I knew what it was, but I watched it anyway.

Bad, sad. Frown, cry.

The saddest thing is that our scientists would have no qualms about immobilizing her and cutting off the top of her skull to study her brain while they do things to her.

"I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn.

Baby, drink milk.
Baby, play ball.

And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief."

--Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

you weren't kidding. *Wipes eyes with nearest post-it note*.

I was sure that this was one of Jan's, um, deceptions, but when I started watching, I could see the writing on the wall and quickly clicked off it.

oh. brutal. Jeeze, eedge...

I am not a vegetarian or opposed to any research on animals, but seeing stuff like this just reminds me, like Joe above, what a complete moral outrage it is that we still use primates as lab animals

Okay, um. I don't want to start a big argument, I really don't. But...I feel like I need to say this.

It's evident that many primates demonstrate a high degree of consciousness, empathy, and intelligence. That said, I have many friends who do Science! and who participate in animal testing, one of whom wrote a long post about why she does so. It's locked, so I can't link to it, but one of her major points about animal testing, especially testing on primates, is that we do it because we currently have no other reasonable substitute before we test on humans. Researchers testing on animals are held to high standards for their care and for proving that the research they are undertaking is unique and important; they don't run tests for the hell of it, they run them to see if the new drug to treat brain cancer or MS lesions work, or if this new surgery could restore sight to people who are blind or cure epilepsy or psychiatric illness. Animals in well-run, reputable labs are constantly checked on, properly fed and anaesthetized, and humanely euthanized. We, sadly, can't go straight from theory to petri dish or computer model to the first operation on a human being a success, and we don't have any kind of sufficiently complex model to mimic what happens in vivo without animal testing.

There are exceptions, of course, and crappy labs, but these are exactly that. Good scientists take good care of their animals because it gives them good results when their animals are healthy. And yes, sometimes scientific progress looks *horrible* as it goes, but many if not most of our medical advances wouldn't have happened without animal testing; this includes treatment for diabetes and organ transplants and drugs for AIDS and cancer. Sadly, because primates are so close to humans, in many situations they provide the best models for how a drug or procedure will work in humans.

And I suspect that most scientists will be very, very happy when we get computer models that are good enough to really work without requiring testing on animals, but we are very far from that point now.

So...it's sad, it really is. It's possible for something to be both a moral outrage and a practical necessity, and I think that's where primate testing falls. Right now, animal testing is still very necessary. It saves both human and animal lives, and there are many Metachatters who wouldn't be here without the medical advances that it's made possible.

As a scientist, who yes, tests on animals, let me just agree with all of Fuzzbean's post. I didn't want to say anything because I feel too close to all of this.

Fuzzbean - I don't dispute that there's truth to what you're saying, and I'm glad you made the case in a cogent way

I would just ask - if, hypothetically, we could do this same research on mentally retarded humans who were clearly below the level of intelligence and consciousness of the primates, what would be your opinion on the morality of that?

Well, I would probably consider it not moral. Probably.

Here's the thing: Whatever you do, someone/thing is going to get hurt.

I think we can agree that medical and scientific advances are important to our civilization and quality of life.

We've drawn an absolutely arbitrary line in the sand that says mice < pigs < monkeys < apes < humans. Is a seeing-eye dog worth "more" than a human infant with anencephaly? One contributes more to society, fairly clearly. But we have a line that says that the baby is worth more. So we test on dogs and monkeys, even though the baby would give us demonstrably better/more accurate results.

If we say, no, we're not going to do animal testing any more, okay, cool. So we:

1) Test on humans with mental disabilities, which has been done by any number of individuals and societies. So, who gets to draw that line? What IQ is low enough? How disabled is disabled enough for the scale to be human < pig?

2) Say, hey, this chemical works fine in the petri dishes and in my computer simulations, let's go straight to humans. And people die as a result. People die as a result of medications and procedures that have gone through the full spectrum of animal testing and been cleared by the relevant regulating body.

3) Simply and completely, stop trying to push science and medicine forward. And people will die from that too. Medicine has made so many conditions bearable, including the slow act of dying.

There really aren't any other options right now.

The point I'm trying to make is not that I think that primate testing is awesome and fun. I'm saying that it's the least bad option; it's the clearest line. I know they feel pain and emotional connection and have some degree of intelligence. What our humanity demands is that we honor that, that we treat them with respect and use what we learn from them wisely and with consideration. You could say exactly the same thing about testing on babies. It's just the line we've collectively chosen to draw.

And, just for the hell of it: Babycakes

I think the decision to test on animals is an understandable one as a species and a society, but as you say yourself the line between humans and animals is an arbitrary one, and one that I think has been drawn for our own peace of mind and largely a result of religion, custom, ignorance, etc. When researchers first began to show the incredible intelligence of primates, other mammals, and even birds(e.g. Alex), the typical response was disbelief and derision. It's taken a long time for scientists to accept the degree of intelligence held by many animals, and most of the lay public is still astonished upon first viewing a video of Koko or Alex the parrot. And is it a coincidence that the animals we've demonstrated the most intelligence in are ones that can communicate in ways familiar to us(sign/spoken language)? When we finally develop a way to use language with dolphins or pigs or elephants, what will we discover?

I don't think there's an easy answer to this question - it is a "least bad" type of choice, and I still accept the possibility that our current compromise is the right one

But I can't help but look at an experiment like the Silver Spring monkeys and think future generations will consider Taub as amoral as we do Mengele, regardless of the scientific value of his research. And that's one highly publicized case - how many primates are used in this way every year?