Human ingenuity and compassion have prevailed in an Institute of Medicine declaration that invasive medical experiments on chimpanzees are largely unnecessary.
Though the report’s suggestions are not legally binding, the Institute is widely respected. Its judgments often shape government and academic policy. According to the report, experiments that inflict physical and mental harm to humanity’s closest living relatives are justified only when absolutely indispensable, and when no other alternatives exist.
Thanks to improvements in drug design, research techniques and experimental methods, alternatives do exist. Of 436 federally owned research chimps and 501 kept in private laboratories, only a few might be considered important to medical progress — and perhaps not for long.
“While the chimpanzee has been a valuable animal model in past research, most current use of chimpanzees for biomedical research is unnecessary,” conclude the 12 members of the Committee on The Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research. They describe a “decreasing need for chimpanzee studies due to the emergence of non-chimpanzee models and technologies.”
- More Here
Though the report’s suggestions are not legally binding, the Institute is widely respected. Its judgments often shape government and academic policy. According to the report, experiments that inflict physical and mental harm to humanity’s closest living relatives are justified only when absolutely indispensable, and when no other alternatives exist.
Thanks to improvements in drug design, research techniques and experimental methods, alternatives do exist. Of 436 federally owned research chimps and 501 kept in private laboratories, only a few might be considered important to medical progress — and perhaps not for long.
“While the chimpanzee has been a valuable animal model in past research, most current use of chimpanzees for biomedical research is unnecessary,” conclude the 12 members of the Committee on The Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research. They describe a “decreasing need for chimpanzee studies due to the emergence of non-chimpanzee models and technologies.”
- More Here
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