Report: Scientific research on chimpanzees "unjustified," should be limited

From the Washington Post today: Nearly all medical research on chimpanzees is "scientifically unjustified" and any future studies using the great apes must pass a “very high bar,” according to a new congressionally ordered report from the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Fewer kinds of studies will be justified based on the criteria that we set out,” said Jeffrey Kahn, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University who chaired the report committee.

The report does not endorse an outright ban on chimp research, but instead outlines restrictive rules for using the apes.

More on the findings here. (thanks, Cyrus!)

• [chgoliz]

  I’m surprised you didn’t include the reason why:

  “Chimpanzees possess nearly-human intelligence and emotional awareness, which implies “a moral cost and ethical issues” when mankind’s closest evolutionary cousin is kept captive for invasive medical research, Kahn added.”

  I wonder how much of this is due to Jane Goodall’s lifetime work in the field.

• [formosaman]

  They saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes and panicked

• [grimc]

  Now what am I supposed to do with these million typewriters?

• [querent]

  The closer the species is to us, the more useful the information gained, and the more arbitrary and indefensible the line drawn between that research and research on humans.

  Darwin hasn’t really sunk in yet.  Biologists shouldn’t be able to pretend there’s some absolute division between us and our kin.

  This is awesome news!  Another blow to anthropocentrism!

• [Rob Beschizza]

  Does this mean we have to stop eating them?

  • [Mister44]

    Ew.  Though in other countries, bush meat is a real issue.

• [Brainspore]

  But scientific research BY chimpanzees is still cool, right?

  • [Ian G]

    Brofist for that

• [Ito Kagehisa]

  Well, we could always just use humans for scientific research.  You probably won’t have any problem finding volunteers for the most painful, absurd and useless experimentation imaginable; just post a request on the Internet.  Some science fiction author pointed this out back in the day – if there’s one person in a billion with a sincere desire to die painfully testing mascara, well, then there’s six of them available right now.  Wish I could remember who to credit for that.

  • [Guest]

    I want it to be Vonnegut. Sounds like him.

• [Tess]

  Oh good.  I remember reading an argument back in biological anthropology class for changing the taxonomy to put chimps, bonobos, and humans all in Homo and I found it pretty convincing.  We would still be Homo sapiens sapiens, the bonobos and chimps would be in Homo pan as separate subspecies.) We do come from a common ancestor, and we’re really not all that different.  Adapted to different, environments, sure – I wouldn’t treat a chimp like a human and expect that to go well.  But I can’t look at them and see animals; I see a different type of person.  The idea of not responding to a chimp in distress with empathy is hard for me to even imagine.  Ape babies are babies.

  Yes, this means I value intelligence and similarity-to-humans highly in my judgments of which animals it’s okay to hurt.  I’m not particularly ashamed of that.  It’s a lot easier to feel okay about the scientific (or food) use of animals that evolved to be eaten – animals that have many young, for example, or those that get very little parenting.  It gets trickier when you get to carnivores – they usually have more parenting needs, so more work per parent animals to hand on the genes…  And then there are primates, even trickier – there’s all this learning ability and individualism.  The apes add cultural knowledge, humor, and language capacity, the great apes even more so, and then you get to us and the chimps.

  Biological anthropology is an awesome concept.  Everyone interested in human evolution should look into a course in it.  Handling casts of early human skulls is just mind-blowing – and it really breaks down the distinction between us, other (currently extinct but not necessarily predecessor) branches of humanity, and apes.  There was a species of humans with a sagittal crest and heavy jaw – they were massive.  Not our ancestors, but human.  The Neanderthals coexisted with our ancestors but are probably not actually our ancestors (although there’s some genetic evidence that they might have managed to interbreed; even mules are fertile once in a while). [EDIT: wow, things change fast. Consensus now is that H. sapiens sapiens and H. neanderthalensis (or H. sapiens neanderthalensis) did indeed interbreed. Cool.]

  I don’t really want to make it easier to experiment on humans – the potential for abuse there is just so high – but at least we aren’t currently endangered.