Dogs may be a man's best friend, but on the great evolutionary chain, chimpanzees are humanity's closest relatives in the animal world. Chimps are so much like us physically, emotionally and socially that for decades researchers routinely used them as surrogates to test new surgical procedures, evaluate the effectiveness of drugs and vaccines, and develop other therapeutic breakthroughs before trying them out on humans.
That research has been instrumental in advancing scientific knowledge and the search for new treatments and medicines to prevent life-threatening and debilitating diseases.
But the very similarities that make chimps so useful as research subjects also raise thorny moral and ethical dilemmas: If chimps are really so much like us, how can we justify forcing them to undergo experimental, potentially dangerous procedures that we would never countenance testing on people?
If chimpanzees feel pain and experience emotions of distress, grief and loss in much the same way we do, why is it OK to conduct research on them that would never be considered ethical if it were conducted on humans?
Recently, the National Institutes of Health took up the question during a review of its policy regarding several hundred chimps the agency owns at its labs around the country. It asked the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, to study the ethical issues involved in using chimps as research subjects and to make recommendations about whether, and under what circumstances, the practice can be justified for NIH-sponsored research.
This week, the Institute of Medicine released its report, and its findings attempted to strike a balance between those who think chimp research is a valuable tool that ought to remain available to researchers for a wide range of applications, and the growing number of scientists and bioethicists who believe it is never justified under any circumstances.
While holding that much current research using chimpanzees is unnecessary, the institute stopped short of endorsing an outright ban. Instead, it recommended the adoption of uniform ethical guidelines for determining when, if ever, such research is necessary to treat, prevent or control diseases that pose a serious threat to public health.
The criteria for ethically acceptable chimp research adopted by the institute are straightforward. It said the knowledge gained from such experiments must be necessary to advance a public health goal; that researchers had to show there was no other way of getting such knowledge, and that using human subjects to obtain it would be unethical; and that chimps used for research purposes must be cared for and housed in appropriate physical and social habitats.
The institute's recommendations have been adopted by NIH director Francis S. Collins, which brings U.S. policies into line with those of most other governments. All the countries of the European Union already ban research on chimps except in those rare cases where it is the only way to meet a public health emergency, and it's pretty much prohibited everywhere else in the world as well.
While the new NIH guidelines don't rule out chimp research entirely, they set a high enough ethical bar that, as a practical matter, it's unlikely future work will be approved except on rare occasions. That's as it should be, given what we know about how similar to us chimps are cognitively and emotionally. Most people will probably always prefer dogs to chimps as household companions, but treating our closest primate relatives humanely surely also ought to be part of what makes us human.