Strip away the goofier rhetoric of the ape-rights activists, and their claim is straightforward. Great apes are biologically very close to humans; chimps and humans share about 98 percent of their DNA. Apes have complex communication skills and close emotional bonds. They experience loneliness and sorrow. They deserve some respect.
Absolutely. I'm against the horrific conditions in which we raise our livestock, and I support discouraging the use of apes in circus-like performances. Most of us have no problem with outlawing needless cruelty. I just happen to think that "harmful medical research" is pretty darn needful.
I don't mean to downplay the suffering experienced by chimps in medical facilities. Richard Preston's excellent history of smallpox, The Demon in the Freezer details the horrible suffering of chimps infected with smallpox, and the scientist involved genuinely mourn for their charges. I think eliminating crippling diseases trumps our concern for the human-like nature of apes, just as crippling hunger would justify butchering and eating them. We shouldn't outlaw important medical research, but we should, just like the scientists Preston observes, understand the weight of what we are doing and mourn accordingly.
(Of course, I'll admit to being somewhat heartless in this matter. When I read in Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters (another great book) that Pasteur neglected to confirm that his TB cure worked, since this would have involved deliberately not treating babies for a control group. Unfortunately for science, TB was already in decline when Pasteur developed his treatment, so there's no confirmation that it works. I would have been in favor of an actual human trial.)
2 comments:
Your last paragraph hits very close to home. I've been involved in a number of clinical human trials now, and the question of whether to begin treating the control group once the experimental subjects have started showing statistically signifcant improvement is always a tricky one.
The crazy part is that the research we do is on nasty chronic stuff that doesn't kill you. The controls always have an opportunity to sign up for the treatment once the study is over. I shudder to think of what must go through the minds of the scientists involved in acute, infectious disease studies.
This is actually a pretty hot topic in medical ethics right now. If you ever have the pleasure of writing a proposal for an IRB, you'll find that they want very detailed descriptions (and justifications) for how the control group will be treated if the method proves successful.
I did science research in high school and always had to spend a lot of time justifying myself to IRBs. ("So you're surveying students [a protected group] on math anxiety? Won't that make them anxious?).
That aside, I'm glad we have them. It's good to have someone unconnected to the experiment there to have second thoughts. These questions should give us pause.
I'm generally in favor of running trials as long as you humanly (and humanely) can. As awful as it must be for cancer researchers to be actively denying some participants a few more months with their children, a number of drugs (particularly for cancer) are widely used but are of questionable efficacy. (See the recent NYT piece on Avastin). We just lose so much, in health effects and in wasteful spending otherwise.
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