While surgeons in Pittsburgh were transplanting the liver of a baboon into a man's body, animal activists at the hospital entrance were chanting, "Animals are no spare parts."
Their protest was interrupted by Robert Winters, a patient on his way to a hepatitis treatment. Hepatitis attacks and destroys the liver. Starting up the steps, Mr. Winters shouted: "I didn't ask for this! But I've got it and I'm fighting it just like that guy [getting a transplant] up there! You don't have a right to be standing here!" The chanting stopped as he went on. "Do you know what it's like to have liver disease? Do you?"
What makes dilemmas like these particularly difficult is the value most people intuitively attach to the lives of monkeys and apes, our closest animal relatives. Confronted with creatures so strikingly like us, it is not hard to imagine that they have emotions similar to ours, that they are able to suffer and feel miserable as we do. There is increasing evidence that they are intellectually closer to us than any other animal. They think and plan and solve problems with a speed that often astonishes people working with them. Add to this the endangered status of many primates in the wild, and we have every reason to assign greater weight to their lives than to those of more common laboratory animals, such as rats or mice.
Unfortunately for the primates involved, their similarity to us also carries weight from a medical perspective:
It makes them uniquely valuable for transplants and research. They are often the only animals susceptible to diseases that affect us. If it were not for the testing of the polio vaccine on hundreds of thousands of monkeys in the 1950s and 1960s, science might never have halted this crippling disease. The now widely used vaccine against hepatitis B was developed largely on chimpanzees. And most scientists believe that there will be no vaccine against AIDS without primate research.
On the one hand, then, we are dealing with magnificent, intelligent animals that clearly deserve our respect and concern. On the other hand, they may hold the key to medical mysteries, the resolution of which could save millions of human lives. With stakes so high, small wonder that the use of monkeys and apes in biomedical research has become one of the hottest controversies of today.
In "The Monkey Wars," Deborah Blum provides a candid look at the issues from both sides. No comparable book on this topic exists, and after reading it, it is not hard to understand why there is so much polarization. Ms. Blum reports the tactics of animal advocates, ranging from protest demonstrations and legislative initiatives to personal death threats, arson and laboratory break-ins. One group, the Animal Liberation Front, is violent enough to be on the FBI's terrorist list.
On the other side, she describes in gruesome detail historical research by a few bad-apple scientists that have done great harm to their profession. However, she also visits the labs of first-rate investigators who explain how they go about minimizing pain and suffering and why their work should matter to the world.
Ms. Blum, a science writer for the Sacramento Bee, received a Pulitzer Prize for an earlier series of newspaper articles on the same subject. Both sides no doubt view her account as biased against them, which will only go to show how balanced it really is.
She urges animal advocates to step back a little from the fences around research facilities so as to appreciate the genuine progress made by some. Looking beyond the positions of the most radical animal advocates and the most conservative defenders of scientific freedom, we can see an entire middle ground out there. It is not a place for simple slogans, nor for neat boxes marked "right" and "wrong," but one where the large majority of people will feel a lot more comfortable than on the barricades erected over the past decade. It is a place where both animal and human lives count, and where we can honestly and calmly ponder the so-called pain/gain equation -- that is, how much pain we are prepared to inflict for scientific gain.
"The Monkey Wars" documents the shifting of this balance. It argues that the time has come to close our ears to the yelling proponents of the most extreme positions and tune in to voices of reason and moderation. As in the Middle East, not everyone may be happy with dialogue, but it has to be tried if we ever wish to get beyond the current standoff.
Mr. de Waal is a professor in psychology and research at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta. He is the author of "Chimpanzee Politics."
BOOK REVIEW
Title: "The Monkey Wars"
Author: Deborah Blum
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Length, price: 306 pages, $25