Harvard To Close New England Primate Research Center 100
sciencehabit writes "Citing an increasingly bleak outlook for federal research funding, Harvard Medical School is shutting down its major primate center, which has recently experienced the departure of several key scientists and an investigation into its handling of animals. In the announcement, which surprised many primate researchers, the school said it will not seek to renew the New England Primate Research Center's (NEPRC's) 5-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will 'wind down operations' at the center in Southborough, Massachusetts, over the next 2 years. The center, which has a nearly 50-year history, had done groundbreaking work on an AIDS vaccine and developed animal models for diseases such as Parkinson's, among other accomplishments."
Not tested on animals (Score:3)
This comment has not been tested on animals. However, we cannot guarantee that it is not cruelty-free.
Re:Not tested on animals (Score:4, Funny)
colbert's opening line (from years ago) fits well here:
"no animals were harmed during the making of this work. we tried, but that monkey was just too damned fast!"
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what about the monkeys? (Score:2)
they just got fired, who is going to feed and care for them now?
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Re:what about the monkeys? (Score:4, Funny)
That is a horrid, racist remark. Reported to administrators.
True.
It REALLY pissed off the monkeys.
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True, there's no need to degrade monkeys and put them on the same level as politicians.
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You're probably only the second commenter in the thread to think of that.
"Washington, DC" is a symbol, not a literal city. The fact that some people live there is irrelevant to the rhetorical device.
When most Americans refer to "the people in DC" we're talking about the politicians, not the residents.
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Washington DC has a majority African-American population.
And?
Calling them monkeys is racist.
Except no one was calling them monkeys. We were all calling the politicians monkeys, regardless of the politician's skin color.
So I repeat my question. Since when has "politician" been a race?
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Won't somebody think of the baby monkeys!
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Not to worry, they'l soon find new jobs writing pilot scripts for Amazon Prime shows.
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Or legislation for Congress!
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Or become programmers.
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Put to work on the ongoing project for the recreation of the works of Shakespeare.
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Won't it be more like Oracle's next lead security guys for Java?
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Hating on animal rights activists is what the cool kids are doing.
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I can't tell you where exactly they're going, but a number of them are already well taken care off by other primate labs. Also, the equipment is being sent to other primate labs.
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Obvious. They can work for ThinkGeek [thinkgeek.com].
Researchers find: Primates don't likebeinglockedup (Score:2)
Federal funding has all but dried up for Primate research. Researchers have found that Chimps are indeed very similar to humans, and testing on them is inhumane. Animal/primates rights activists have won, and the few chimps in federal care are the only ones left, they won't be replaced. There's quite a backstory here that isn't being told.
As great of research Harvard provided, they had effectively built a Guantanamo for apes.
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I don't think he meant it literally. Don't be obtuse.
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I fully support your right to be a dickhead. This rant places you firmly in the camp with all the people you claim to denounce.
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It is hard to experiment on the apes if you don't keep them caged. No it is not humane, it is research. Research is where they do bad things to animals (and sometimes people although usually the people volunteer) in order to promote the greater good. You may not agree with it, as is your right, but without it scientific progress slows down. If you've ever been in any slaughter house you'll see there is little humane about our treatment of animals. Most people don't care because they are just animals an
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Actually in most cases their quality of life is improved. Mostly research primates have better healthcare and food availability than out in the wild. Their average life-spans are much shorter in the wild. Often they fight, bite or scratch each other, get infected and die. They get eaten, they go hungry etc. The being stuck in a cage part is a negative, sure, but most of the stuff they do to them in research is not really all that bad. See, the thing is, animals don't have the option to join civilizati
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The line between hypocrite and pragmatist pretty much comes down to if you are talking about 'us' or 'them'.
data is data, and people are just bald apes. (Score:2)
Hypocrisy doesn't necessarily enter into this; you don't have to agree with the method used to obtain some information in order to use it ethically.
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I wonder how many anti-animal-rights people would be willing to forgo medical advances that were the result of human experimentation yet still be against the idea of it making a comeback.
Some medical advances, including methods currently used to revive drowning victims, were developed by the Nazis in experiments conducted on concentration camp inmates. Do you think that we should forgo using these treatments on anyone that thinks these experiments were immoral?
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better to use life/death prisoners (Score:2)
Humans make the results more accurate.
Consider the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, Manson, the guy known as BTK (for "bind, torture, kill"), the Fort Hood shooter, and those guys that raped girls in Connecticut and then burned down the house with them inside. There are enough awful people that we have no shortage of humans for medical experiments.
I would have no qualms about performing the experiments. We can implant wires into their brains, give them harmful drugs, whatever... Except for the Fort Hood s
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If there is a bit of doubt, participation in the test population can be put on hold until that is resolved.
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If you've ever been in any slaughter house you'll see there is little humane about our treatment of animals. Most people don't care because they are just animals and have little in the way of rights.
I'm willing to bet most people do care, which is why they'd rather not be confronted with it. They'd prefer to keep believing that the animals are humanely raised and slaughtered. Personally, I've seen enough and found it disturbing... but I still like eating meat too much, and when it gets on my plate it's yummy food, not factory farmed, slaughtered animals.
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When I was young I lived on a farm. I was involved in the slaughter and preparation of the food we ate. Life is ruthless and most people like to be insulated from that real world.
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I'm not doing that job for many reasons, but animal rights is not among them. I'd bite right into the side of a living animal if it were safe to do so. (it isn't: unsanitary, legal trouble, and maybe getting pecked or kicked)
As an end-user, my only complaints about slaughter houses are the bad sanitation and the sleazy attempts to add cheap filler into the meat. As a worker I'd take issue with the pay, the boredom, the legal risk if you fail to follow the crazy laws, the stench, the disease risk, the risk o
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If you've ever been in any slaughter house you'll see there is little humane about our treatment of animals.
Well of course. Humane is for humans.
I don't expect a hippo to be nice to me. To a hippo, I'm just a random animal. If I get annoying, the hippo will slaughter me without the slightest bit of compassion.
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Used to live right around the corner from this place.
I live right around the corner from a lot of places, and I have no idea what's going on in any of them.
Saw it in a movie (Score:1)
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Sounds like an improvement.
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from what i hear, the monkeys were treated better than at gitmo
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Really? Where do you source your information you right-wing hippie? The primates are and some have already been shipped to other primate labs. Acquiring and taking care of primates (or any animal) in a public institution is under a very strict oversight from several government agencies as well as institutional committee's. These animals have care and space very similar to a regular zoo. If any of the government agencies would have as strict oversight as these do, we wouldn't have disasters like the Keystone
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Your right. It's been around longer then 50 years
Researchers estimate that sometime in the 1930s a form of simian immunodeficiency virus, SIV, jumped to humans in central Africa. The mutated virus became the first human immunodeficiency virus, HIV-1.
So I guess ... (Score:2)
PETA needs to step up!!! (Score:2)
And volunteer to be tested on instead of animals. Someone has to cure AIDS and Cancer and its not going to happen through computer simulations and best wishes.
Not ideal, but important research (Score:2)
This isn't spraying some perfume into rabbits eyes to make sure it doesn't give people a rash, this is doing research to treat and prevent diseases that are killing and disabling an astounding number of people.
I think most people that have come to the ethical conclusion that the thousands of animals that they tested HIV and AIDS treatments on at this facility, are more important than the tens or hundreds of thousands of people that are not dead, and living their lives relatively normally because of that res
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Legally it's not quite that complex. In the EU, cephalopods are equivalent to vertebrates [southernfriedscience.com], and UK legislation specifically grants octopodes the same status. (As a result they have often been called "honourary" vertebrates.)
As for an actual hierarchy of "evolvedness," and not just a subjective ethical ranking based on what we know about animal intelligence, alternative splicing [sciencemag.org] seems to be a good indicator of genetic complexity, but we only really have detailed analyses for vertebrates.
here's the real question (Score:2)
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So the question is, are they going to auction off all the monkeys?
That is almost universally prohibited under NIH funding regulations.
Because that would be freakin awesome!
I'm not sure what would be awesome about owning a monkey with AIDS.
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Harvard is gone to the dogs. (Score:4, Interesting)
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I don't disagree with you (Harvard grad here), but a couple things I need to point out. First, as a professor, I can tell you that cheating happens everywhere. Second, I saw the spreadsheet thing on the Colbert Report, which is, of course, not a reliable news source. While it's certainly possible that there is an issue with corruption, Harvard is also composed of about a dozen different schools with totally different sources of funding, faculties, etc. One school having corrupt professors would not indicate
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I am surprised you got the spreadsheet scandal via Colbert. It has been making news for quite some time. There was an NPR report, one BBC report etc. So please do not assume I am getting all my news from Colbert.
Further, very surprisingly, Stewart and Colbert seem to care for accuracy, despite being a comedy show. Being comedians they are able to laugh off their mistakes on air and apologize by making fun of themselves. But still, they do that when they make a mistake. The one I remember recently i
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Or perhaps you could do the prudent thing and blame it on poor budgeting decisions.
I think that, for example, this is better than sending money to the national endowment of the arts, or even cut it into defense spending by stopping the manufacture of Abrams tanks that the Army generals have already asked that they stop doing.
I don't see how anybody anywhere could argue that this is a reason to increase spending. Even if you raised the shit out of the top income rate, you still haven't solved the budget defi
Such a bummer (Score:2)
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I found this comment on the RTFA to be of particular interest. It offers a lot more insight into what may have driven Harvard to shut down the center.
Didn't know! (Score:2)