A primate out of its habitat

Wayne hasn’t been getting along well with his neighbor Barney, so a barrier has been put up separating them. It’s all because of Wayne’s partner Silva. Apparently Barney keeps giving her the eye. Shooting a piercing look, Wayne turns away, more interested in tucking into a bowl of chopped-up fruit and playing on his swing.

Not yet nine-years-old, Wayne is already sexually mature. He’s also a monkey.

Like his companions, Wayne, a south American breed of marmoset, has Parkinson’s disease. He’s part of a medical research study at a London university, where some £6.5m is spent annually on the laboratory. This is the dark side of medicine. Nearly all the world’s pharmaceutical drugs were tested on animals and while most people take advantage of them, it’s less appealing to consider how they came about.

In October medical experiments involving animals returned to British headlines.  Pharmaceutical researchers at Wickham Laboratories were secretly filmed using ballpoint pens to break the backs of research rats. To test or not to test medicines on animals; a century-old debate. The chorus of radical animal rights activists of the early nineties may have quieted, yet it remains contentious.

What’s clear is that sometimes, if not always, the research can yield results. In Australia, a terminally ill baby born with abnormal sulphite levels in her brain, was saved by treatment previously tested first on mice. After experimenting on pigs, scientists are set to begin re-growing the breasts of mastectomy patients. And Italian sheep are undergoing pioneering work using wood to create a bone replacement.

But for some, in an age when we can run cars on chip fat, it is incomprehensible how British scientists still justify giving a mouse cancer or brain damaging a monkey.

Protesting against Wickham Laboratories

“History tells us animals were used, not that they remain the only option available,” said Alistair Curry, a policy advisor for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Foundation (PETA). “The things people do inside a laboratory – acts of violence, deliberate infliction of suffering – they would be prosecuted for if they were done outside.”

Curry argues technological progress makes a ban feasible and that scientists just need the incentive, highlighting how when the EU banned cosmetics testing in 2003, companies like L’Oreal pumped money into finding other solutions.

“If you set a goal, people work towards it,” he said.

Rita, a researcher for the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Research (FRAME), says more money is crucial to find alternatives. “The funding agencies fund mainly what they think is important,” she said.

But both Rita and scientist Professor Clive Page do not expect animal testing to stop in their lifetime. Page, placed on a death list for his research, said the science simply isn’t ready.

“The brain is a very big black box,” said Professor Page, who is frustrated by groups like PETA calling for alternatives without doing research themselves.

“It’s easy to say use a test tube and I do grow nerves in a tube.  But [human] nerves are still very different to those in a test tube. I know a dog is not a man, but looking at a dog gives far more information about the effect of a drug than looking at an individual cell.”

That’s not to say science isn’t progressing at all. Across the UK researchers are turning from mammals to researching on fish instead.

Can we justify animal testing?

Joan, an animal-lover who has been a technician at the university for many years, said she has seen controls tighten up radically. “You used to get dogs arriving with rope tied round their neck,” she said. “Not anymore.”

Responsible for Wayne and his contemporaries, Joan said her job is “heartbreaking”.

“I have been called a murderer for my job,” she said. “But I accept that we have to do it. The fact we have got better drugs shows that.”

Joan would like the research stop tomorrow, but in the meantime wants to make the monkeys’ lives as happy as possible. “We don’t want to treat them as numbers, we like to give them respect,” she said. “After all, they’ve all got different characters.”

Wayne, who has just urinated on his bowl of fruit, might well agree with that.