Director of Yerks National Primate Research Center Dr. Frans de Waal defended the integral role chimpanzees and other animals play in biomedical research at institutions such as UW-Madison in front of a crowd of 250 Friday.
De Waal spoke on both his own research and the overarching ethical concerns of primate research as part of a discussion series sponsored by the UW-Madison Forum on Animal Research Ethics.
De Waal worked at the Wisconsin National Primate Center in Madison from 1981 to 1991. The Center is based in the Graduate School of UW-Madison and uses about 2,000 primates in biomedical research including studies on HIV, emotion and stem cell research.
Last December, The Institute of Medicine released a report recommending the National Institutes of Health only perform experiments on chimpanzees that would be ethically acceptable to perform on a human.
Although the report questioned the need for chimpanzees in research at all because of technological advancements in medicine, de Waal said chimpanzees have very similar DNA to humans and can help make psychological and biological advancements in humans.
He said the criteria of whether these advancements would be worth the chimpanzee’s pain needs to be measured by how beneficial these advancements would be to humans.
“The more evasive or the more painful or the more hurtful the procedure, the greater the potential benefits would need to be,” de Waal said.
After the IOM report, De Waal said he believed many more primates used for research now will be placed into communities with other research primates because they are unable to be released back into the wild.
