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One in five experiments on primates had ‘no justification’ and should
not have been allowed under British legislation, according to a report by
the moderate anti-vivisectionist group Advocates for Animals. ‘Much of the
work was of dubious nature with little or no relevance or benefit to humans,’
says the report. It calls on the Home Office’s Animal Procedures Committee
to investigate why these research projects were approved and to publish
their deliberations.

The group cites papers published between 1987 and 1991 describing research
funded by the Medical Research Council or medical charities, and carried
out at MRC units, universities or hospitals in Edinburgh, London, Glasgow,
Oxford and Durham. It looked in detail at 60 experiments, 13 of which it
says should not have been allowed. The experiments criticised included operations
on monkeys’ brains to study sexual behaviour, taste perception or facial
recognition, physiological studies of brain chemistry and the removal of
the pancreas.

The group, which supported the passage of the Animals (Scientific Procedures)
Act in 1986, argues that its report ‘is not an abolitionist’s charter’.
Rather, says its director, Les Ward, the findings demonstrate that ‘there
can be little public confidence that the act . . . is being enforced’.

The act requires that the potential benefits of the research are weighed
against the costs to the experimental animals. In the experiments cited
in the report, ‘this balance was not achieved’, says Angela Walder, who
wrote the report. The research was either ‘repetitive of earlier work on
other species, of no value to humans or so painful as to be unjustified’,
she says.

The use of marmosets to study sexual behaviour is defended by Dennis
Lincoln, director of the MRC Reproductive Biology Unit in Edinburgh. ‘The
work, which ended in 1988, would be licensed today, and there was no cruelty
involved,’ he says. ‘I stopped it because I didn’t see the researchers had
made the progress I wished to see. As we learnt more about the marmoset
it became clear that the work was less and less relevant to human sexuality.’

Peter Morris of the University of Oxford also defends his team’s experiments
on monkeys, which involved transplants of insulin-producing islet cells
from the pancreas as a potential cure for diabetes. ‘We only moved to primates
after long studies in the test tube and on rodents,’ he says. ‘We have used
monkeys because their pancreas is very similar to humans, and we have just
done the first islet transplants in people.’

Advocates for Animals criticises the removal of the pancreas in five
control monkeys, which then became diabetic and were destroyed. Morris says
this was necessary to show that they would become diabetic.

A spokeswoman for the MRC says it will investigate the allegations made
by Advocates for Animals.