Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 9, 1995 TAG: 9511090065
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SHANKAR VEDANTAM KNIGHT-RIDDER TRIBUNE
DATELINE: BASTROP, TEXAS LENGTH: Long
Imagine you're between jobs, and still the federal government takes care of you. You spend your days eating free food and sleeping. You get free medical checkups, a safe environment and a generous pension plan. Your only real responsibilities are to play a lot and have regular sex.
Well, imagine you're a chimp.
For 1,500 chimpanzees in a half-dozen research facilities across the country, life is pretty good. Tasty treats and efficient housekeeping are basic room services. Back rubs and games are written into the contract. Color television is provided, and some chimps soon will be getting personal computers.
``It's part of what you do for chimps in captivity,'' explained Mollie Bloomsmith, a psychologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center's chimp-research facility here. ``It's expected.''
And expensive. Maintaining a single healthy chimp can cost more than $100 a week. In captivity, chimps can live 40-50 years.
It wasn't meant to be this good, actually. There was supposed to be a flip side to the perks and treats.
The chimps were bred as part of a plan devised by the National Institutes of Health. When the AIDS epidemic exploded in the early '80s, the NIH realized scientists soon would need animals on which to test new vaccines.
Because chimps are most likely to react to vaccines in the same way as humans, the NIH authorized a chimp-breeding program.
``We wanted them at hand the moment vaccines came off the line,'' said Leo Whitehair, director of the Comparative Medicine Program at the NIH's National Center for Research Resources.
Two things derailed the plan: AIDS vaccines were terribly slow in ``coming off the line'' - and there weren't many of them. Then, sometime around 1991, researchers made an embarrassing discovery.
Chimps don't get AIDS.
The NIH urgently instructed the chimp-breeding facilities to slam on the brakes and to rein in the chimps, who were having sex for all they were worth. But by then, the promiscuous primates had spawned hundreds of babies. The baby chimps, with names like Caesar and Angel, Newt and Xanadu, were cute, but the problem was they didn't stay that way.
``The public's view of a chimp is the 2-year old cuddly animal you see on TV,'' said Michale Keeling, director of the Bastrop chimp facility. ``Unfortunately, like humans, they grow out of childhood. They are very aggressive and strong and destructive.''
Euthanizing the animals was out of the question. Animal rights activists, the public and the scientists themselves feel a special kinship with chimps and would never stand for them to be killed.
Besides, chimps are endangered in the wild. Since international laws prevent America from importing wild chimps, researchers needed to preserve a pool of chimps for future research. Experience showed that the demand for research animals may suddenly rise.
``Congressional aides fuss about the cost'' of maintaining the chimps, Keeling said. ``But if we get a vaccine in five years, they will be hollering for animals.''
Krishna Murthy, a scientist at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, said, ``They are intelligent animals and have to be given sufficient stimulation. We don't want to use them for research and discard them.'' Part of maintaining them, as the psychologists put it, ``in a species-appropriate way,'' is to challenge them, divert them, entertain them.
``We have to figure out ways for them to use those big brains,'' said Bloomsmith. ``We have to give them problems they can't solve easily. I'm developing computer-assisted enrichment, giving them problems to solve with a joystick.''
``We'll have computer setups so animals would learn a way of logging on themselves,'' she said.
Some of the chimps in the Southwest Foundation facility already are given televisions.
``We play whatever's on,'' one of the researchers said, then added, seriously, ``We try to play PBS. Something educational.''
They also experimented with putting goldfish in with chimps, to see if the animals would enjoy the company.
The chimps, sad to report, didn't take the offer in the right spirit. They either ignored their visitors or banged the aquarium, which upset the fish.
At first, when the breeding program was halted, the chimp facilities merely separated males from females. The chimps were not happy with this development. It was clearly species-inappropriate.
It was Keeling's program that hit on the way to keep the chimps happy without getting pregnant.
Norplant.
Human contraceptive pills didn't work, largely ``because getting a daily pill into an animal is difficult,'' Keeling said. If the pill was hidden in food, often the chimps found it and threw it away before eating.
Now, fertile chimp females carry around a slight scar on their right arms, where researchers have embedded the tiny capsules of the Norplant contraceptive.
The federal government might also take a leaf out of Southwest Foundation's final gift to the chimps, the ultimate work benefit:
A pension plan.
Southwest, a nonprofit research center which maintains most of its chimps without federal dollars, has been diligently banking a portion of the money it earns from providing chimps for research. When the time comes to retire the animals, interest from the fund will be used to maintain some 80 of the animals until they die. ``We are just about break-even with the chimp retirement program,'' Murthy said.
The pension fund is worth almost $2.5 million.
by CNB