This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by editorial page staff and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.
You can say this for the federal government: It may be big and incompetent, but it sure has inertia. And once some faceless bureaucrat puts a bad idea into play, it just keeps lumbering down the wrong path.
Despite pleas from Gov. Bill Richardson, Sen. Tom Udall, Animal Protection of New Mexico, actor Gene Hackman and countless animal activists, the National Institutes of Health seems determined to take about 200 chimpanzees at the Alamogordo Primate Facility on Holloman Air Force Base out of retirement and move them to the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio.
There, some will be subjected to pointless testing. While chimps and humans have genetic similarities, they are sufficiently different on a cellular level that using them for research into a long list of infectious diseases has proven fruitless after decades of trying.
To his credit, Gov. Richardson has asked NIH director Francis Collins to "permanently retire" the chimps and convert the Alamogordo facility into a sanctuary. Those pleas have fallen on deaf ears at NIH headquarters, where these intelligent, sentient chimpanzees apparently are just numbers on a report.
Given the research these animals have endured, they should be left alone for the rest of their lives. Many are old, infected by researchers with HIV and hepatitis, and bear other scars from what humans have done to them. After decades of laboratory confinement ? and a 10-year hiatus from testing ? it's cruel and inhumane to resume this pathetic exercise just because NIH bureaucrats think "mechanisms for increasing the cost-effectiveness of chimpanzee breeding, maintenance and research must be developed."
That sounds like a grad student's thesis, not a medical necessity.
Societal moral standards have changed since it was considered acceptable to subject intelligent animals like chimps and dogs to testing for a variety of reasons not always confined to medical research. It's time for the NIH, mired in past thinking, to move on and leave these animals in peace.
Posted with permission from the Albuquerque Publishing Company.
|
