive vaccine for hepatitis C or whether it might be feasible, ethically and economically, to test a vaccine's safety in other animals and then test its effectiveness in humans.
The Texas Biomedical Research Institute, which has about 90 chimpanzees that the N.I.H. supports, said that 50 are not enough to enable rapid development of preventions and cures for hepatitis B and C, Ebola and new or emerging viruses that could cause pandemics.
Meanwhile, the Fish and Wildlife Service recently proposed classifying all chimps as endangered, whether in the wild, where they are already listed as endangered, or in captivity, where they are currently deemed only threatened and given less protection. The upgrading of captive animals to endangered status could make it virtually impossible to conduct future research in chimps that might be highly important, which seems overly restrictive. The upgrading is based largely on a judgment by the wildlife service that the wording of the Endangered Species Act is inconsistent with granting separate legal status to animals in captivity. Legal experts need to chime in during the two-month comment period as to whether this is a correct interpretation of what the act requires.
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