Jul 31, 2025 Evolving Ethics: Apes in Laboratories

In November 2015, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it would no longer fund biomedical research involving chimpanzees. They stated that all NIH-owned and NIH-supported chimpanzees would be eligible for retirement and relocation to a federal sanctuary, as mandated by the Chimpanzee Health, Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection Act (the CHIMP Act – signed into law in 2000). The NIH announcement followed a 2011 report by the Institute of Medicine, commissioned by NIH, which concluded that chimpanzees were “largely unnecessary as research subjects.”

In the 1920s, Robert Yerkes was the first to study captive chimpanzees in the USA, and one of the seven primate research centers established in the early 1960s was named after him. His early research eventually led to the widespread use of chimpanzees in biomedical research in the USA, where, at its peak, approximately 1,800 chimpanzees were kept in US research laboratories, with perhaps another 400 in research facilities in Japan, Austria, the Netherlands, China, Liberia, and Gabon.

Following the adoption of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in 1975, importing chimpanzees from wild populations in Africa to stock research laboratories in America was restricted. In 1978, the US Interagency Primate Steering Committee produced a report on the need for chimpanzees in research, estimating a future annual requirement of about seven hundred chimpanzees, followed by the publication of a national chimpanzee breeding plan in 1982. In the early 1980s, it was believed that chimpanzees would be needed for research into the AIDS virus (the first American cases of AIDS were reported in 1981, and the virus reportedly originated in chimpanzees in Africa). Still, later studies showed that the virus does not cause AIDS in chimpanzees. The ambitious breeding program resulted in a surplus of chimpanzees, and in 1997, a report by the National Research Council, commissioned by the NIH, concluded that the breeding program should be discontinued.

Over the next fifteen years, protests against using chimpanzees in invasive research continued to grow, eventually leading to the 2015 NIH decision to end such research and to relocate surviving laboratory chimpanzees to retirement sanctuaries authorized by the CHIMP Act of 2000. The 1997 NRC report also recommended explicitly against euthanizing the surviving laboratory chimpanzees, a significant portion of whom were chronically infected with HIV and hepatitis and would pose a biohazard to animal care staff. This recommendation went against the standard practice of euthanizing surplus laboratory animals. The decision reinforced the common belief among supporters and opponents of chimpanzee research that chimpanzees are a special case.

The end of invasive chimpanzee research in the United States resulted from over 30 years of activities, including workshops, meetings, and advocacy campaigns by various individuals and organizations. Today, three primary retirement facilities care for laboratory chimpanzees: Chimp Haven in Louisiana (the official Federal chimpanzee sanctuary), Save the Chimps in Florida (founded by Carole Noon, a longtime opponent of chimpanzee laboratory use), and Project Chimps in Georgia (established by the Humane Society of the US), along with several smaller sanctuaries in the US and Canada that house about 100 former laboratory chimpanzees. Caring for these chimpanzees is complex and costly, especially for those chronically infected with HIV or hepatitis viruses.

NIH continues to oversee chimpanzee retirement to sanctuaries and reports on the program’s annual costs. In 2011, NIH owned or supported 713 laboratory chimpanzees and spent $11.58 million on their care. By 2024, NIH owned or supported only 343 chimpanzees, of which 272 had been retired to Chimp Haven. Annual NIH support has averaged about $8 million over the last few years, compared to an average of $11 million spent on annual chimpanzee support from 2011 to 2016. Government costs for chimpanzee care are slowly decreasing.

The three large chimpanzee sanctuaries have secured significant funds from private donors and are also reducing the government funds needed for the lifetime care of the retired laboratory chimpanzees. For example, in 2023, these sanctuaries raised a total of $27 million, which included around $6.5 million in government grants. In other words, the government currently provides only one dollar for every four spent caring for the retired chimpanzees.

Laboratory research using chimpanzees is too costly for the results obtained. Chimpanzee studies have played an important and possibly crucial role in understanding hepatitis viruses and related treatments and have also contributed to our knowledge of prion diseases. However, providing proper care and management for chimpanzees has always been very difficult. Additionally, research projects involving chimpanzees usually included only a small number of subjects, sometimes just one control and two experimental subjects receiving different doses.

In the 1990s, the Animal Care and Use Committee at Columbia University debated the ethics of transplanting chimpanzee organs into human patients who desperately needed a new kidney or heart. The committee decided not to approve the project. When discussing the vote with a committee member, he said that, while he couldn’t speak for the others, he thought the committee was ultimately afraid the project would succeed, leading to an unsustainable demand for chimpanzee organs. That discussion at Columbia in the 1990s was a preview of the future debates that eventually led to the end of invasive research on chimpanzees in the United States.