Robin Laananen
One profane primate dons the skin of another to show his displeasure with primate research and Stephen Kelley at a June 11 protest.
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TWO YEARS AGO, Stephen Kelley was a central figure in one of the most explosive episodes in the recent history of animal research.
So why did the University of Washington hire him to become chief veterinarian at the Washington National Primate Research Center? The university says Kelley's troubles were the result of an internal spat in another state and that its center is trouble-free.
But local animal rights activists have declared Kelley Animal Enemy No. 1. They want him fired.
As things turn out, his hiring is bad news and good news for the activists. The bad news, they say, is that Kelley will do for Washington what he allegedly did for a primate center in Oregon—and that will add up to a sorry scene for research primates. But the good news is that his hiring gives them a perfect wedge to drive into the university's animal research complex.
"This is a jumping-off point for us to get into the horrendous vivisection issues at UW," says Che Green, an organizer of local animal rights activists campaigning to remove Kelley.
Kelley, after all, was openly criticized by his colleagues in Oregon, a crack rarely seen in the familial facade of research science.
But so far, the anti-Kelley crowd has been incapable of nailing down a victory, crucial at a time when animal rights issues have largely dropped off the public's radar.
In many ways, the dispute surrounding Kelley is another journey down the well-worn rails of the animal research debate, with everyone sticking to their primeval roles. Scientists react with a silent hauteur to accusations, while activists stick to a fist-in-the-air emotionalism—both tactics obscuring the facts behind the unusual tale of how one secretive primate veterinarian became a lightning rod for animal rights crusaders.
THERE ARE EIGHT national primate research centers, funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health. Harvard University runs one in Massachusetts and the University of California at Davis runs one near Sacramento, Calif.
The Washington Center has a $113 million a year budget and is located in the Warren G. Magnuson Health Sciences Building. It has satellite facilities in Belltown and Indonesia. Its two Washington facilities plus a breeding colony in Louisiana are home to 2,000 primates, mostly macaque monkeys. (Census figures for its Indonesian center were not available.)
Established in the early 1960s, the centers were part of America's answer to the former U.S.S.R.'s Sputnik, a way to close the basic science gap between East and West. The centers operate around the central dogma of animal research: Scientists can use creatures great and small to tell them about humans because, owing to evolution, lower mammals and humans share many of the same biological characteristics. Mice develop cancers, for example, making them a kind of living laboratory.
With nonhuman primates, such as rhesus monkeys and baboons, the dogma is even stronger. They are considered full-blown biological proxies for humankind. Each may share as much as 97 percent of its DNA with humans (estimates vary). What's more, their reproductive systems, brains, and immune systems are similar enough to humans that there is a central tenet of biomedical research: What's true in the nonhuman primate is also true in humans.
AIDS and HIV research have been a focus of primate research over the last 15 years, but the answers still elude scientists. One area where primate research has provided answers is human infertility.
The centers are controversial. It is not uncommon to see protesters lined up outside primate centers in Oregon and Georgia, for example. The animals are highly sentient, and there is evidence that some primates can use language.
To protesters, it's an outrage that researchers are able to take humankind's next of kin, stuff them in a cage, and vivisect them.
To researchers, it would be an outrage if they couldn't use primates as experimental vehicles to probe the mysteries of retroviruses and Alzheimer's.
No one is bold enough to claim that the life of an experimental primate is pleasant. Many live alone in cages, and some of the highly social animals do not thrive under those circumstances. Some become depressed, some go "cage mad," and some pull out tufts of their hair and bite themselves (some do just fine). As a result, federal law requires that the psychological well-being of research primates be tended to. That's the charge of the primate veterinarian.
The job is paradoxical, especially when compared with a typical small-animal vet. Besides looking out for primates' mental health, the vets are supposed to keep animals alive—stitching them up after fights and treating their chronic diarrhea, for example—so they may be experimented upon and, later, killed.
"This is the dilemma all lab animal vets face," says Viktor Reinhardt, a former primate veterinarian at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center in Madison, Wis., and a consultant to the Animal Welfare Institute.
Stephen Kelley is a well-known primate vet. He's worked in animal research for over 25 years, mostly at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, located in a stand of second-growth Douglas fir and cedar in a suburb of Portland.
