Researchers who use chimpanzees are operating under the paradigm that assumes humans and chimpanzees are more similar than different. Modern evolutionary biology reveals that the differences are far more important than the similarities.
Elsie Chimpanzee
Photo: Courtesy of PETA
There was a time in the history of science when standard medical procedures included pre-frontal lobotomies – where the brain was literally scrambled with a blade inserted behind the eye socket.
There was a time when scientific thought included notions like HIV-infected blood was harmless to humans.
There was a time when doctors didn’t feel compelled to wash their hands as they moved from patient to patient because they refused to accept the germ theory of disease promoted by other scientists.
Project R&R is working with scientists who believe that the use of chimpanzees is a dead end, unproductive, unnecessary, and often dangerous route that will be shown to be as crude as other methods and beliefs once accepted but long abandoned.
In this section, scientists challenge the use of chimpanzees in research. They examine:
- The lack of use of results from chimpanzee research
- The medical limitations and dangers of results
- The possibility that the research could have been done without chimpanzees
Growing evidence of invalidity
There is growing evidence that certain research findings derived from animal experiments – including experiments on chimpanzees – may not have been helpful, were in fact dangerous to humans, or could have been done without animals. Scientists who challenge the chimpanzee model argue that the problems begin with the assumptions used to justify the research. Challenges to existing research methods begin to establish scientific arguments against the use of chimpanzees and all animals in research.
All scientific methods of inquiry must be seen as fallible and evolving. If science does not challenge itself – continually – then it runs the risk of ceasing to be science and becoming dogma.
Resistance to change
Many institutions and researchers profit from the use of chimpanzees in research. Many chimpanzee researchers have spent their lives committed to this model. When esteem, reputation and money are at stake, objective and critical scrutiny becomes more difficult.
As consumer psychology informs us: the more you have spent, the more likely you are to “defend” your choice as a good one. Similarly, after years of doing chimpanzee research and of receiving millions of dollars in funding, it is the rare researcher who goes to work one day, acknowledges the limitations, the errors, and the cruelties of what he/she is about to do once again, and says, “No more.” Still, some have.
Challenging the status quo
It will take scientists who want to bring critical analysis to the status quo to challenge what is going on in labs. Their work calls for open debate with scientists advocating chimpanzee use. As yet, no one using chimpanzees is willing to come forward in such a public forum.
For that reason, Project R&R provides you, the public, with arguments that scientifically challenge the use of chimpanzees in research. If you are a member of the scientific community and wish to contribute, please contact us.