The Monkey Wars

achievement has compelling human numbers as well. Before the vaccines, in the United States alone, 20,000 people a year were crippled or killed by polio viruses. In the early 1960s, when vaccine production was running smoothly, the numbers dropped to a few cases a year, cases suddenly so unusual that their appearance was startling.

...even primate researchers still talk with awe, and some dismay, about how many animals were used to develop a polio vaccine. "We went through a hell of a lot of monkeys," says one high-ranking administrator at the NIH primate program. Before the race for the polio vaccine, there were an estimated 5 to 10 million rhesus macaques in India. During the height of the vaccine work, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United States alone was importing more than 200,000 monkeys a year, mostly from India. By the late 1970s, there were fewer than 200,000 rhesus macaques in India.

You could not, today, kill some 2 to 5 million monkeys in AIDS research, the way you could in polio work four decades ago. Look at the pigtail macaque model for AIDS; Seattle researchers have been criticized, not only by activists but by other scientists, for importing a mere 1,000 extra monkeys, much less hundreds of thousands.

No one is sure where, exactly, HIV moved out of the dark and into the human population. But in macaques, there's no doubt. Their version of the disease began at the hands of humans. SIV in macaques is a disease born of captivity. It was carried by African monkeys who were packed into research centers with Asian macaques. Most probably, researchers think, it was transferred by the casual handling of animals, such as reusing needles. The most clear-cut case occurred at the Tulane Regional Primate Research Center. Scientists there tried to infect rhesus macaques with leprosy by injecting the tissue from sooty mangabeys that carried leprosy bacterium. They didn't realize at the time that mangabeys were silent carriers for SIV. The macaques became much sicker than anyone had expected.

Animal activists complain that scientists don't give them a fair hearing. On this ground, the reverse is true. Activists rarely give fair credit to the researcher who works quietly within the system, even though many have brought about real change in the country's laboratories. This falls again into the category of telling only part of the truth. If you spend all your time talking about what Martin Stephens, of the Humane Society of the United States, calls "the bad apples," then you leave no room for the rest of the crop—the veterinarians, the psychologists, the behaviorists, the animal technicians, the individuals within the community who believe that status quo is not good enough. The often-cited "research community" is not made up of one single-minded scientist, cloned multiple times.