The end of biomedical research on U.S. chimps may imperil their wild brethren

In the dense woods of Northeastern Louisiana, Penny, a 52-year-old chimpanzee, doesn’t let age discourage her – she’s an avid climber of the forest’s lofty conifers. After living for decades as a captive animal in a treeless laboratory, Penny was retired to Chimp Haven in 2011, a spacious sanctuary for retired laboratory chimpanzees. And Penny is hardly alone. She lives here with some 300 other chimpanzees, and after being federally emancipated from research colonies, hundreds more are on their way.  It has been over a year since the National Institute of Health ended its chimpanzee biomedical research program, which experimented on chimpanzees in efforts to advance human medicine. The end of this invasive research, while inarguably fair for apes like Penny, has some researchers alarmed – not for humans but for wild apes. Africa’s great apes are in a bad place. Their meat fetches a high price and their forest homes are being engulfed by swelling human communities. Both chimpanzee and gorilla populations show catastrophic declines. In less than two decades, the chimpanzee population in Gabon was slashed in half, and nearly 80 percent of Grauer’s Gorillas disappeared in a single generation, dropping the population to just 3,800 individuals.  But yet another culprit – invisible and insidious – lurks in the African woods and threatens these fractured, endangered populations: infectious disease. It can come in the form of the ruthless Ebola virus, which has killed  an estimated one in three great apes since 1990. And it can also come from an increasingly present source: humans, who pass deadly respiratory diseases to genetically similar animals. There is a solution – vaccination – but some scientists think the end of the National Institute of Health research program is hampering conservationists’ efforts to develop and test effective vaccines. And time might be running out.