By Christopher Onstott and Leah Nash
Chimpanzees Retired From Research: Major federal agencies have taken steps in the past few weeks toward ending almost all biomedical experimentation on chimpanzees.
Jane Goodall says it was a "Damascus moment" that turned her from the groundbreaking studies of chimpanzees in the wild that revealed their complex social and emotional lives, to a life of nomadic global activism on their behalf.
That moment, at a conference on chimps nearly 27 years ago, led her to begin a campaign to protect chimps, wild and captive, and inspired numerous animal welfare activists who took up the cause. Last month, they all counted two major victories when two federal agencies took steps that together may come close to halting such research.
"There's a lot of problems in the world, this is a problem we can all solve," said Laura Bonar, the program director of Animal Protection of New Mexico, where the most recent chapter in the campaign for chimp protection began. "The very least that the chimps deserve is for us to work together to see them have some peace and dignity."
Back in 1986, what moved Dr. Goodall were presentations on dangers to wild chimp populations and the treatment of captive chimps in research. She went into the meeting a contented field scientist, and, she says, "I left as an activist."
Until that time, "I always felt that I didn't have the credentials to stand up to some of these white-coated lab people," she said, speaking recently in an interview from her home in Tanzania. "But by this time I had done the book" — "The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior" — "and therefore I had more self-confidence."
Over the past few years, as animal welfare groups have mounted a strong but pragmatic campaign against invasive experiments like subjecting chimps to vaccines and treatments for human diseases, Dr. Goodall has been having the occasional conversation with arguably the ultimate white-coated lab person, Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health and former head of the Human Genome Project.
"I was impressed from the very beginning," Dr. Goodall said of Dr. Collins. "He agreed something should be done and went ahead and did it."
Dr. Collins, who invited her to speak to the N.I.H. staff, said, "I found her to be remarkably realistic and practical, but also idealistic in terms of her views."
And on June 26, Dr. Collins announced that more than 300 of the 360 or so chimpanzees owned by the N.I.H. would be retired to sanctuaries over the next few years.
That followed a proposal two weeks earlier by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to list all chimpanzees, including those in captivity, as endangered. The plan would raise barriers for experimenting on chimps even higher, by requiring a permit for almost all medical research on the animals unless it involved only observation or tests that are part of normal veterinary visits. Permits would be granted only if the research was judged to be for the benefit of chimpanzees.
Dr. Goodall said the decisions were not the end of efforts to protect chimps in captivity, a campaign prompted by Animal Protection of New Mexico and expanded by groups like the Goodall Institute, the Humane Society of the United States and others.
"There are still chimpanzees in private labs," she said, as well as in other countries, though Gabon is the only other country known to allow medical experimentation on the animals. It is, however, "a very, very important milestone along the way," she said.
The path to the decisions began in June 2010, when the N.I.H. started to move 186 chimps, held in semiretirement at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, N.M., back into the research stream. The plan was to move them to the Southwest National Primate Research Center at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio.
The animals had been used in research by the Coulston Foundation, at the Alamogordo facility, which closed after many allegations of mistreatment of the chimps. Save the Chimps brought some of the Coulston animals to Florida, where the group has the largest North American chimpanzee sanctuary. Others were still being held at the facility but were not used in research.
"That's what triggered all of this," said Sarah Baeckler Davis, now head of the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance. One of the leaders of the movement, she has both a Ph.D. and a law degree. Dr. Davis had run a sanctuary and has worked with the Goodall Institute in the past. ("I read about her in fourth grade," she said of Dr. Goodall, "and I wanted to be her.")
"That's when we all yelled and screamed about the move," she said, "because they were supposed to be a holding colony."
Ms. Bonar of Animal Protection of New Mexico said the N.I.H. move was so egregious that "the public was outraged."
"We reached out to the public and to all of our elected leaders," she said.
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