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[Josh Greenman <josh.greenman AT gmail.com>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/us/02chimps.html?src=twr&pagewanted=print

September 1, 2010

Will Aging Chimps Get to Retire, or Face Medical Research?

By DAN FROSCH

ALAMOGORDO, N.M. — Flo the chimpanzee bounds about her enclosure,
hurls a rubber ball then stares quizzically at the New Mexico green
chili pepper that will be her morning snack.

It has been a long time since Flo was on exhibit at the Memphis Zoo,
even longer since she learned to smoke cigarettes during a stint with
the circus. Most recently, she was a research chimpanzee here in New
Mexico, part of an expansive biomedical testing program for hepatitis
C and H.I.V.

At the moment, though, she is out of a job — but perhaps not for long.

Flo and the 185 other chimpanzees who live at the Alamogordo Primate
Facility at Holloman Air Force Base have not been research subjects
for nearly a decade — part of an agreement between the National
Institutes of Health and the military, which prohibits using the
animals for biomedical tests on the base.

But recently, the health institute decided it wanted to use the chimp
colony for medical research again, primarily to help develop the
elusive hepatitis C vaccine. This past June, the institute began
shipping some of the animals by special trucks to the Southwest
National Primate Research Center in San Antonio and plans on moving
the remaining chimpanzees by the end of 2011.

The move has spurred outrage among animal rights advocates, primate
experts and politicians, who say the chimpanzees — many of them
middle-aged and elderly — should get to live out the rest of their
lives in peace after years of invasive research. It has also cast a
fresh light on the debate over the tipping point between science and
ethics, with everyone from the legendary primatologist Jane Goodall to
Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico weighing in.

“These chimpanzees have given up their freedom, if not their natural
environment, their bodies, their health, their children to research,”
said Laura Bonar, program director for Animal Protection of New
Mexico, which wants the government to turn the Alamogordo facility
into a retirement sanctuary for the chimps. “And at the end of their
lives, we can give them something back.”

For the health institute, though, the Alamogordo chimpanzees represent
an invaluable resource. As per the agreement with the Air Force,
biomedical research cannot be conducted on the animals. That agreement
was forged after the institute acquired the chimpanzees from the
Coulston Foundation, an infamous New Mexico research laboratory that
was found by federal officials to have abused and neglected the
animals.

In 2001, the institute gave the private Charles River Laboratories a
10-year contract to provide medical care to the chimps, most of whom
have been infected or exposed to hepatitis C and H.I.V. through prior
research.

These days, chimps like Flo, who at 53 is the oldest of the Alamogordo
colony, spend their days living in small groups in geodesic domes:
foraging for food, swinging from structures and whooping greetings at
visitors and one another.

Harold Watson, who heads the chimpanzee research program for the
National Center for Research Resources, said that with the end of the
contract, it only makes sense to use the chimps for their original
purpose. The research — which will most likely entail drawing periodic
blood samples, liver biopsies and in some cases inoculations of
hepatitis C — will be carefully monitored, he said.

“I think people envision pictures of monkeys with electrodes in their
heads,” Dr. Watson said. “This is not what we’re talking about.”

The history of primate research, however, has been long and
controversial. Because of their genetic closeness to humans,
chimpanzees are considered well-suited for studies of how various
infectious diseases or psychological environments might affect
mankind.

But some have questioned whether that research has yielded any
substantive breakthroughs, and the United States is currently the only
developed country that continues large-scale confinement of chimps in
laboratories, according to the Humane Society of the United States.
Supporters of the research say the animals have been critical in the
development of hepatitis A and B vaccines.

Pending Congressional legislation known as the Great Ape Protection
Act would retire about 500 federally owned chimpanzees currently in
laboratories to permanent sanctuary. The Alamogordo colony traces its
lineage to the Air Force’s space chimp experiments in the late 1950s.
A decade later, the toxicologist Frederick Coulston set out to build
the world’s largest captive colony of chimpanzees for research, in New
Mexico. His foundation’s tenure was marred by charges of severe
mistreatment.

That legacy still haunts the health institute, which got 288 of the
chimpanzees around 2001 and has tried to distance itself from the
Coulston Foundation.

John Gluck, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of
New Mexico, who has visited the Alamogordo colony at least four times
since the 1970s, is worried what a move to Texas would mean for the
animals’ physical and mental health, particularly given “the
tremendous price” paid by most of the chimpanzees while research
subjects of the Coulston Foundation, he said.

“N.I.H., in general, is a place I respect,” Dr. Gluck said. “But it
seems to me that they’ve lost both their ethical and scientific
compass here.”

Governor Richardson has also urged the institute to reconsider, and
Ms. Goodall wrote to the institute that the chimpanzees “will surely
suffer considerable physical and emotional distress from this plan.”

Dr. Lon Lammey, the director of the Alamogordo primate facility for
Charles River, the private contractor, disputed the notion that the
move would be harmful, and said he was “confident the animals would
continue to receive optimal medical care.”

Despite the mounting pressure, the institute has shown little sign of
changing its plan.

Some 15 miles from the base, a separate group of 82 chimpanzees are
also waiting to be moved, but to a lush Florida sanctuary run by Save
the Chimps, a rescue group.

The animals were part of a larger group handed over to the rescue
organization by the Coulston Foundation after its demise and have
gradually been moved to Florida over the past few years. Save the
Chimps wants the institute to permanently retire the rest of the
Alamogordo chimpanzees to a sanctuary as well.

At the old Coulston facility, which has been transformed into a
temporary sanctuary itself, a 13-year-old chimp named JJ clutched a
bundle of security blankets while readying for lunch. As a worker
placed bushels of fruit in the enclosures, the chimpanzees began to
yelp in unison, their cries carrying across the high desert.