Texas Biomed firmly stands behind the Covid work of its scientists. Corinna Ross, the primate center’s acting director, stated that critics don’t recognize that a deep love of animals is what first drew many, such as herself, to primate research. Indeed, Corinna Ross loves animals... loves them to a torturous death. Her researchers infected dozens of primates (baboons, macaques, and marmosets) with the Covid-19 pathogen. These animals endured tremendous suffering. All them were eventually euthanized.
WILL BOSTWICK: Weighing about seventeen pounds, rhesus macaques are brown-gray primates with expressive pink faces and are native to much of southern Asia. Because of their genetic similarity to humans, they often act as our stand-ins in biomedical research. Hundreds of rhesus macaques live here at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, one of a handful of federally designated national primate-research centers in the U.S. and the only one in the state.
The infected macaque was among the first creatures in the world to be immunized against COVID-19. Several weeks before arriving at Texas Biomed, it had been 1 of 6 injected with a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine candidate, while another 6 received a slightly different formulation. Nine other macaques—the experiment’s control group—were injected with saline. The scientists in San Antonio were tasked with infecting all 21 of the monkeys with the coronavirus and tracking the results…
A development process that would ordinarily have taken years had been completed in just nine months, thanks in part to what Texas Biomed calls its “animal heroes,” those macaques—all of whom were euthanized, as is standard for this sort of vaccine study…
Traditionally the institutions that conduct primate research haven’t sought to draw attention. The use of animal subjects has long attracted fierce opponents, who argue that the practice is unethical and the science derived from it unreliable. But having played a significant role in the rapid development of lifesaving COVID-19 treatments, Texas Biomed wouldn’t mind a little recognition…
Macaques are by far the primates in greatest demand—in part because their size makes them more manageable than larger primates, such as baboons. But each species has “really unique characteristics and unique targets for research,” says Corinna Ross, acting director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center. Baboons have been especially valuable for cardiovascular and neonatal research. Marmosets are frequently used in neuroscience and were test subjects for a Zika virus vaccine. Macaques have been used to study tuberculosis and HIV, as well as in COVID-19 research…
Texas Biomed… plans include the construction—already underway—of a $20 million complex for as many as six hundred more macaques, as well as a large veterinary clinic and pathology lab. Additional phases could allow the macaque colony to increase to about five thousand and the marmosets to about eight hundred…
In a sleek second-floor conference room, Texas Biomed CEO Larry Schlesinger, who’s also a physician, explained… “We’re at the cutting edge of science that will enable us to replace monkeys someday,” Schlesinger agrees. “We want that more than anyone. Animals are very expensive, labor intensive, and require a lot of care.” But Schlesinger pushes back against those who say animal testing should be supplanted immediately by the new options. “The reality is it’s not ready for prime time,” he says of the emerging technology. “What are you going to do, just sit around and say, ‘I want an organ on a chip?’ The FDA is going to laugh. It’s not realistic.”
Though the Food and Drug Administration has signaled that it will accept alternatives to animal testing in some cases, a congressionally mandated report published this year by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine found that none of the alternatives can fully replace nonhuman-primate testing—at least not yet…
Some animal rights advocates would like to see this clemency extended to other species. Lisa Jones-Engel, a former primate researcher who now serves as a senior science adviser for the nonprofit People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, cites some of the nation’s top medical scientists who recognize that data gathered from chimpanzee studies often don’t result in improved human health. If it doesn’t work with chimps, which along with bonobos are our nearest genetic relatives, sharing nearly 99 percent of our DNA, she says, “it’s not going to work with macaques, who we haven’t shared a common ancestor with for twenty-four million years, or marmosets, who we haven’t shared a common ancestor with for thirty-five or forty million years.”
It’s true that research conducted on animals doesn’t always translate into effective treatments for humans… Nevertheless, Texas Biomed firmly stands behind the work of its scientists. Ross, the primate center’s acting director, told me that critics don’t recognize that a deep love of animals is what first drew many, such as herself, to primate research. Lisa Cruz, the institute’s vice president for corporate communications, says that considering the thousands of nonhuman primates the institute cares for, “we have an extremely great track record of care and safety.” Numbers vary each year, but as of this summer, the institute is conducting tests on more than nine hundred monkeys. Some studies are “terminal,” meaning the primates will be euthanized…
According to Bob Fischer, an associate professor of philosophy at Texas State University and director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals, “there’s a real tendency to demonize” in conversations about the use of animals in medical research. He notes that many consumers are complicit in the suffering of others—whether humans or nonhumans—more than they’d care to recognize. “If you go far enough back in the supply chain, for just about any product that you like, you will find horrors,” he says. Estimates for the number of animals used in biomedical research each year in the U.S. range from about 20 million to more than 100 million…
John P. Gluck, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of New Mexico, is another former primate researcher who came to regret his decades of conducting experiments on monkeys. He says he fears that norms within the scientific community overpower the basic instinct not to inflict pain on another intelligent living thing. “A good argument for doing the experiment is very meaningful,” Gluck says. “But the pain is still there, so does that pain still have a claim on us ethically? Does it still require something more from us? And I would say yes, it does.” SOURCE…
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