Research Chimpanzees May Get a Break 英文参考文献.docVIP

Perspective ResearchChimpanzeesMayGetaBreak FransB.M.deWaal* LivingLinks,YerkesNationalPrimateResearchCenter,EmoryUniversity,Atlanta,Georgia,UnitedStatesofAmerica When New Zealand, in 2000, became the first nation to pass legislation against research on the great apes, and Spain however. The Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would forbid all invasivebiomedicalresearchonapes,was recently reintroduced in Congress [4]. AndapetitiontotheUSFishandWildlife Service by the Humane Society of the United States and other groups seeks to change the status of captive chimpanzees from ‘‘threatened’’ to ‘‘endangered.’’ Un- der the Endangered Species Act, this upgradewouldpreventcommercesothat chimpanzees could not be sold for use as pets or actors in advertisements, such as the degrading CareerB com- mercials[5]. bioethicist,Dr.JeffreyKahn,nowatJohns Hopkins University, as chairman of its committee. adopted a resolution to grant these The NIH’s head-in-the-sand attitude towards ethics hinted that powerful inter- ests were at play, which in turn explains the IOM’s decision to keep chimpanzee experts off its committee. This way, no establishedinterestswererepresentedand the discussion was free from political interference. The result, though, was a committeewithonlytangentialknowledge of the species under consideration. From the start, therefore, the committee faced serious challenges and pressures, and it is in this light that its final report is to be commended for the balance it struck and thehigh-qualityinformationitdelivered. The IOM committee did an outstand- ing job reviewing and summarizing the biomedical need for chimpanzees in a report entitled ‘‘Chimpanzees in Biomed- ical and Behavioral Research: Assessing the Necessity’’, released December 15, 2011 [7]. It summed up its conclusions as follows (p.5): ‘‘The present trajectory indicates a decreasing need for chimpan- zee studies due to the emergence of non- chimpanzee models and technologies.’’ Apart fr