A last-minute push to bring the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (GAPCSA) to the Senate floor during the lame duck session hit a roadblock when Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) announced that he had placed a “hold” on the bill. Although Senate rules allow legislative holds to be placed anonymously, Wyden took the extra step of explaining his opposition in the Congressional Record.
Wyden’s December 13 statement first outlined the “significant oversight and regulation” that is in place at National Primate Centers to “ensure the highest quality and ethical care for animals.” He also noted that these Centers “provide outstanding research and powerful research tools that are vital to our understanding of human health and disease.” He further explained that the NIH has already convened a panel to determine the best way to implement the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) recommendations for limiting the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research. Passage of a bill prior to the expected January 22, 2013 release of the NIH panel’s findings, “would circumvent this ongoing process,” Wyden said.
Supporters of the legislation to end all invasive research on chimpanzees had made significant revisions to the bill as part of the push to bring it to the Senate floor during the lame duck session. However, the new version would still effectively ban all biomedical research on chimpanzees, despite the IOM finding that such a ban would be “disruptive” and that “chimpanzees may prove uniquely important to unraveling the mystery of diseases that are unknown today.”
The revision nominally offers a way for researchers to petition the Secretary of Health and Human Services for permission to conduct research on a study-by-study basis, but the onerous procedure calls for passing judgment on research without any meaningful scientific peer review and publishing details of the application in the Federal Register. As FASEB President, Judith S. Bond, told Nature’s News Blog, “[The Government] prohibiting the use of a research model is a frightening concept.”
NIH Changes Planned Chimp Move
An important factor in the effort to bring the revised GAPCSA bill to the floor was the fact that the Congressional Budget Office scored it as “cost neutral,” whereas the earlier version was expected to cost the government $56 million over 4 years. That is because the new version called for retiring chimpanzees in place—at research facilities—instead of moving them to sanctuaries. However, as other recent events demonstrate, it is highly unlikely the organizations pushing for GAPCSA’s passage would be satisfied with such an arrangement.
In September, when the New Iberia Research Center said it would not renew its application for funds to maintain its colony of NIH-owned chimpanzees, the agency announced that it would retire these animals from any further research. The original plan was to move 10 chimpanzees to the Chimp Haven sanctuary and send 100 to Texas Biomedical Research Institute, another National Primate Research Center. Although the animals had been designated “permanently ineligible” for research, animal rights groups objected and urged that the entire group be moved to Chimp Haven, despite the fact that the sanctuary does not have the capacity to house them. Over the next few months negotiations ensued, resulting in a new plan announced December 18 to raise $2.3 million dollars to expand facilities at Chimp Haven so that a total of 113 chimpanzees could be moved there over the next 12–15 months.