U.S. wants to restart lab testing of chimps as science cools to it
Billy Jo, who was a circus chimpanzee before being sold to a research laboratory, reaches out for a human touch in a scene from the documentary " Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History." Thirteen/WNETCHRIS ADAMS McClatchy Newspapers madison.com
April 25, 2011
ALAMOGORDO, N.M. - During Lennie's life under the microscope, science changed.
Starting in the 1960s, Lennie, a chimpanzee, was strapped in a spacesuit for U.S. government test flights, and subjected to spinal taps. He was fed a banana laced with triparanol, a drug already removed from the market for humans. In the 1970s, he was a breeder, used to increase the supply of lab chimps. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was infected with the HIV and hepatitis viruses and subjected time and again to blood draws and biopsies.
In 2002, Lennie died at a federal primate facility in the New Mexico desert, where many of his former cage-mates still live.
Today, those former cage-mates - about 180 of them - are at the center of an impassioned debate between the National Institutes of Health and the animal rights community. The chimps at the Alamogordo Primate Facility have been withheld from research the past 10 years as part of an agreement between the NIH and the Air Force base where the facility is located. Now the NIH wants to move the chimps away from Alamogordo and allow them to be put back into research. Animal rights activists want them retired to a grassy sanctuary.
But even before Lennie's death, apparently from heart disease, science was moving away from the kind of research that dominated much of his life. Two years ago, a major drugmaker said it no longer would conduct research on chimpanzees. Several countries have sworn off chimps, as well.
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