It is not easy to find living space for a great ape at short notice, let alone more than 100 of them. Yet that is precisely the problem that administrators at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) are scrambling to solve, as the biomedical agency takes its most visible and decisive step away from invasive research on chimpanzees.Scrutiny of the NIH's chimp research enterprise has been intensifying since the release last December of an Institute of Medicine report, which declared most of the invasive chimp studies to be scientifically unnecessary (see Nature 480,424-425; 2011). The agency, based in Bethesda, Maryland, immediately put a moratorium on new grant applications for work involving chimps.
展开▼
