WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE

On a warm August evening this year, 25 people carrying signs marched up to Gene Sackett's house. One of them pushed the doorbell.

Sackett, a bald, bespectacled man in his late 60s with an intense set to his eyes, sat for a moment in his living room. His two Abyssinian cats ran for the basement. He knew what was behind the summons to the door and the hubbub of voices outside. Sackett is a primate researcher. And this was war.

Few Seattleites know that within the city sit the twin facilities of the Washington National Primate Research Center of the University of Washington, one of the most prestigious biological research facilities in the country. About $137 million a year in taxpayer money touches the center's research—equivalent to more than half the yearly revenue of Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Few know that each year the primate center conducts experiments on about 1,000 monkeys and that almost one-third of those animals die in the cause of advancing human health.

Nor do many Americans know that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) spends $2.1 billion a year on primate research.

But some Seattleites know. Once or twice a year, the more impassioned of them—known alternately as animal-rights advocates or animal "rightists"—march on researchers' homes to let them hear what they think of the scientists' life's work. In recent years, members of the Northwest Animal Rights Network (NARN) have visited the Sackett household four times.

On occasion, Sackett gets anonymous death threats telephoned to his campus office. He fears, as many researchers do, that someday soon an animal rightist will shoot a researcher in the head.

"I'm surprised it hasn't happened already," he says. "I'm pretty sure it will."

To animal advocates, humankind's use of animals as biological proxies for human ailments is unethical and smacks of slavery. They are especially angered over the use of nonhuman primates in biomedical research. The animals are too intelligent and too much like us, they argue. What's more, they endure psychological pain. Local advocates dislike Sackett because his research, at times, has involved separating infant primates from their mothers.

But to Sackett, his main work, which tracks the effect of fetal development on the later psychological development of monkeys, is scientifically valid and crucial to humankind. When you can get them to speak, other researchers will tell you that without being able to experiment on primates, many advances in AIDS research would never be made. You simply cannot test an HIV vaccine on a rat, they say. You need an animal more like us.

UNIVERSITY OFFICIALS say the firebombing of UW's urban horticulture center in 2001 is an example of how matters have spiraled out of control, why the research must go on out of public view.

It's a kind of cold war, and moments of d鴥nte are rare.

All the same, last August, Sackett opened his front door.

"Would you come out and talk with us?" asked Wayne Johnson, one of the advocates. Johnson has been involved in primate-center protests for 21 years.

Sackett stepped onto the porch.

"If they are going to kill me, then I guess they are going to kill me," he said when I asked him about it later. "If I end up being the martyr, then what can I do about that?"

Wearing a white sports shirt and white slacks, Sackett leaned against the porch rail and crossed his right leg over his left. Flashes from digital cameras lit up his house. The activists stood just back from his front stairs. Some of their signs showed research monkeys' heads immobilized by metal frames.

For about 20 minutes, the activists peppered him with questions about primate research, guffawed at many of his answers, but, for the most part, engaged in the kind of reasoned-yet-pointed exchange that lately has been missing from the controversy that has hovered around vivisection for at least 300 years.

No one in Seattle marches on researchers' homes demanding freedom for mice and rats.

But primates change everything, even for NIH. Officials at the usually accessible $27 billion biomedical research agency in Maryland suddenly become unavailable when you want to talk about primate research. So, too, do primate researchers, who receive the billions of dollars in federal funding.

They fear joining the war, even though its weapons are raw emotion and public lobbying more than violence. Animal advocates aren't afraid to fight. But researchers are—and they have the most to lose by not taking their case to the public.

That's because over the past 25 years, there has been a sea change in public opinion. A majority of Americans still support animal research in general, according to a Gallup Poll last May. Asked about primates, however, a slim majority of Americans now believes that our biological next of kin deserve legal rights equal to young children, according to a recent Zogby poll.

OF MONKEYS AND MEN

What compels animal advocates like Johnson to take to the streets is the belief that primate research forces intelligent, social creatures to live in small cages, sometimes for years on end. The animals, he and other advocates say, suffer psychological trauma. Then they are killed.