More than 108,000 monkeys were held in US labs as of 2019. That controversy accelerated in the 1960s when the US National Institutes of Health established its primate centers program and medical researchers began relying on non-human primates. (Few people care what researchers do to insects or other invertebrates.)Ĭontroversy over the use of animals in research goes back to at least 18th-century Europe, when philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau began to argue that animals had rights. The Environmental Protection Agency hopes to eliminate the use of vertebrates in animal testing by 2035. I n 2019, the last year for which research is available, more than 108,000 monkeys were held and/or used in experiments in US labs, along with nearly 200,000 guinea pigs, 58,000 dogs, 18,000 cats and millions of mice and rats. She made herself a promise: she would shut down the country’s seven remaining primate centers within the next 10 years. So in late 2019 she took a drastic and irrevocable step: she said yes to a job at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) as a senior science adviser, a move she never would have predicted when she started her career. But every time she questioned a protocol or requested information, even simple questions like whether animals in a study were age- and sex-matched, she was stonewalled and disrespected, painted as a troublemaker rather than as a concerned researcher. She’d made the calm, reasoned arguments she’d sat on her university’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). She had been trying so hard for so long to make things better for the animals in her care, the monkeys used in biomedical research. She’d spent decades in the field, trapping and sampling macaques and other primates across Asia on prestigious grants, publishing her research in top journals, co-authoring a book on monkey diseases, building expertise and credibility.īut now here she was wearing a garish monkey mask on a sidewalk in Seattle, feeling both energized and profoundly uncomfortable to be part of this spectacle. She had worked at NYU’s Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates, and then at the University of Washington’s primate research center, one of eight national primate centers created in the 1960s. She was a PhD, a primatologist – a scientist, for God’s sake, not some silly monkey-hugger who reduced sophisticated issues to summer-camp chants. If you had told Jones-Engel she’d be doing this two years earlier, she would have been horrified.
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