Perspectives On Medical Research

Volume 5, 1995

Aping Science

A Critical Analysis of Research at the Yerkes
Regional Primate Research Center

Policy Recommendations

I. Reducing Primate Use

1) Research designed to understand and treat human conditions using nonhuman primates as models should be discontinued;

2) The primate center system of the National Center for Research Resources should be closed and base-grant funding reallocated to research on environmental causes of human diseases;

3) Nonhuman primates remaining at the primate centers should be retired and transferred to the environment that best serves their needs;

4) Current FDA regulations that mandate animal testing should be critically reviewed. When nonhuman primate tests are deemed necessary, commercially bred and raised primates, rather than those wild-caught, should be used. Where no alternatives to animal tests currently exist, efforts to develop in vitro tests should be pursued vigorously. Such in vitro bioassays have generally proven to be less costly and more reliable than animal tests.


II. Expanding Public Health Research

1) The Congressional subcommittees on Labor, Health and Human Services should require that:

A) the NIH Director mandate that the heads of the various institutes of health reconstitute the membership rosters of their study sections so that clinical investigators have at least equivalent numerical representation to laboratory researchers;

B) the Directors of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Alcoholism, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute on Child and Human Development reconstitute the membership of their study sections so that at least one social scientist with professional training in sociology, anthropology, or social psychology is represented along with clinical investigators and laboratory researchers;

C) the Directors of the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Disease, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and the National Institute on General Medical Sciences reconstitute the membership rosters of all study sections related to etiology to include at least one public health biostatistician and one human pathologist;

2) Congress should consider inaugurating a new human-data collection system, possibly using each person's Social Security number, to track individual medical, environmental, social. and occupational history from birth to death.