AR-News: Aging boomers bring boom in monkey traffic

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From: animal_net at yahoogroups.com

Van: Tony Smith [mailto:fauna.found at sympatico.ca] 
Verzonden: zaterdag 24 januari 2004 19:39
Aan: Undisclosed Recipients
Onderwerp: Aging boomers bring boom in monkey traffic

>From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  January/February 2004
Aging boomers bring boom in monkey traffic

Beijing news media on November 25,  2003  announced the arrest of lab animal dealer Jia  Ruiseng.  Called by police the biggest wildlife  trafficker ever caught in China,  Ruiseng  allegedly bought 2,130 macaques during the year from illegal trappers in central Anhui province.

China is building a new primate research  center at Sun Yat Sen University, in the  southern part of the country,  but it will start  with only 100-200 macaques,  officials said. Ruiseng served the export trade.

The Royal SPCA in 1995 won a ban on the  import into Britain of wild-caught nonhuman  primates for research use.  In August 2003,  however,  the Home Office authorized the import  of captive-bred monkeys from the Centre de Recherches Primatologiques in Mauritius,  despite  RSPCA video purporting to
show "squalid and  barren cages that appear to fall far short of International Primatological Society guidelines."

The Medical Research Council,  a British  government agency,  is reportedly increasing its  access to monkeys by starting a macaque breeding  center at Porton down in Wiltshire.

In December 2003 the Supreme Court of  Israel upheld an interim order barring Mazor Farm  from importing 60 monkeys from Mauritius for  resale and export.  Founded in 1991,  Mazor Farm  sold 1,362 monkeys to Britain between 1994 and  2000.  Contending that the business violates  Israeli law,
the activist groups Let The Animals  Live and the Association for Moral
Science claimed a significant victory.

"There are 200,000 monkeys in the world  who are being raised in capitivty for research  purposes,"  Mazor Farm attorney Robert Fishman  testified. "About 100,000 are used annually."

The U.S. uses nearly half of them:  49,382 in 2001.  USDA records show that from 1973  to 2001,  nonhuman primate use rose 17%,  but the  jump was in from 1975 to 1987,  when use rose  70%.  After a 31% drop in the next four years,  the annual fluctuations have been under 10%.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service animal  import data collected and analyzed by Aesop  Project founder Linda Howard tells a more  alarming story.

U.S. lab acquisition of monkeys from  abroad more than doubled between 1997 and 2002.  Monkey imports jumped 22% over the preceding year  in 1999, 19% in 2001,  and 22% again in 2002.

>From 1995 through 2002,  Howard found,  Charles River Laboratories imported 36% of the  monkeys,  Covance Research Products imported 30%,  and all of the top 20 importers were labs or lab  supply firms.

The 16 leading sources of monkeys  included four suppliers in China, four in  Indonesia,  three each in Mauritius and Vietnam,  and two in the Philippines.

In August 2003 the National Institutes of  Health awarded a $6.4 million, five-year grant  to the Pittsburgh Development Center to  investigate cloning nonhuman primates,  apparently to expedite domestic captive
breeding as an alternative to imports.

PDC researcher Gerald Schatten "has  attempted conventional cloning methods with more  than 700 eggs from rhesus macaques and has  transferred 33 early embryos into surrogate  mothers,  but never achieved a pregnancy," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff writer Anita  Srikameswaran disclosed after reviewing a paper  Schatten published in Science.

If lab use of nonhuman primates is as  steady as the USDA data indicates, why the  surging interest in acquiring monkeys?

Offered Jonathan Amos of the BBC News  Online science staff in July 2003, in an  assessment as applicable to the U.S. as to  Britain,  "The number of nonhuman primates used  in medical research in the U.K.  [3,342 in 2001] is set to rise significantly.  The pharmaceutical  industry has
acknowledged as much.  As science  seeks to tackle the neurological diseases  afflicting a 'greying' population,  it will need  a steady supply of monkeys on which to test the  safety and effectiveness of its next-generation  pills. Experts say the extremely specific way  that these novel pharma products will
work means  primates--because their brain architecture is  very similar to our own--will be the only animals  suitable for experimentation."

"We're not talking about a cure for  baldness,"  Genetic Interest Group representative  Dr. Alastair Kent told Amos.  "We're talking  about horrendous conditions--Parkinson's,  Alzheimer's,  schizophrenia."

To do the testing,  comparably horrendous  conditions must be inflicted on the test subjects.
 And it is not all about drugs.

Transplant research involving nonhuman  primates peaked in notoriety with the macaque  head transplants done by Robert White,  1963-1971,  and spiked again after the Baby Fae  baboon-to-human heart transplant controversy of 1984.  Those experiments,  however,  were just  parts of the beginning phase
of transplant  experimentation on nonhuman primates.

Documents leaked to the British group  Uncaged Campaigns in September 2000 and October  2002 "describe in unique detail harrowing  experiments involving the transplant of  genetically modified pig organs into 500 higher primates," Uncaged Campaigns summarized in April  2003,  after winning a
30-month court battle  against the drug maker Novartis Pharma,  which had sought to suppress publication of the data.

"The research was conducted by  Cambridge-based biotech subsidiary Imutran Ltd.,"  Uncaged Campaigns continued,  "at the  laboratories of Huntingdon Life Sciences. Imutran,  bought by Novartis in 1996,  had hyped  pig organs as an imminent solution to transplant  waiting lists.  The experiments were a
blood-soaked disaster,  causing severe suffering  as scientists failed to overcome the complex  barriers to cross-species transplants."

Implants of mechanical and electronic  devices tend to have a higher success rate than  intraspecies xenographs. Miguel A.L. Nicolelis of Duke University in  Durham,  North Carolina,  in October 2003  published details of a brain implant that allows  monkeys to control robotic arms with their thoughts.
"The technology could some day allow  people with paralyzing spinal cord injuries to  operate machines or tools with their thoughts as  naturally as others today do with their hands.  It might even allow some paralyzed people to move  their own arms or legs again,  by transmitting  the brain's directions not to a machine but  directly to the muscles in those latent limbs,"  enthused Rick Weiss of the Washington Post.

Like the monkeys used in brain research  decades ago,  the Nicolelis research subjects  have wires sticking out of their skulls--but Nicolelis is working on wireless signal  transmission technology,  Weiss reported. Such high tech experiments are rapidly  superseding some of the older kinds of primate  research.  Deprivation study ends "University of Colorado Health Sciences  Center researcher Mark
Laudenslager--featured on  national animal rights web sites for his maternal
separation experiments--has ended his 17-year  study,"  Committee for Research Accountability  directors Rita Anderson and Barbara Millman announced in November 2003.

"Since 1986 Laudenslager has conducted  experiments in maternal separation, funded by  the NIH,"  the CRA announcement explained.  "Laudenslager claimed
his most recent study,  'Behavioral and Physiological Consequences of Loss,'  would show if inadequate parenting had an  effect on the progression of AIDS in HIV-positive  children.

Laudenslager sent two groups of  three-to-four-year-old monkeys," including a  group separated from their mothers in early  infancy,  "to the University of Washington  Regional Primate Research Center.  Both groups  were injected wth the simian form of the HIV  virus.  After that the monkeys were isolated
in  individual cages where they were monitored for  the progression of symptoms."

Laudenslager was among the last  researchers in the U.S. doing work derivative  from the isolation chamber experiments done by  Harry Harlow from1930 to 1970 at the University  of Wisconsin.  Harlow drove generations of baby  macaques mad,  plunging them into stainless steel  "pits of despair,"  subjecting them to  deliberately cruel robotic "mothers," and allowing mothers dri ven insane by his  experiments to abuse and kill them. When Harlow  semi-retired to a part-time post at the  University of Arizona, other University of  Wisconsin faculty immediately dismantled his lab.
Harlow died in 1981,  at age 76,  a  reputed drunk whose chief contribution to  mainstream laboratory primatology was inventing  the "rape rack," a device for artificially  inseminating primates.  But he had trained some disciples and defenders,  who have continued  similar work.

Laudenslager distinguished his work from  Harlow's in part by reuniting  babies with their  mothers after varying lengths of time--a  distinction meaning little to babies who had no  way of knowing that the reunions
would ever occur.

Psychological experimentation believed to  be relevant to educating and socializing the Baby  Boom generation was the most prestigious branch of primate research during most of Harlow's  career.  AIDS research took the spotlight in the  early 1980s,  but by the early 1990s was clearly  a dead end.  Chimpanzees,  the species  researchers most anticipated using, not only  rarely develop HIV but also are increasingly  regarded as being to close to humans to use in  invasive experimentation.

"It would not surprise me,"  National  Center for Research Resources director of  comparative medicine John Strandberg told the  American Association of Laboratory Animal Science  annual meeting in October
2003, "that at some  time in the future--I don't want to get into when--chimpanzees are not used" in biomedical  research. Britain,  the Netherlands,  New Zealand,  and Sweden have all adopted regulations that  impose moratoriums on the use of great apes in experiments.

Around the world,  labs are divesting of  chimps and purchasing monkeys. More monkeys can  be kept in the same space,  for less cost.  Monkeys are also typically subject to less  regulation--but that is not supposed to be true  in the U.S.

In 1985 Congress amended the Animal  Welfare Act to require labs,  zoos, and other  federally inspected institutions to provide for  the psychological well-being of dogs and all  nonhuman primates,  regardless of species.

A six-year political battle over the  proposed enforcement regulations followed,  as  the National Institutes of Health and  universities resisted anything that would force  significant changes in facilities.  After the
enforcement regulations were at last introduced,  another seven years of lawsuits and lobbying  followed,  until the USDA itself concluded that the regulations it imposed in 1991 are inadequate  and poorly enforced.

On July 21,  2003 the Animal Legal  Defense Fund and Animal Welfare Institute filed  yet another lawsuit seeking to make the 1985  Animal Welfare Act amendments a reality.  Keeping proprietary secrets

Monitoring compliance with the Animal Welfare Act requires observation.

In the early days of invasive animal  experimentation,  some of the most notorious  vivisectors invited the public to witness their  work--and charged admission.

By the late 19th century,  however,  animal experimenters usually sought secrecy.  Initially the idea was to escape public  opposition to cruel research.  After substantial  opposition developed anyway during the
1980s, some labs and individual vivisectors came under  sporadic violent attack. There were arsons in  the U.S. and Canada,  and bombings and beatings in Britain.  Circa 1990 the most often mentioned  rationale for secrecy became protecting  researchers' lives and property.

Since the early 1990s,  however,  attacks  on labs and individual vivisectors have  diminished,  except against targets associated  with Huntingdon Laboratories,  which is sole  focus of the British/U.S. group Stop Huntingdon  Animal Cruelty.

While research institutions still claim a  need for secrecy to protect life and property,  protecting proprietary rights associated with  product development seems to have become a  greater concern--as University of Utah freshman  biology major Jeremy Beckham,  18,  has been  finding out.

Already an experienced activist who made  the Baylor University mascot bears a national  cause celebre,  Beckham on January 16 won a  ruling on behalf of the Utah Primate Freedom  Project that the university is obliged by the Utah Government Records Access and Management Act  to disclose the protocols used by faculty who are  studying baboons and macaques.

University of Utah associate general  counsel Phyllis J. Vetter held that the  university must withhold the protocols to protect  the security of the researchers and the  proprietary rights to their findings.

The state records request review  committee ordered the university to share the  protocols,  after blacking out confidential and  proprietary information.

But the personal security issue was  hardly at issue.  A hotbed of violent actions in  the name of animal rights during the mid-1990s,  Utah has had very little activist-linked violence  and property damage since the convictions of many  of the mid-1990s perpetrators in 1997-1998.

As Beckham pointed out,  many University  of Utah researchers have posted their names,  photographs,  and complete contact information to  web sites. Reported Linda Fantin of the Salt Lake Tribune,  "The committee's legal adviser,  Mark Burns,  said the university may have to hire a patent lawyer
to distinguish between what is public and  what is proprietary--and send the bill to  Beckham."

The money to be made from patenting new  treatments appears to be the chief university  concern.

Exposés & escapades

The British Union Against Vivisection  meanwhile sparked an investigation of the Covance  Research Products nonhuman primate facility at  Munster, Germany,  with undercover video of  staff allegedly abusing monkeys. The BUAV hired  journalist Friedrich Mulln to take a job at  Covance and document whatever went on.  As the  case broke,  Covance obtained an injunction  against further distribution of the video by  Mulln,  but BUAV was beyond the jurisdiction of  the court.

An earlier BUAV undercover investigation  in 1997 triggered the Huntingdon campaign. BUAV is also using undercover video,  showing monkey brain research done on marmosets  at Cambridge University in 2002,  to rally  opposition to a $45 million new primate research  facility.  Construction was authorized to


the wild, cruel beast is not behind the bars of the cage. he is in front of it - axel munthe

"Never doubt that a small group of dedicated citizens can change the world. 
Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."      Margaret Mead
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