Should the Great Apes Be Used in Biomedical Research? No

SHOULD THE GREAT APES BE USED IN BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH? NO

Jean Kazez

Southern Methodist University

In July 2010, the fate of about 200 chimpanzees living on the Holloman Air Force base in Alamogordo, New Mexico, became a topic of national debate (Frosch, 2010). The primate facility had been created in 2000 as a sanctuary forthe chimp population of theCoulston Foundation, which had closed its labs after being charged with animal welfare violations over a period of two decades. Now, ten years later, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to transfer these animals to the National Primate Research Facility in San Antonio, Texas, where they would once again be used in biomedical research.

These apes would join over 160already in San Antonio,adding to about 1,000 chimpanzees (pan troglodytes) used for research in the US(NCRR, 2007). The facility’s website explains that chimpanzees were “critical to the development of vaccines for Hepatitis A and B” and are now used primarily in “developing and testing vaccines and drugs for Hepatitis C” (SNPRF, no date). According to a careful investigation conducted by Kathleen Conlee of the Humane Society (Conlee, 2007), chimpanzees in US labs are also used “as models for human reproduction, malaria, gene therapy, respiratory viruses, Crohn’s disease, drug and vaccine testing, and other infectious diseases.” (p. 114) Despite the initial hopes of researchers in the 80s and 90s, chimpanzees are no longer considered viable models of AIDS, since HIV infection rarely progresses to AIDS in this species.

Hepatitis C research is not easy on chimpanzees, despite the video of frolicking apes displayed at the San Antonio facility’s website (SNPRF, no date).In the course of this research, the apes are injected with virus, watched for signs and symptoms, frequently biopsied (largely percutaneously), and kept in isolation whenever they’re being studied (Bettauer, 2007).Apes are not natural carriers of Hepatitis C, which spreads between humans primarily by blood transfusion and when drug abusers share needles. But they can be infected, and they appear to be the only non-human species that can be infected—hence the San Antonio facility’s interest in the Alamogordo chimpanzees.

The proposed transfer led to reintroduction of the Great Ape Protection Act (GAPA), which was initially introduced in Congress in 2009 with 160 cosponsors (HSUS, 2010). A descendant of the Great Ape Project, established by Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri in 1994 (Singer & Cavalieri, 1994), GAPA would phase out all invasive research on pan troglodytes and (less important, since they’re seldom used) the rest of the great apes--bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas. All primates (comprising about 20 species) already receive extraconsideration under the federal Animal Welfare Act, which requires “a physical environment adequate to promote the psychological well-being of primates.” (AWA, no date, §2143). Under the CHIMP act, passed in 2000, chimpanzees came to be favored in another way: if they survive research, and they’re not useful for further research, they must be retired to a federally approved sanctuary, not killed (as other animals would be). GAPA takes the ultimate step: it prohibits all invasive research on the great apes. Passage wouldn’t put the US in the vanguard; in fact, just the opposite. Starting with the UK in 1997, countries around the world have stopped using the great apes in biomedical research. Only the US and Gabon still support the use of chimpanzees for medical experiments (Conlee, 2007).

With the 200 chimpanzees bound for Texas, all attention was on the plight of these animals. Meanwhile, pro-research organizations did their best to redirect attention to humans who could benefit from continued research. Opposition to GAPA is strenuous in the biomedical research community (Wolinetz, 2010).If we care about the human victims of diseases like Hepatitis C (who include, potentially, ourselves and our own loved ones), then how could we not use the chimpanzees to find cures?

That’s certainly a good question. I’ll try to answer it in section one, and then focus on more general issues: Do animals have rights? Do we have obligations to them? Is animal experimentation ever defensible? In the last section, I’ll explain why I support the Great Ape Protection Act. (For other views on why apes should be protected, see Cavalieri & Singer, 1994).

1. Apes, Art, Trees

Seldom discussed when animal research is in question, but obviously true: we forfeit medical advances all the time, with no special fanfare or debate. For example, the US funds art museums, instead of channeling every last tax dollar into medical research. We could raise more money for AIDS and Hepatitis C research by selling off the treasures of the National Gallery, but nobody thinks we should do that. Nor is this just a matter of some unique importance possessed by art. The regal trees lining French country roads cast shadows that can befuddle drivers and turn highway run-offs into deadly crashes. Cutting them down would save some number of lives every year. Likewise, highway engineers know that by reducing speed limits, thousands of highway fatalities could be prevented. Yet nobody really thinks the trees must be cut down and the speed limits reduced. All these examples show that on the whole we reject the idea that saving the maximum number of human lives is our constant number one imperative. Other things are important too—art, the natural world, the lifestyle we prefer—and we will continue giving them their due.

We value art, trees, and fast driving enough to let more people die so we can have them. Do we also care about chimpanzees to that degree? In fact, more and more people do. Of course, someone who knows nothing at all about the great apeswon’t have this reaction. But that’s true of art too. The artistically ignorant will want all money to go to medical research, none to art, but it makes sense to think funding priorities should be based on informed preferences, not ignorant preferences. The person who knows nothing about apes just doesn’t know what he needs to know.

Why do so many informed people attach special value to chimpanzees? For one, they are our closest non-human relative, historically speaking: chimpanzees and humans diverged from a common ancestor about 7 million years ago. They’re also our closest non-human relative genetically, sharing 96 to 98 percent of our genes, depending on research methodology (NIH News, 2005). In fact, when we inform ourselves about the great apes, we learn that we are arguably great apes too. Vanity makes us resist the classification, but many scientiststhink that genetically, and in terms of evolutionary history, it makes good sense forhomo sapiens, pan troglodytes (the common chimpanzee) and pan paniscus(pygmy chimpanzees or bonobos) to be grouped together (Diamond, 1992).

Chimpanzees have a great deal in common with human beings psychologically. Like us, they have some level of self-awareness. We know that because they pass the mirror self-recognition test, unlike the vast majority of species. They examine their faces in a mirror, instead of searching behind the mirror for the “other” animal. That alone is no huge accomplishment, but it suggests that chimps have a sense of themselves, so can be aware of their own plight in a deeper way than most other animals can. This is not to trivialize what other animals suffer—we can all tell what our own cats and dogs feel about being trapped in a small space, stepped on, or hungry. The point is that there are extra dimensions to chimpanzee experience, making it more like our own.

Chimpanzees can also be taught rudimentary sign languages. An ape being injected or biopsied could, with sufficient training, literally say he doesn’t like that, in contrast with other animals protesting inarticulately. Frans de Waal has shown that chimpanzees have some of the rudiments of morality (deWaal, 2006). Chimps can empathize with their troop-mates, and(on the other hand) will get angry when others get more than their fair share—they grasp the concept of fairness. There are experiments that suggest chimps have a stronger awareness of the future than other species; they’re more capable of planning and strategic thinking. As Jane Goodall famously discovered, they use tools and pass on local customs, so that chimpanzees in geographically separated troops have different “cultures.” Their social interactions and way of life are different from our own, but similar enough that de Waal speaks of “chimpanzee politics.”

We care about chimpanzees for all of the above reasons, but also because they are an endangered species (IUCN, no date). Native to equatorial Africa, it’s been estimated that their numbers will have been halved by the end of the 60-year period from 1970 to 2030, the result of habitat destruction, poaching (largely for the lucrative bush meat trade), and disease. Now, chimpanzees can be preserved in zoos, and even in laboratories. So merely preserving the genome doesn’t require us to stop experimenting on chimpanzees; in fact, the more we breed them for research, the more the genome can be expected to survive. But what we value is not just the genome, or the existence of individual chimpanzees. We value there being communities of chimpanzees freely living their own lives, instead of being our captives, and living the very restrictedlives we impose on them. The more they dwindle in Africa, the more it will become disturbing to think that the remaining animals are incarcerated in our labs and infected with our diseases.

Call the argument I’ve just made the “Value-to-Us Argument”. It’s the most cautious and conservative argument that can be made for the Great Ape Protection Act. It turns on attitudes we already have—our support for the arts, preserving trees, and higher speed limits; and attitudes people have toward the great apes when they inform themselves about them. It gives animals no new-fangled place in the order of things. It doesn’t so much as assert that we have obligations to chimpanzees, let alone that they have rights.The argument doesn’t lead in the direction of exempting all animals from research, because not all animals have as much value to us as the great apes do. The reasoning indulges human special concern for their own near and dear, allowing that apes may matter to us especially because they are our closest non-human kin.Even with all this caution and conservatism, we can still make a good case against further experimentation on chimpanzees.

2. Concern for Animals

But is that all we can say? The argument so far ignores an important fact about apes. Unlike paintings, they can suffer; they have preferences. We can look into the eyes of chimpanzeesand feel compelled to do things on their behalf. We seem to have obligations directly towardthem, whereas we have no obligations directlytoward paintings. Everything we do with respect to paintings is really for ourselves or other people.

The fact that apes can feel and want, and that we must do things for their sake, could strengthen the case I’ve made so far on behalf of the Great Ape Protection Act—that’s the possibility I’ll be exploring, step by step. And certainly, it is a case of strengthening, not replacing. There’s no incompatibility between protecting apes because of their value to us and because we have duties to them directly.

At certain points in history there has been strong resistance to the idea that animals have feelings and preferences, and that we have obligations toward them. In the 17the century, renowned philosopher Rene Descartes argued that animals have no feelings whatever—no conscious mental life at all. He thought consciousness required a soul; and you couldn’t attribute souls to apes or dogs without starting down a slippery slope and finally attributing souls to insects—which to his mind would be patently absurd.

Periodically, even today, a philosopher steps up to the plate and tries to argue that animals see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing—consciously, that is. Obviously, signals propagate through animal nervous systems just like they do through ours. The debate is only about the feeling aspect, or sometimes it’s about whether animals really have beliefs and desires, as opposed to just having complicated neural mechanisms that register inputs from the world, and generate outputs—i.e. behavior.

What about the idea that we have obligations to animals? Again, there have been philosophers who think otherwise. Immanuel Kant, the great philosopher of the enlightenment, holds that we have no duty to feed a starving cat or relieve the pain of a suffering dog for the animal’s sake, since dogs and cats are not (on his view) the sort of being to which it’s possible to have duties, however much they do suffer. (He did worry that cruelty to animals might lead us to be cruel to other humans, so for that reason he did think we should feed our cats and help our dogs.)

As much as they’re philosophically interesting, I’ll set aside unusual positions that convince almost nobody today (for further discussion, see Kazez, 2010, chapters 2-3). We’ll assume here the common sense picture—animals do suffer, and they have other morally relevant mental states as well, such as preferences; and these things directly give rise to obligations in us, such as the obligation to feed our pets, use anesthesia for veterinary surgery, avoid hitting animals on the road, and the like. Putting all of that in a nutshell, you might say that animals have rights. But rights talk is open to many different interpretations. And the interpretation makes a huge difference to the sort of arguments you can make about the great apes. We need to separate the different shades of rights talk.

Ethicists who think animals have rights in a very strong sense have in mind what are often referred to as “human rights.” Consider how we condemn research on non-consenting humans—like the Guatemalan prisoners infected with syphilis by American researchers in the 1940s (this only recently came to light – see McNeil 2010). If someone asked how the researchers could have been expected to pass up medical progresson syphilis, we’d simply say they had to, since human prisoners have rights—so-called “human rights”—and the experiments violated them. If rights like this were extended to some animal species—and don’t let the nomenclature make you think they couldn’t be—experimentation on that species would have to be drastically curtailed or terminated.

Ethicists who hold that animals have rights in a looser sense think there are conditions in an animal (like pain) that give rise to obligations in us, obligations that are owed directly to the animal. These could be relatively limited obligations, like the obligation to ensure that animalsused in research receive adequate food, housing, and pain relief. Or they could be quite extensive and status quo-altering—as I’ll argue in section four. I’ll call this more challenging view “The Strong Direct Obligation View,” contrasting it with a “Humane Traditionalism” that allows us to continue using animals in all or most of the usual ways.

The Rights View and the Strong Direct Obligation Viewinvolve rethinking our relationship with animals, and giving them more protection than historically they have been given. To take these ideas seriously, we have to be aware of our own biases, and try to drop them or at least see beyond them. And clearly we do have biases. Even if we are attached to our pets, we are prone to think that animals are “just animals.” Philosophers since the ancient Greeks have tried to capture what it is to be human in terms of a contrast between human excellences and animal deficiencies. All cultures allow animals to be used for human benefit in myriad ways. On a visceral level, humans find some species more than inferior, and actually repellant. In short, we are “speciesists”—to use a term that entered English in the 1970s: we have a deep-seated bias in favor of the human species and against other species (Singer, 2009).

Eliminatingspeciesist bias is such an important step in rethinking animal ethics that we need to pause here and more closely examine what speciesism is and isn’t. (1) Clearly we should count blanket disparagement of animals as speciesist: distaste for fur, tails, feathers, and the like is an obvious bias. If your gut feeling is “they’re just animals,” that’s surely sheer prejudice. (2) We should also count it as speciesist when one makes a moral distinction—“we can do X to apes, but not to humans”—and can back it up with nothing but sheer species: “They’re apes, and we’re humans, end of story.” We ought to recognize that “human” is simply a biological category (it means “member of homo sapiens”). How could a mere biological category, in and of itself, be a status-conferring, ethics-changing honorific? (3) On the other hand, we shouldn’t assume it’sautomatically speciesist to believe we can do X to apes, but not to humans, no matter how we arrive at that view. Overcoming speciesism doesn’t mean we have to see animals and humans as interchangeable, no matter what the moral issue or context.