NIH agrees with panel on limiting research with chimps
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The National Institutes of Health on Thursday suspended all new grants for biomedical and behavioral research on chimpanzees and accepted the first uniform criteria for assessing the necessity of such research. Those criteria require that the research be necessary for human health, and that there be no other way to accomplish it.
In making the announcement, NIH Director Francis S. Collins said the agency was accepting the recommendations released earlier in the day by an Institute of Medicine expert committee and would establish a working group to decide how to carry out those recommendations.
Until the working group finishes, no new grants will be awarded, and all NIH chimpanzees not already enrolled in experiments will not be involved in any further research. Dr. Collins did not offer a timeline or say how many chimpanzees are currently involved in research.
The Institute of Medicine committee said most biomedical research using chimpanzees was not necessary, although it left open the possibility for future research, providing enough ambiguity that both supporters and foes of chimp experimentation claimed it as good news.
Jeffrey Kahn, chairman of the institute panel that produced the report and a Johns Hopkins University bioethics and public policy professor, said, "What we did was establish a set of rigorous criteria that set the bar quite high for use of chimpanzees in biomedical or behavioral research."
Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, which strongly opposes any chimpanzee experimentation, said the society was very encouraged by the findings that "chimps are largely unnecessary" for research.
Thomas Rowell, director of the New Iberia Research Center in New Iberia, La., which houses 471 chimpanzees, more than any other U.S. center, also said he was "quite pleased." He said the report "just confirms what we've been saying all along in regard to the chimpanzee model for advancing public health research."
The institute report is the result of a nearly two-year conflict over bringing semi-retired chimpanzees back into use as experimental subjects, which itself is only one confrontation in a continuing struggle over whether it is morally acceptable and scientifically useful to use chimps in invasive experiments.
Use of chimpanzees had already been waning -- partly because it is expensive -- and the report covers only chimps owned or supported by the government, 612 of a total of 937 chimps available for research in the United States. Few of these are in experiments at any one time. So the overall controversy over use of chimps is sure to continue.
There are two areas where the committee concluded that 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 that because the new technology was not widespread, projects now under way should be allowed to reach completion.
For invasive biomedical experiments, the report concluded that chimp use was justified when there was no other way to do the research -- with other animals, lab techniques or human subjects -- and if not doing it would "significantly slow or prevent important advancements to prevent, control and/or treat life-threatening or debilitating conditions."
For behavioral experiments, the report recommended that the research should be done on chimps only if the animals are cooperative, and in a way to minimize pain and distress. It also said the studies should "provide otherwise unattainable insight into comparative genomics, normal and abnormal behavior, mental health, emotion or cognition."
The report also recommended that chimpanzees be housed in conditions that are behaviorally, socially and physically appropriate. All U.S. primate research centers are already accredited by the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care, and Mr. Kahn said this accreditation meets the committee's recommendation.
That was one area where the Humane Society disagreed. "That language," Mr. Pacelle said of the cage and enclosure requirements, "was disappointing to us."
The NIH commissioned the report after an outcry in response to its 2010 plan to move a colony of chimpanzees it owned out of semi-retirement in Alamogordo, N.M., back into medical research at a primate center in Texas.
First Published December 16, 2011 12:00 am
