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Science should study human brains,
not monkeys'
Letter to the Editor published in The Daily Telegraph September 23, 2003
SIR - John Prescott will soon announce his decision as to whether Cambridge University can build its new primate laboratory in the Cambridge green belt. Tony Blair and the science minister, Lord Sainsbury (chief financier of the Labour Party), have pre-empted the outcome of the public inquiry in their ardent support for this project.
The centre would undoubtedly reap financial benefits for Cambridge's "biotech cluster", so favoured by Lord Sainsbury. But on the more important question of whether it would benefit human medicine, abundant evidence suggests that it would not.
Regrettably, large sums of money spent experimenting on monkey brains in the new facility will mean less money is available for scientists studying human brains - both patients' and healthy volunteers'. Unravelling Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurological disorders is dependent on such human studies. They are the key to finding treatments and cures for these terrible diseases.
Findings from marmosets and macaques have frequently misled neuroscientists, sometimes with tragic consequences. For example, scores of treatments for stroke have been developed and tested in primates, but all of them have failed in humans and harmed people in clinical trials.
One hundred and fifteen MPs agree with us that "experiments on primates cannot be justified in view of the important biological differences between people and primates".
Professor Claude Reiss
Director, Alzheimers' R&D,
President, DLRM Doctors and Lawyers for responsible Medicine
President, Pro Anima
Professor Lawrence Hansen
University of California
Dr Nancy Harrison
Scripps Memorial Hospital, Chula Vista
Dr Ray Greek
Dr Christopher Anderegg
Dr Jerry Vlasak
Europeans for Medical Advancement
Dr Stephen Kaufman
Medical Research Modernisation Committee
Dr Niall Shanks
East Tennessee State University
Professor Vernon Reynolds
Oxford University
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Vivisectors' letter refuted
Professor Colin Blakemore et al. (letter in The Times (London), October 27) confess that they find it "very difficult to see how progress can be made against Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, how new vaccines against malaria and Aids can be developed, or how certain new medicines can be considered suitable to test in people" without experiments on primates.
Response from Professor Reiss printed 31 October, 2003
Everything we know about Alzheimer's and Parkinson's has been learnt by studying humans, not monkeys; primates (even chimpanzees) are immune to malaria and Aids, and are therefore useless for studying those diseases; many people have been killed by new medicines that have tested safe in primates but were not safe for people.
Research in monkeys delayed the polio vaccine by 30 years and, more recently, has wasted 20 years and millions of pounds in Aids research programmes which, it is now acknowledged, have been a failure.
In an early day motion 125 MPs have stated that "experiments on primates cannot be justified in view of the important biological differences between people and primates". Medical progress will be far better assured without experiments on monkeys, which serve only to divert money and researchers' attention from genuinely productive avenues of research, of which there are many."
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