In a move that will please anyone who’s ever watched The Plague Dogs, the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced this week that it is officially ending its chimpanzee research program, according to Nature magazine.
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Now, as soon as space can be found, all of the NIH’s remaining research chimpanzees will be moved to sanctuaries, to live out the rest of their days. That classification meant that scientists could not conduct stressful or invasive research unless the work benefited chimps in the wild.
Trull sees the total scrapping of NIH’s chimp programme as too extreme, saying: “I don’t understand the decision of ‘we’re going to take that resource away forever'”. Dr. Francis Collins, NIH Director, said “As a result of these numerous changes over the last few years and the significantly reduced demand for chimpanzees in NIH-supported biomedical research, it is clear that we’ve reached a tipping point”. Due to their genetic similarities to humans, they can be infected by almost all human diseases.
There’s been a growing movement in recent years against using animals in invasive research, especially primates, elephants, dolphins and whales – species whose unusually high level of intelligence and self-awareness have been established by a growing body of scientific research.
The use of great apes in animal testing was banned in Europe in 2011, and now the United States and Gabon are the only two countries that still use chimps for research. Additionally, the animals were recently listed as an endangered species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services – a status that requires an additional research permit, none of which have been sought since.
The report led the agency to retire many of its chimpanzees in 2013 and introduce stricter requirements for research with the primates. The NIH reported that they have finished up all their biomedical research using chimps that did not fall within the criteria set by the Institute of Medicine.
Chimps were vital in creating important medicines and paved astronauts’ way into space.
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About 300 government-owned chimpanzees already had been sent to Chimp Haven, a federally approved sanctuary in Louisiana.
