Chimpanzee research in Texas could face changes
December 19, 2011 9:17 AM ET
By DON FINLEY
SAN ANTONIO (AP) - At the chimpanzee playground, scattered with primary-colored concrete platforms and truck tires and ropes to climb, a graying chimp lies on his back, legs crossed, as if to study the heavens. But it's the human visitors his eyes follow.
"Each one of these animals has a personality," said Dr. Melissa de la Garza, the veterinarian in charge of the day-to-day care of the 149 chimps at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute. "Not all animals look for human interaction. The chimpanzee does."
It's a complicated relationship. Chimps and people are so similar physically, genetically and — to listen to their caretakers — even in personality, that de la Garza often brings in local physician specialists, rather than vets, to treat them. In the winter, the humans take care not to pass their colds and flu to the chimps.
For that very reason, chimps have been prized by scientists for their usefulness in certain kinds of scientific research in which similarity to people is critical. And for almost 50 years, chimpanzees have been studied at the San Antonio facility.
"They've contributed greatly to our understanding disease processes, including AIDS in the early years," said Dr. John VandeBerg, scientific director of Texas Biomed. "We were the first to infect a chimpanzee with HIV. Our work was critical to the development of the hepatitis B vaccine with chimpanzees. We were involved in the development of the hepatitis A vaccine with chimpanzees."
That contribution is evolving.
Last Thursday, the director of the National Institutes of Health promised stricter rules governing the use of chimps in research, based on new recommendations by an expert committee of the Institute of Medicine.
How much current research the new rules would prohibit depends on whom you ask. The committee that wrote the recommendations said they would preclude all but a small number. The head of the NIH predicted half. And VandeBerg, perhaps hopefully, believes they will impact local research little or none, depending on how they are interpreted.
The recommendations were developed in the wake of a controversy in the middle of which VandeBerg and Texas BioMed found themselves.
Last year, hoping to save $2 million, the NIH announced plans to move 186 chimps it owns from an Alamogordo, N.M., facility no longer doing research to San Antonio, where they could be enrolled in new studies.
That brought a long-simmering debate to a furious boil. The plan drew opponents ranging from actor Gene Hackman to former N.M. Gov. Bill Richardson, and breathed new life into efforts by the Humane Society of the United States to remove all chimps from research labs.
"I think we were a significant force in encouraging this review when the Alamogordo chimps were going to move to your neck of the woods," Humane Society President Wayne Pacelle. said. "One outcome of that was that NIH called for this IOM report."
But that was only one part of what VandeBerg describes as "a three-front war, basically."
The Humane Society also petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to declare captive chimpanzees as endangered. A similar petition almost 25 years ago led to endangered status for wild chimps, but the government opted to list captive chimps only as threatened — mainly because of their value to researchers.
The group also is lobbying hard for the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which has more than 130 sponsors in the U.S. House and would make illegal nearly all research with chimps.
"We treat chimpanzees with a special respect and reverence because they are more similar to humans than any other animal," VandeBerg said. "And we're proud of the conditions in which they live here. But I think it's our moral and ethical responsibility to do this research with chimpanzees, in order to develop as quickly as possible the capacity to save millions of human lives."
Sabrina Bourgeois swears she knew at age 5 she wanted to work with chimpanzees. On visits to the zoo, her parents would leave her to watch the chimps while the rest of the family went to gaze at the hippos and giraffes.
Today, the 31-year-old behavioral specialist and trainer is part of a six-person team in charge of the chimps' psychological and emotional needs.
She knows their names, celebrates their birthdays and knows what DVDs they like to watch ("The Jungle Book" is high on the list) when the maintenance crews shoo them off the playground.
"They can be very mischievous and they can be stubborn," Bourgeois said. "Some love to play. And they'll do all sorts of things, similar to children, to enlist you to play."
One of her main jobs is making their involvement in research studies less stressful. Although chimps aren't subjected to the kinds of invasive studies the baboons and monkeys sometimes are — those can involve surgery and euthanasia — chimps often are injected with sedatives and experimental drugs. In hepatitis studies, they undergo needle liver biopsies, in which tissue is removed using a syringe.
Not that the studies are always benign. A few have died from testing the safety of promising but volatile monoclonal antibodies, a type of therapy that tinkers with the immune system in sometimes unexpected ways, VandeBerg said.
Bourgeois trains the chimps to present an arm or leg voluntarily for injection. That training is a long and continuous process, with plenty of praise and rewards — Hawaiian Punch and Dora the Explorer yogurt in particular.
There's a bond that forms between the staff and chimps, she said, and it's based on their intelligence and humanlike emotions. But despite that bond, she's a supporter of the research done here — and not just because of the paycheck, she said.
"I had a close friend and mentor who had hepatitis C," Bourgeois said. "He was 44 years old and came to see me two months before he passed away. He went through a year of trying experimental treatments for hepatitis C that made him so sick he was down to 100 pounds. He was suffering, and he opted not to go through them anymore.
"Unfortunately, there is at this time no effective treatment for hepatitis C, and I don't imagine we will have one without these chimpanzees."
Opponents, of course, have a different view. Like the IOM committee, they believe most chimp research today is unnecessary, with alternatives available.
"These are a highly endangered species, and society places a special value on animals who are so rare," the Humane Society's Pacelle said. "Related to that is that these animals are so highly intelligent and social that confining them in laboratory setting brings with it a major moral cost."
In addition, Pacelle said, they're so expensive to maintain — estimates range from $300,000 to more than $600,000 over the lifetime of each chimp — that those tax dollars could be put to better uses, especially given the fact the animals are used in so few studies.
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH, said in announcing the new guidelines that there are no savings to be had in moving chimps from labs to sanctuaries. Under federal law, taxpayers must support retired research chimps throughout their lives, and the cost is about the same in either setting.
Four studies involving nine chimps are under way at Texas Biomed. Two are testing new therapies for safety before they're tried in people. And two are looking at the underlying mechanisms of hepatitis C and E.
Robert Lanford, an expert in hepatitis at Texas Biomed, was one of a number of scientists who argued before the IOM committee that science isn't quite ready to relinquish chimpanzees.
"My opinion is, we need somewhere between three to five more years of the kind of immunological studies in chimpanzees that are infected with hepatitis C — meaning infecting an animal and monitoring it from the time of infection, and understanding its outcome," Lanford said.
VandeBerg said he believes Collins has a broader interpretation of the guidelines than the IOM committee that developed them. While the committee estimated very few studies would qualify under the criteria in the guidelines, Collins estimated half would. And a second committee he's organizing to evaluate which studies to continue is likely to include experts in such research, which the IOM committee lacked, VandeBerg said.
"I don't believe that the impact on our research will be great," he said.
In the past year, VandeBerg has emerged as perhaps the leading defender of chimps in science. The federal government supports eight national primate research centers. Of those, only two — including the Southwest National Primate Center at Texas Biomed — use chimps in research. The other, the Yerkes primate center at Emory University in Atlanta, uses them only in behavioral studies.
"Ironically, I've never used chimpanzees for my own research," VandeBerg, a geneticist, said a few days before the IOM report was released.
"I'm arguing the case as a national primate research center director who has seen over these decades the research that's been done with chimpanzees and the value of it to human life. I've seen how well these chimpanzees are taken
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