 PRIMATE
EXPERIMENTS
A doctor speaks out
The following powerful endorsement of the growing scientific
opposition to experiments on primates appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 30th
September 2003. It is written by the Telegraph's leading health writer, Dr James
Le Fanu.
The current controversy over the proposal to open
a primate research laboratory in Cambridge
has attracted the hostility not only of the usual suspects. The letters page of
last Tuesday's edition of this paper revealed the objections of a coalition of
scientists, researchers and neurologists (see letter).
The central problem is that, despite more than 100 years of research, scientists
have come to realise that they have no grasp of how the brain really works.
Clever chemists, to be sure, have identified dozens of neuro-transmitters, and
sophisticated brain scanners can delineate with great accuracy which part of
the brain does what.
But the practicality of how we memorise something as simple as a telephone
number or how we perceive the world around us remains completely elusive. The
brain now appears so profoundly complex, mysterious and inscrutable as to defy
human understanding.
This is all very frustrating for young scientists whose jobs depend on them
doing something to convey the impression that their research is useful. So they
end up doing terrible things to our beautiful primate cousins under the guise
of finding the cure for some disease or other.
Primate research has contributed nothing to the development of treatments for
stroke, but this does not discourage researchers from continuing to damage monkeys'
brains to see what effects this might have on their ability to carry out certain
tasks.
Similarly, it is absurd to suppose that the enigmas of diseases such as Alzheimer's
or Parkinson's might be resolved by primate experiments, because their brains
are so qualitatively different from our own. Indeed, as Professor Claude Reiss
and his fellow signatories point out, the proposed primate research centre will
not just cause yet further distress to monkeys. It will also divert attention
and resources from more creative and useful lines of research.
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