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[Paula Carino <pcarino AT rcn.com>]

>From BBC News:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3234124.stm

Monkey brain research: The case against
By Ray Greek, medical director of Europeans For Medical Advancement
Friday, 28 November, 2003, 17:32 GMT


John Prescott's decision to grant planning permission for Cambridge
University's controversial primate laboratory is based entirely on economic
- not scientific or public health - considerations.

The planning inspector who conducted the public inquiry concluded that no
national need for brain research on primates had been demonstrated at the
inquiry. 

In fact, he described the university's evidence in support of such research
as "peripheral skirmishing".

He even went so far as to say that "the fears of some objectors that the
outcome is a foregone conclusion is granted credibility".

There is abundant evidence of harm to humans as a result of experiments on
primates. See some of the evidence to the inquiry at
www.curedisease.com/Cambridge/contents.html

Such evidence includes:
Primates' track record at predicting drugs' dangerous side effects is
abysmal. 
Many drugs that were safe for primates have gone on to injure and kill
people. For example, amrinone (for heart failure) was tested on numerous
non-human primates and released with confidence. However, one in five human
patients haemorrhaged as the drug prevented normal blood clotting.
An Alzheimer's vaccine was withdrawn in 2001 when it caused serious brain
inflammation in patients, after proving safe and effective in tests on
monkeys. 
Countless drugs for stroke have been developed and tested in primates and
other animals, yet all of them have failed and even harmed patients in
clinical trials. 
Monkeys do not suffer from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or Huntington's diseases
and when these diseases are artificially induced they manifest very
differently from the real human versions.
Human brains can now be studied non-invasively using remarkable high-tech
scanners. These enable the conscious brain to be observed while engaged in a
variety of cognitive tasks (talking, singing, reading, writing, etc) of
which monkeys are not even capable - and thus clearly could not provide any
relevant insight. 
Experimenting on monkeys in the hope of unlocking the secrets of the human
brain is an exercise in futility.

The most dramatic differences between humans and other primates are in the
brain. 

Our brain is four times larger than that of a chimpanzee, which is four
times larger than that of a macaque.

Biochemical pathways in the human brain are unique. Gene expression in our
brain is dramatically different from that of the chimpanzee.

Future advances in our understanding and treatment of neurodegenerative
diseases will come from where they always have - human-based observation and
ethical clinical research.

'Science, not politics'

Everything we know about these diseases has been learned from autopsies of
patients, population research and studies using human tissues cultured from
biopsies or autopsies.

It is in human tissue that we will find the answers to these diseases.

UK ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS
2.73 million experiments in the 12 months of 2002
Total number of procedures rose by 4.2% on 2001
About 80% are for research and drug development
Safety testing accounts for most of the rest
When medical science was in its infancy, researchers learned things from
monkeys and other animals that extrapolated to humans: the heart pumps
blood; white blood cells are involved in immunity and so forth.

But as medical science advanced it became obvious that, with regard to the
questions being asked, the differences between species outweighed the
similarities. 

Today, medicine is focused on variation between individual people at the
level of "snips" (single nucleotide polymorphisms). This is where the clues
to diseases and their treatments will be found - not in artificially induced
versions of the disease in an entirely separate species.

The funding for the primate centre would be better spent on more
scientifically modern and reliable research methods involving DNA
microarrays; bioinformatics; microdosing with subsequent Pet analysis; human
stem cells; large clinical studies and so on.

Science, not politics, should determine what research gets funded in the UK.