this is really good news, imo. maybe even christmas present material. finally the US steps up and mostly bans research on chimpanzees. we're kind of late to do this, but at least we finally did.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45684414

WASHINGTON — Days in the laboratory are numbered for chimpanzees, humans' closest relative. Chimps paved astronauts' way into space and were vital in creating some important medicines. But the U.S. government said Thursday that science has advanced enough that from now on, chimpanzees essentially should be a last resort in medical research — a move that puts the United States more in line with the rest of the world.

Chimps' similarity with people "demands special consideration and respect," said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.

His move came after the prestigious Institute of Medicine declared that most use of chimpanzees for invasive medical research no longer can be justified — and that strict new limits should determine which experiments are important enough to outweigh the moral cost of involving this species that is so like us.

The bar is very high," said bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn of Johns Hopkins University, who led the institute panel.

The group stopped short of recommending an outright ban, saying a handful of research projects today might still require chimps — but more importantly, that the animals might be required in the future as new diseases evolve and emerge.

Animal welfare groups welcomed the change but continue to push for Congress to pass legislation that would go a step further and phase out all invasive chimp research.

"Chimpanzees have provided limited value in research settings, and now alternative methods have been developed that will make their use all but obsolete," said Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States.

But some scientists say it's not that big a change because chimp studies already were dwindling fast as researchers turned to less costly and ethically charged alternatives.

"The use of a chimpanzee in biomedical research is the rare exception," said Dr. Thomas Rowell, who directs Louisiana's New Iberia Research Center, one of five research centers that houses chimps and other primate species used in both government- and privately financed studies.

It is not clear exactly how many of the nation's 937 research chimps — 612 of them owned by the NIH — are in the midst of experiments that would be affected by the new standards and could be moved into retirement instead. Most of the chimps are fairly old, as the nation has had a moratorium on breeding since 1995.

But Collins temporarily barred new government-funded studies involving chimps as his agency began implementing the recommended restrictions. Also, a working group will decide whether to phase out about 37 ongoing projects, about half of which Collins said probably don't meet the new standards.

These apes' genetic closeness to humans — the genome is about 99 percent identical to ours — has long caused a quandary, making the animals valuable to medical researchers for nearly a century but also sparking ethical and emotional questions about how they are housed and used.

"They are highly intelligent. They live in complex social settings, and they live for a very long time," said evolutionary anthropologist Anne Pusey of Duke University, who once worked with chimp expert Jane Goodall in Tanzania and manages an archive of Goodall's field data on the animals.

"When you enclose a chimp in a very small cage for 50 years, it really is cruel and unusual, even regardless of whether you're doing invasive things to them," she added.

The U.S. is one of only two countries known to still conduct medical research with chimpanzees; the other is Gabon, in Africa. The European Union essentially banned such research last year.

thursday's decision was triggered by an uproar last year over the fate of 186 semi-retired research chimps that the NIH, to save money, planned to move from a New Mexico facility to an active research lab in Texas. They are staying put for now.

The Institute of Medicine's investigation found over the past 10 years, the NIH has paid for just 110 projects of any type that involved chimps. Most involved hepatitis C, a liver virus that infects only humans and chimps. Some involved HIV, a disease that scientists now know is better to study in rhesus monkeys. Still others involved comparing the genetics of chimps and humans, or behavioral research examining such things as development and mental health.

The institute recommended two different sets of restrictions. Biomedical research — testing new drugs or giving chimps a disease — should allow using the apes only if studies could not be done on other animals or people themselves, and if foregoing the work would hinder progress against life-threatening or debilitating conditions. The panel said behavioral and genetic research, while less controversial, nonetheless should be limited to studies that provide insights otherwise unattainable, using techniques that minimize any pain or distress.

The institute combed research files to see what types of projects would fit those strict criteria — and could come up with only a handful, such as a possible need to test vaccines against hepatitis C in the animals. But the panel concluded chimps aren't needed to study cancer or a host of other diseases or even to test most drugs.

The standards would not automatically apply to privately funded pharmaceutical research, although the industry, too, is shifting away from use of chimps. One drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, adopted an official policy ending its use of great apes, including chimpanzees, in research.

I heard about this, but was under the impression it was not a law, but something they were hoping to institute.

Anyway, I totally agree. Chimps should not be used unless there is a real chance of curing cancer or HIV or something totally devastating to human life. And maybe not even then!

[Edited 12/17/11 11:15am]

guess i need to check this out. i'm hoping it will set a new legal standard whereby non-human/animals become legally 'worthy of consideration' in the eyes of the law.

weel now how we gonna do this?
• More science news





“It’s a major advance,” University of Washington neuroscientist Eberhard E. Fetz said of the monkey studies. “This bodes well for the success of brain-machine interfaces.”

SUBTLE ELECTRICAL SIGNALS
The experiments, led by Miguel A.L. Nicolelis of Duke University in Durham, N.C., and published today in the journal PLoS Biology, are the latest in a progression of increasingly science fiction-like studies in which animals — and in a few cases people — have learned to use the brain’s subtle electrical signals to operate simple devices.
Until now, those achievements have been limited to “virtual” actions, such as making a cursor move across a computer screen, or to small two-dimensional actions such as flipping a little lever that is wired to the brain.
The new work is the first in which any animal has learned to use its brain to move a robotic device in all directions in space and to perform a mixture of interrelated movements — such as reaching toward an object, grasping it and adjusting the grip strength depending on how heavy the object is.
“This is where you want to be,” said Karen A. Moxon, a professor of biomedical engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “It’s one thing to be able to communicate with a video screen. But to move something in the physical world is a real technological feat. And Nicolelis has taken this work to a new level by quantifying the neuroscience behind it.”
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The device relies on tiny electrodes, each one resembling a wire thinner than a human hair. After removing patches of skull from two monkeys to expose the outer surface of their brains, Nicolelis and his colleagues stuck 96 of those tiny wires about a millimeter deep in one monkey’s brain and 320 of them in the other animal’s brain.
The surgeries were painstaking, taking about 10 hours, and ended with the pouring of a substance like dental cement over the area to substitute for the missing bits of skull.
The monkeys were unaffected by the surgery, Nicolelis said. But now they had tufts of wires protruding from their heads, which could be hooked up to other wires that ran through a computer and on to a large mechanical arm.
Then came the training, with the monkeys first learning to move the robot arm with a joystick. The arm was kept in a separate room — “If you put a 50-kilogram robot in front of them, they get very nervous,” Nicolelis said — but the monkeys could track their progress by watching a schematic representation of the arm and its motions on a video screen.

REWARDED WITH JUICE
The monkeys quickly learned how to use the joystick to make the arm reach and grasp for objects, and how to adjust their grip on the joystick to vary the robotic hand’s grip strength. They could see on the monitor when they missed their target or dropped it for having too light a grip, and they were rewarded with sips of juice when they performed their tasks successfully.
While the monkeys trained, a computer tracked the patterns of bioelectrical activity in the animals’ brains. The computer figured out that certain patterns amounted to a command to “reach.” Others, it became clear, meant “grasp.” Gradually, the computer learned to “read” the monkeys’ minds.
Then the researchers did something radical: They unplugged the joystick so the robotic arm’s movements depended completely on a monkey’s brain activity. In effect, the computer that had been studying the animal’s neural firing patterns was now serving as an interpreter, decoding the brain signals according to what it had learned from the joystick games and then sending the appropriate instructions to the mechanical arm.
At first, Nicolelis said, the monkey kept moving the joystick, not realizing that her own brain was now solely in charge of the arm’s movements. Then, he said, an amazing thing happened.
“We’re looking, and she stops moving her arm,” he said, “but the cursor keeps playing the game and the robot arm is moving around.”
The animal was controlling the robot with its thoughts.
“We couldn’t speak. It was dead silence,” Nicolelis said. “No one wanted to verbalize what was happening. And she continued to do that for almost an hour.”
At first, the animals’ performance declined compared to the sessions on the joystick. But after just a day or so, the control was so smooth it seemed the animals had accepted the mechanical arm as their own.
“It’s quite plausible that the perception is you’re extended into the robot arm, or the arm is an extension of you,” agreed the University of Washington’s Fetz, a pioneer in the field of brain-controlled devices.

MANY POSSIBILITIES
John P. Donoghue, a neuroscientist at Brown University developing a similar system, said paralyzed patients would be the first to benefit by gaining an ability to type and communicate on the Web, but the list of potential applications is endless, he said. The devices may even allow quadriplegics to move their own limbs again by sending signals from the brain to various muscles, leaping over the severed nerves that caused their paralysis.
“Once you have an output signal out of the brain that you can interpret, the possibilities of what you can do with those signals are immense,” said Donoghue, who recently co-founded a company, Cyberkinetics Inc. of Foxboro, Mass., to capitalize on the technology.
Both he and Nicolelis hope to get permission from the Food and Drug Administration to begin experiments in people next year. Nicolelis also is developing a system that would transmit signals from each of the hundreds of brain electrodes to a portable receiver, so his monkeys — or human subjects — could be free of external wires and move around while they turn their thoughts into mechanical actions.
“It’s like multiple cellular phone lines,” Nicolelis said. “As my mother said, ‘You can dial your brain now.’ ”
Significant challenges remain if the technology is to find widespread application in people. Although earlier experiments suggest the electrodes are safe and able to continue functioning for three years or more, longer-term safety studies are needed, and implants with far more electrodes may be required to accomplish anything more than the simplest tasks.
“For something basic like grasping a cup of coffee or brushing your teeth, apparently you could do almost all of this with this kind of prosthesis,” said Idan Segev, director of the center for neurocomputation at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “If you were a pianist and had a spinal cord injury and you wanted to play Chopin again, then 500 neurons is not enough.”
Still, Segev expressed astonishment at how much the monkeys were able to do with signals from only a few hundred of the brain’s 100 billion or so nerve cells — evidence, he said, that “the brain uses a lot of backup and a lot of redundancy.”
That may explain one of the more interesting findings of the Duke experiments, he and others said: that neurons not usually involved in body movements, including those usually involved in sensory input rather than motor output, were easily recruited to help operate the robotic arm when electrodes were implanted there.
Asked if the monkeys seemed to mind the experiments, Nicolelis answered with an emphatic “No.”
“If anything, they’re enjoying themselves playing these games. It enriches their lives,” he said. “You don’t have to do anything to get these guys into their chair. They go right there. That’s play time.”

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

XxAxX said:

guess i need to check this out. i'm hoping it will set a new legal standard whereby non-human/animals become legally 'worthy of consideration' in the eyes of the law.

I'm not saying I know that it isn't law, I just wasn't sure based on the story I heard.

But yeah can you imagine how outraged people would be to be used as science experiments for some other animal's benefit? Not a single spray of hairspray in the eyes would be acceptable

[Edited 12/21/11 17:59pm]

Well, I for one think it's wonderful that we've been doing so much research to help out sick chimpanzees. What a shame the government is trying to limit that.