March 13, 2012 • 32 mins
If you've got half a heart it's an easy question to answer. But if you're happy living without polio and hepatitis B you may want to question further. Learn about what makes chimps special and the history of medical testing in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is always as
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes the Stuff you
(00:22):
Should Know the podcast the Chimpagze centric podcast. Frequently I
told you about the time that chimp held my hand, right, Yeah,
that was just the best thing ever. Yeah, I mean
I think about it today, my heart melts a little,
just a little, just a little. You're a weepy guy. Yeah,
(00:43):
there's like ten twelve years ago, and it's still it's
worn off. Yeah, it's still melting though by degrees. Do
you think it will melt forever? Every time I think
of that little chimp holding my hand, it will melt
a tiny bit. Why don't you just go buy a
chimp and you can have it happen all the time. Dude,
if I didn't have three dogs in two cats, I
would have a chimp in my house. Would you really
even after that one story? Um, remember when we started
(01:06):
blogging it happened that chimp or something. Yeah, I would
because that was such a big deal that made the news.
And I don't think it just that didn't happen all
the time. Okay, I would totes have a chimp. When
did you start talking like that? You're talking like my
friend Adam and it's unvous. Oh yeah, I think it's funny.
(01:27):
It's like that, like everything's abbreviated. Yeah, yeah, Emily, and
not do that I totes on the totes train. Yeah
are you? I just think it's funny. Don't start saying
natsch Okay, Oh that's old school, though I know. I
still don't like it. All right, I never did toads.
I can handle more than natch. Okay, Okay, you're ready, Yes, okay, Chuck.
(01:49):
I want to tell you about a certain lady. Her
name is Wenka okay, and she has kind of a
rough life story. She was born into a family and this,
or you might say, um. She was born in nineteen
fifty four and when she was just two years old,
her mother died after being mistakenly poisoned. Her um mother's father,
(02:13):
her grandfather, uh He was a morphine adict who died
as a result of his addiction. Her grandmother, maternal grandmother
died of dysentery um on. Her father said she was
one of forty grandkids. You believe that she was adopted
out at a very young age, but returned back home
(02:34):
at age three. At fifteen fifteen, she had her first daughter,
and her daughter was born with Down syndrome. She died
at seventeen months. Eventually, Winkle went on to have another boy,
and a boy and another girl. Um, and here's the
mind blowing part. She's a chimpanzee. Yes, I actually see that.
(03:00):
I mean, and I know I was sitting there like,
how is there a way to do this? At the
top of the Chimp podcast. That's not somebody not know
because it sounded like you were talking about a human story.
But think about all of the stuff that her family
went through if they were humans, wouldn't she feel pretty
bad for well, feel bad for Whanka to And here's
(03:21):
why she is, as far as anyone knows, the oldest
primate in captivity that's still being used for research. And
she was here in Atlanta. Well, she's born in ninety
and she's been experimented on ever since. She went back
to the Yorkes Primate Institute at age three, and her
(03:41):
mom the one who was mistakenly poisoned. Was one of
the original ones that yer Keys got his hands on
in the what the forties, right, Well, in the twenties, yes,
is Robert Yorke's started messing around with behavioral research, not
(04:02):
as much medical research. No, And at first you think like, oh, well,
that's that's way better. But if you have you looked
into some of the behavioral experiments that they were conducting,
I'm sure it's not fun. So like one one young
UM chimp from I believe for this, the first thirty
six months of his life had UM like plastic or
(04:25):
some sort of obstruction over his hands and his feet,
so he couldn't use either of them for the first
three years of life. A lot of social isolation, like
chimps spent the first two or three years of life
without seeing, hearing, touching anybody else's. Yes, very much so,
wasn't it Little Albert? Yeah, a little Albert was on
(04:45):
a human though the fear conditioning UM the The equivalent
to that was UM Harry Harlowe's experimentation of separating UM
chimps from their mothers and then raising them with like
wire and co and fake reconstructions UM that they would
cling to and treat as their mother, because what he
(05:07):
found from these experiments is that moms are really important.
That's the saddus thing I've ever heard. All Right, So
we're talking about we started this off well, I mean,
this isn't the brightest of topics, although the ending is
fairly uplifting. Past headed that way, Yeah, we won't ruin it,
(05:27):
so chuck, let me set you up here. Um, we
have only just in the last few years come to
to think that animals deserve some sort of um rights. Right.
It's a very new idea, isn't it. It is new Ish? Okay,
like maybe eighteenth century Newish. Yeah, England leads the way.
(05:50):
Our British friends um past the first anti cruelty laws
against animals in well even before that, Jerry May Bentham
he wrote a paper on how animals could possibly suffer
and maybe we should start treating him differently late Sevre
kudos to him. Yeah, and did you know that he
is mummified and they bring his body out for uh
(06:14):
some annual dinner dancing with the stars at the college.
He's a judge at the College um where he was
a professor. They bring his body out for dinner every year. Wow,
an't that crazy? It's a little weird. Well, good for him.
Um still looks great, by the way, does he really? So?
Peter didn't start until nineteen eighty A lot of people
(06:35):
might think that Pete has been around like since the sixties.
Fairly new, um. And then the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was started in eighteen sixty six,
So pretty new in a world view, right, but a
big picture specifically, and that's general animal rights. Yeah, but
(07:00):
chimps in particular. Um. There. I guess the idea that
they may be deserve even more special rights than the
average lab rat um is based on something that's also
fairly recent, which is the discovery or the idea that
we share a tremendous amount of similarity with them. There's
no other animal that is closer to humans than chimps, right, Yeah,
(07:24):
I think the number is just over DNA sequence of
d N a face pairing. The other part. I can't
remember what it's called. Should have written that down. Well, no,
that's very like people throw that out like chimps are
similar to humans and that's very misleading. The like you said,
(07:46):
the genetic sequence of the chromosomes that we share or
that are similar in apes and humans are similar. We're not.
It's not like if you our DNA and put it
side by side, only two percent would be different. It's
not like that. And in fact, chimps have ten percent
(08:07):
more DNA than humans do I really, So that's that's
very misleaning to say. But the point is they are
very genetically similar, probably more than any other animal. And
we've known that since the twenties. Yeah, and similar enough
to that at a certain point people said, you know what,
We've experimented on human prisoners long enough and they say,
(08:28):
we can't do it anymore, which is a drag. So
let's get these chimps in here and uh give them disease.
And here we reached the title of the podcast. Um.
There As as much as we would like to think
that it is a very easy moral ethical question, like
(08:50):
should chimps be used for medical research, it's not because
if you, as we were saying before, if you like
walking around not having polio or hepatitis B, yeah, um,
you can go ahead and thank a chimp for volunteering.
I'm sorry, wait, that was the absolute worst for it.
(09:11):
I could have used um for being a basically a
test animal on those vaccines, UM and treatments. Uh. Same
with contraceptives. Uh. If you like our understanding of addiction,
you can thank chimps for that. For being a space animal,
(09:32):
let's go ahead and call that out. That's where it
all began. The US Air Force said, Hey, we got
a space race going on. Let's go get some chimps
from the wild. Shoot him up into space, put him
in sled cars, test g forces on him. See what
can happen. Put him on the giz rocket sled. I
guess what's his face was getting a little tired at
that point. Yeah, I couldn't see because of all the
(09:54):
blood pooled in his retiness. So um pre NASA, the
Air Force went and got sick five chimpanzees from the wild,
and a lot of these chimps are used today are
descendants of those original chimps because they couldn't keep going
to get them. After the Site's Convention on International Trade
(10:15):
and Endangered Species and seventy five, which basically said like,
hey man, you can't just start going and grabbing chimpanzeezer
other animals out of the wild. They're in danger. Exactly.
So they started breeding these chimps, right they the ones
that they already had. After SITES was passed, they said, okay,
well we'll just start making them here in America, making
them made in America. And I did find it odd
(10:39):
or not odd, but a little like distressing that some
of those with a lot of these chimps today are
descended from those original sixty because of breeding. And it
makes sense. But who knew, Well the same with yer Keys,
his primates that he had in the twenties, those original
four that was the captive breeding program as well. I
think he definitely supplemented them with um imports. Yeah, you know,
(11:03):
because it was prior to SITES. But he had you know,
bread bread, He bred them, they bred, they bred, They
did it um And like you pointed out, we should
uh say that yr kis is now in Atlanta here
in Emery University. After being in Florida for twenty some
eighty years, they moved to Atlanta and sponsored by Yale before. Yeah,
(11:24):
and they got two point five acres at the main
station here in Atlanta and then in Lawrenceville just up
the road they have the field station, a hundred and
seventeen acres of chimpanzee breeding and testing facilities. It's where
chimps go to get their drugs. Chimpanzees are endangered, their
(11:44):
native to Africa and uh because of their similarities, they thought,
you know this HIV thing in the eighties, maybe we
should start injecting these chimps and see how and if
they develop AIDS. That's what changed everything. The combination of
sites and the appearance of AIDS um combined with chimp similarity,
(12:08):
like really changed everything. We had a captive breeding program.
The federal government sponsored it, and so it became very,
very big and mysterious new disease. Yeah, the fear of
AIDS and HIV was so enormous that they within just
a few years of this captive breeding program that was
started by the National Institutes of Health in I think
(12:30):
maybe within a year two, there were I think five
chimps running around with HIV. The big problem was, as
we soon found out that while they can carry HIV,
and chimps are the only other animal besides humans that
can contract HIV because cats have their own, dogs have
their own um, other other apes and primates have their own,
(12:53):
but only but only humans and chimps can have HIV um,
we on the chimps don't get AIDS, they don't go
they don't move into full blown AIDS. Yeah, at least
not like humans do. And so it was kind of
a big failure on that front. And all the progress
we've made on AIDS rechurch has been because of human
(13:16):
experimentation basically or watching and seeing. Well, this is another
way to put it. Uh nine six The Animal Well
Welfare Act outline minimum care requirements for all animals and captivity. Right,
So these chimps were, you know, before the site's program,
the ones that they were importing, they still had some
(13:37):
sort of protection, but it wasn't you know, there weren't
that many bells and whistles. It was pretty pretty Southwest
Airlines not really Singapore air you know. Uh, I would
thought you would have said, like Virgin Atlantic or something.
Singapore are really nice. Really, it's up there with like Emirates,
Emirates Singapore Japan Airlines is pretty nice to concord. Remember that, Yeah,
(13:58):
we should do one on that. Do you remember the
time that Phil Collins played a show in London and
then Flute was it for live and he played two
shows and two different continents within each other. Awesome, Thank
you Concord, Thank you Phil Collins. Yeah, well, I thought
that might go without saying. I can just open my
shirt and shraining my t shirt to say that. And
(14:20):
by the way, that's a huge urban legend that he
saw his girlfriends rapist in the audience drowning not true.
Makes for a good story though. Yeah. All right, getting
back to Animal Welfare Act. You said it was didn't
have the bells and whistles, said temperatures had to stay
between forty and eighty five degrees fahrenheit, not bad, keep
(14:42):
him comfortable, Uh, gotta give him food and water. Gotta
isolate the sick ones, even though you can get a
waiver on that if they're supposed to be sick among
their their friends. Imagine that wasn't too hard to get
that exception. And um, basically it applied to all chimpanzees
were both biomedical and behavioral research, which was good, and
(15:04):
all animals, any animal that's being experimented on, any warm
blooded animals or in captivity period. Okay, like I think
it had just applied to zoos and everything, gotcha, that's good. Yeah,
So we had that in place in sixty six sites
came along in seventy five, the chimpanzee breeding program came
along in and then when that collapsed and failed, UM,
(15:27):
the US government was like, oh, what are we gonna
do here? We've got literally hundreds of chips running around
with HIV there like if they come in contact with people,
especially sickos, they could spread right well and they don't
live to be twelve, no, sixty. Yeah, So that's and
(15:47):
they cost some money to you know, hows and fifteen
bucks a day, So it doesn't sound like a lot,
but it adds up. That adds up, especially when um
there was only about I think five hundred that had HIV,
but there was something on the order of like twelve
the undred that were that the government was responsible for.
And it wasn't just the failure of the HIV AIDS studies. Uh.
(16:11):
You can thank Jane Goodall um and groups like Peter
and the s p c A in the Humane Society
in the early eighties around this time when chimp research
was really at its peak, UM for kind of a
learning the public to the cruelty of animal testing and research.
The Army of the Twelve Monkeys. Yeah, you can thank them,
(16:32):
I did. It was Uh, we should talk a little
bit about the the Kalston or Colston Foundation um that
is now defunct. It was shut down in two thousand two.
And here's the deal. Uh, it's controversial depending on who
you asked. Frederick Colston was the guy who was a
(16:57):
toxicologist who helped develop tree meant for malaria and hepatitis
B and AIDS or it was a house of horrors
and he performed experiments on human prisoners and then moved
to chimps. And uh, you know when one test chimps
had their teeth smashed in with a steel ball so
they could practice reconstructed reconstructed dental surgery, nine three chimps
(17:22):
were cooked to death when the temperature in there and
this is New Mexico and their unmonitored enclosure topped a
hundred and forty degrees And since n three chimps and
I think forty like forty five animals and all died
quote unintended deaths at the Colston Foundation. So you know,
(17:42):
it sounds like some awful, awful thing going on. But
then again, he's developing these treatments for these awful diseases,
so it's a very dicey situation. But they were shut
down in two thousand two because uh, negligent care on
a lot of fronts and any any I mean, there's
there are plenty of people who have like a really
good um there. They have really good ground to stand
(18:06):
on by saying like any animal testing is bad and
it doesn't matter how well you treat these animals, like
shouldn't be experimenting on where they put on this earth
to test to save humans. Some people back that. Some
people don't write UM. So oh you know, very recently
I saw UM. There was some researcher associated with the
Center for Great Apes. Yeah, yeah, apparently there's like a
(18:31):
number of them, uh, and one of them is in
Des Moines, and apparently somebody slashed the heels of UM
an infant chimp to keep it from being able to
stand upright. And this is like December, like a couple
of months ago. So one of the one of the
researchers acted as a whistleblower. Yeah, um or for a test,
(18:54):
not that I don't think that was the I don't
think that was the experiment. I think it was related
to it. But one of the researchers there was like,
I'm getting this chimp and all the rest of them
out of here and taking them down to another center
for grade eights UM, the main one in Florida. Yeah, well,
just to finish up on the Coulson Foundation. The good
news is, as of two thousand ten, about half of
(19:16):
the TCF chimps are now living at Save the Chimps,
which is basically where you want to be if you're
a retired chimp. Swinging, playing, running around, eating bananas, holding hands,
all that good chimp stuff. So well, let's talk about this.
That's the result of a sea change that was started
(19:37):
by Jane Goodall and and Peter and UM, a lot
of the Animal Liberation Front UM and Matthew Broderick. Yeah,
what was the name of that Project X? And interestingly,
real quick I just saw today. I didn't realize this
Project X was a movie that raised awareness for mistreatment
(19:58):
of chimps, obviously in medical reas, but Bob Barker at
the time accused them of mistreating animals on the set. Yeah,
here's a huge, huge animal cruelty guys. And he got
sued for defamation for that really yeah, and settled out
of court, actually against his wishes. He settled out of
court because he still believed that they were mistreated and
like said that they were like clubs and billy clubs
(20:20):
and batons used and they used like a snake to
scare the chimps and stuff to get reactions. Yeah, but
that was just a joke. That was just a you know,
a prank on set in between takes. But yeah, projects
go to see it, Hele and Hunt, go see it
in your in the theater near you in your time machine.
Did you see the Ferrespeuler commercial at the I saw
(20:41):
it out of the corner of my eye at the
superb Owl. Were you disgusted? Uh? I was looking forward
to it because I heard about it beforehand and it
was it was pretty bad. Yeah. Hey man, he's got
to support his kids. Oh dude, I'm sure he made
a mint good for him. Um. So, okay. We were
talking about Matthew Broderick in his career UM, which led
(21:04):
directly to a sea change in how people feel about
animal testing and specifically about chimpanzee testing UM, which is
kind of evidenced by the fact that Congress and its
endless ability to pass legislation with qut si names and acronyms.
This one was surprised me even in two thousand, Congress
(21:25):
pens the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection Act. And
guess what that spells out, chimp. Yeah, they passed the
Chimp Act in two thousand and Basically this said your
captive breeding program was gone once a chimp is retired
from biomedical testing or behavioral testing. I believe too, you are.
(21:46):
You can't kill it, sorry, all those um monkeys running
around with HIV, you can't euthanize them. You have to
provide for their care for the rest of their lives
and natural natural lives, which is pretty cool. It's bad
enough that given them HIV, at least care for them.
But this extends only as far as I know to UM.
(22:07):
Federally funded chimp programs, pharmaceutical companies that own it's federally
funded in pharmaceutical companies. All the chimps in the United
States are owned by them. That aren't pets, I should say, um,
they pharmacutic companies exist outside of this act, of course,
(22:30):
So Josh, if I were to ask you how many
countries in the world in the world still experiment on
chimpanzees legally, what would be I would say? Since the
United States, since a um, it's such a standard bearer
of human rights and animal rights. Sure that if the
(22:54):
United States still allows it, at least ninety two a
hundred and five other countries allow testing on chimpanzees. Am
I right, you did a very good job of playing
them there. By the way, uh No, United States and
Gabon are the only two countries in the world that's
still performed biomedical testing on chimpanzees. Great Britain said no more. Uh.
(23:19):
Netherlands in two thousand two. I can't even speak Dutch.
That would be a travesty. Uh, Sweden in two thousand three,
Austria two thousand six, Japan two thousand six. Everyone said,
we're drawn a line in the sand. United States still
allows it. But two months ago, three months ago, December
of last year, big news, the n i H suspended
(23:41):
all new grants awesome for biomedical and behavioral research on
chimps or apes the great the great apes um which
by the chimps, the great apes are chimps, guerrillas, bona bows,
and orangutanes. Correct um. So they suspended all new grants.
That doesn't mean that you can't test anymore. They basically
established some pretty rigorous criteria moving forward, which means it's
(24:04):
got to be necessary for human health and there must
be no other possible way to accomplish it. And basically
it's kind of being looked at as the beginning of
the end because they're finding that nowadays, with cultures and
cellular research, you don't need to experiment on chips anymore.
You can find out all you need to know Petrie dish. Yeah,
the n I H said, hey, um, over the next
(24:26):
four years, we're gonna hypercharge our biomedical testing. So we
so we, like you said, it can just exist in
the Petrie dish from now and we don't have to well, basically,
single celled animals that are going to start to bear
the broad no far our desire ceaseless quest for immortality health.
But you can't hold the hand of an amiba. No,
(24:49):
but if you could, I'll bet it would melt you.
Hepatitis apparently is one of two areas that they think
it could still be useful for. And um, but it
sounds like they're genuinely phasing it out. That's great, it's
about time. After that it'll just be on gabone. So
(25:09):
hats off to places like Save the chimps and what
were some of the other ones. Uh, the Center for
Great Apes, which by the way, I don't want to
defame them at all, not even for legal reasons, like
they do a good job. Um. I looked them up.
I looked up Save the Chimps, UM, Chimp Haven, the
Grade eight Project. I found one in Massachusetts. And if
(25:30):
you go on some of like the charity watches and
and ratings sites. Um, there's nothing bad for them, except
for the fact that they haven't filed with the I
r S even though they should for some reason. That
This Morning Star doesn't have anything on them. The Golden laptops,
but they they um, all of them seem to be legit.
But the Grade eight Project, the one that's mentioned in
(25:53):
this UM article that lobbies on behalf of the Great
Apes for testing and basically animal all right, they're located
in Brazil. Um, but keep thinking you're saying grape ape. Yeah,
the Great Pape Project, the Center for Grade Apes is
bona fide and good too. I couldn't find much on
anything that seemed to smack of like the Colston Foundation
(26:17):
or anything like that. Yeah. Well, the Colston Colston Foundation
actually morphed into uh, save the chimps. Okay, so yeah, yeah,
that's in Florida, right yeah. Fort Pierce along with Chimp
Have then and the Fauna Foundation. Um there you know
they're chimp sanctuaries. It's a nice thing. Yeah, so I
guess go there, give him some money, ask in exchange,
(26:41):
um for a chimp to hold your hand. Um, do
not feed chimps antidepressants and keep them at your house?
Is that what happened to the one? Yeah? Remember the
woman was like, yeah, he's on anidepressants. He he he
shouldn't have done this, And everybody's like, wait, what did
you just say? She's like nothing, do you remember? I
don't remember the anti depressants. Yeah, it came out like
(27:03):
a coach onlike the Today Show or something like days after.
She was like, I had him on anti pressants. I
don't know what happened. She was messed up too well
she oh yeah she was. It was pretty gnarmly. Oh
the yeah the victim, Yeah yeah that was something man. Okay, well, um,
we were all over the place there. If you can
(27:24):
figure out where we where we stand on this, hats
off to you. You got anything else about chimps? Great
apes are the Four Great apes, chimpanzees and orangutang's uh maccaws,
that's a bird, my Cobbs, No, uh, Clint Eastwood, that's everywhere,
(27:45):
way but loose. That's an orangutan right now, right turn
Clyde Bonabo, bona bos or bonobo uh, orangutans, gorillas, and chimps.
That's right. In humans, Zippy the Chimp was my favorite
toy growing up. I had a little hand you could
squeeze and it made a little squeaky noise. So yeah,
(28:07):
that was my favorite little toy. Zippy the Chimp. Awesome.
I bet you I can get one an eBay, okay,
because mine is probably, you know, disintegrated. Because I'm ninety,
I'm glad somebody finally said, um, okay, well that's it
for chimps. Then. I was not expecting you to mention
that when I said, if you do you have anything else? Yeah,
(28:28):
I just actually I just remembered about Zippy the Chimp
first time I thought about that twenty some years. Okay. Um.
If you want to learn more about chimps and biomedical testing,
including the delightfully named Chimp Act of two thousand, you
can type in uh, what's it called chuck what happens
to chimps? Used the medical research or any one of
(28:50):
those Christen Conger right, yeah, she wrote, both of the
ones who recorded today this Hey Conger day in the
search bart how stuff works dot com and if let's see,
I said how stuffworks dot com and search bar right now. So,
of course, as ever, without interruption or fail, it's time
for a listener and mail. Except what there's interruption and fail? What? Uh?
(29:18):
You wanted to talk about our million U? What is
it called the million March March for the millions? The
million dollar mark, million dollar March March for the millions.
That's good, too much of the million sounds more like
a car sweep steaks or something like that. The million
dollar March on Kiva Kiva team is rounding the band
towards towards having lent a million dollars. That's just baffling
(29:44):
to me. By the end of March, we're well on
the way, We're assured by Glenn and sonja um and
uh yeah we are the official team captains down. So
we set the goal. You set the golden shape. Yeah,
I typed it up. It's nice of you, um, but
we are not snobs are KEYPA. Team is extremely open
and accepting and if you'd like to join and Lenn,
(30:07):
don't just join. Why would you just join and not lend.
It's weird people do it. I get joining Facebook and
just stalking people right or just like sitting there and
saying like, Okay, I'm here, I'm not gonna do anything
on it. This is this, this is different. This team
is all about action, baby, just one loan, Just do
one loan or do several, um. But the team's very supportive.
(30:31):
The message board is very helpful. If you have any questions,
you can ask and people will tell you and you
can say, hey, I think this people need these people
need their loan fulfilled. Help them and people will go
and it's fun. It's cool. Um, but we are almost
two a million dollars and if you want to join
and help, you can join us on uh www, dot
(30:52):
k i v A dot org, slash team slash stuff
you should know and join up start lending and it'll
be cool. And you know, we don't mind if you
join up here at the last minute and kind of
receive some of the credit as hey, I helped them
reach a million bucks even though I just joined a
month ago. Who cares? We love that well, yeah, bandwagon
(31:14):
ears are welcome. Yes, that's fine as long as you're
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promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by
the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry. It's ready, Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is always as
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes the Stuff you
(00:22):
Should Know the podcast the Chimpagze centric podcast. Frequently I
told you about the time that chimp held my hand, right, Yeah,
that was just the best thing ever. Yeah, I mean
I think about it today, my heart melts a little,
just a little, just a little. You're a weepy guy. Yeah,
(00:43):
there's like ten twelve years ago, and it's still it's
worn off. Yeah, it's still melting though by degrees. Do
you think it will melt forever? Every time I think
of that little chimp holding my hand, it will melt
a tiny bit. Why don't you just go buy a
chimp and you can have it happen all the time. Dude,
if I didn't have three dogs in two cats, I
would have a chimp in my house. Would you really
even after that one story? Um, remember when we started
(01:06):
blogging it happened that chimp or something. Yeah, I would
because that was such a big deal that made the news.
And I don't think it just that didn't happen all
the time. Okay, I would totes have a chimp. When
did you start talking like that? You're talking like my
friend Adam and it's unvous. Oh yeah, I think it's funny.
(01:27):
It's like that, like everything's abbreviated. Yeah, yeah, Emily, and
not do that I totes on the totes train. Yeah
are you? I just think it's funny. Don't start saying
natsch Okay, Oh that's old school, though I know. I
still don't like it. All right, I never did toads.
I can handle more than natch. Okay, Okay, you're ready, Yes, okay, Chuck.
(01:49):
I want to tell you about a certain lady. Her
name is Wenka okay, and she has kind of a
rough life story. She was born into a family and this,
or you might say, um. She was born in nineteen
fifty four and when she was just two years old,
her mother died after being mistakenly poisoned. Her um mother's father,
(02:13):
her grandfather, uh He was a morphine adict who died
as a result of his addiction. Her grandmother, maternal grandmother
died of dysentery um on. Her father said she was
one of forty grandkids. You believe that she was adopted
out at a very young age, but returned back home
(02:34):
at age three. At fifteen fifteen, she had her first daughter,
and her daughter was born with Down syndrome. She died
at seventeen months. Eventually, Winkle went on to have another boy,
and a boy and another girl. Um, and here's the
mind blowing part. She's a chimpanzee. Yes, I actually see that.
(03:00):
I mean, and I know I was sitting there like,
how is there a way to do this? At the
top of the Chimp podcast. That's not somebody not know
because it sounded like you were talking about a human story.
But think about all of the stuff that her family
went through if they were humans, wouldn't she feel pretty
bad for well, feel bad for Whanka to And here's
(03:21):
why she is, as far as anyone knows, the oldest
primate in captivity that's still being used for research. And
she was here in Atlanta. Well, she's born in ninety
and she's been experimented on ever since. She went back
to the Yorkes Primate Institute at age three, and her
(03:41):
mom the one who was mistakenly poisoned. Was one of
the original ones that yer Keys got his hands on
in the what the forties, right, Well, in the twenties, yes,
is Robert Yorke's started messing around with behavioral research, not
(04:02):
as much medical research. No, And at first you think like, oh, well,
that's that's way better. But if you have you looked
into some of the behavioral experiments that they were conducting,
I'm sure it's not fun. So like one one young
UM chimp from I believe for this, the first thirty
six months of his life had UM like plastic or
(04:25):
some sort of obstruction over his hands and his feet,
so he couldn't use either of them for the first
three years of life. A lot of social isolation, like
chimps spent the first two or three years of life
without seeing, hearing, touching anybody else's. Yes, very much so,
wasn't it Little Albert? Yeah, a little Albert was on
(04:45):
a human though the fear conditioning UM the The equivalent
to that was UM Harry Harlowe's experimentation of separating UM
chimps from their mothers and then raising them with like
wire and co and fake reconstructions UM that they would
cling to and treat as their mother, because what he
(05:07):
found from these experiments is that moms are really important.
That's the saddus thing I've ever heard. All Right, So
we're talking about we started this off well, I mean,
this isn't the brightest of topics, although the ending is
fairly uplifting. Past headed that way, Yeah, we won't ruin it,
(05:27):
so chuck, let me set you up here. Um, we
have only just in the last few years come to
to think that animals deserve some sort of um rights. Right.
It's a very new idea, isn't it. It is new Ish? Okay,
like maybe eighteenth century Newish. Yeah, England leads the way.
(05:50):
Our British friends um past the first anti cruelty laws
against animals in well even before that, Jerry May Bentham
he wrote a paper on how animals could possibly suffer
and maybe we should start treating him differently late Sevre
kudos to him. Yeah, and did you know that he
is mummified and they bring his body out for uh
(06:14):
some annual dinner dancing with the stars at the college.
He's a judge at the College um where he was
a professor. They bring his body out for dinner every year. Wow,
an't that crazy? It's a little weird. Well, good for him.
Um still looks great, by the way, does he really? So?
Peter didn't start until nineteen eighty A lot of people
(06:35):
might think that Pete has been around like since the sixties.
Fairly new, um. And then the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was started in eighteen sixty six,
So pretty new in a world view, right, but a
big picture specifically, and that's general animal rights. Yeah, but
(07:00):
chimps in particular. Um. There. I guess the idea that
they may be deserve even more special rights than the
average lab rat um is based on something that's also
fairly recent, which is the discovery or the idea that
we share a tremendous amount of similarity with them. There's
no other animal that is closer to humans than chimps, right, Yeah,
(07:24):
I think the number is just over DNA sequence of
d N a face pairing. The other part. I can't
remember what it's called. Should have written that down. Well, no,
that's very like people throw that out like chimps are
similar to humans and that's very misleading. The like you said,
(07:46):
the genetic sequence of the chromosomes that we share or
that are similar in apes and humans are similar. We're not.
It's not like if you our DNA and put it
side by side, only two percent would be different. It's
not like that. And in fact, chimps have ten percent
(08:07):
more DNA than humans do I really, So that's that's
very misleaning to say. But the point is they are
very genetically similar, probably more than any other animal. And
we've known that since the twenties. Yeah, and similar enough
to that at a certain point people said, you know what,
We've experimented on human prisoners long enough and they say,
(08:28):
we can't do it anymore, which is a drag. So
let's get these chimps in here and uh give them disease.
And here we reached the title of the podcast. Um.
There As as much as we would like to think
that it is a very easy moral ethical question, like
(08:50):
should chimps be used for medical research, it's not because
if you, as we were saying before, if you like
walking around not having polio or hepatitis B, yeah, um,
you can go ahead and thank a chimp for volunteering.
I'm sorry, wait, that was the absolute worst for it.
(09:11):
I could have used um for being a basically a
test animal on those vaccines, UM and treatments. Uh. Same
with contraceptives. Uh. If you like our understanding of addiction,
you can thank chimps for that. For being a space animal,
(09:32):
let's go ahead and call that out. That's where it
all began. The US Air Force said, Hey, we got
a space race going on. Let's go get some chimps
from the wild. Shoot him up into space, put him
in sled cars, test g forces on him. See what
can happen. Put him on the giz rocket sled. I
guess what's his face was getting a little tired at
that point. Yeah, I couldn't see because of all the
(09:54):
blood pooled in his retiness. So um pre NASA, the
Air Force went and got sick five chimpanzees from the wild,
and a lot of these chimps are used today are
descendants of those original chimps because they couldn't keep going
to get them. After the Site's Convention on International Trade
(10:15):
and Endangered Species and seventy five, which basically said like,
hey man, you can't just start going and grabbing chimpanzeezer
other animals out of the wild. They're in danger. Exactly.
So they started breeding these chimps, right they the ones
that they already had. After SITES was passed, they said, okay,
well we'll just start making them here in America, making
them made in America. And I did find it odd
(10:39):
or not odd, but a little like distressing that some
of those with a lot of these chimps today are
descended from those original sixty because of breeding. And it
makes sense. But who knew, Well the same with yer Keys,
his primates that he had in the twenties, those original
four that was the captive breeding program as well. I
think he definitely supplemented them with um imports. Yeah, you know,
(11:03):
because it was prior to SITES. But he had you know,
bread bread, He bred them, they bred, they bred, They
did it um And like you pointed out, we should
uh say that yr kis is now in Atlanta here
in Emery University. After being in Florida for twenty some
eighty years, they moved to Atlanta and sponsored by Yale before. Yeah,
(11:24):
and they got two point five acres at the main
station here in Atlanta and then in Lawrenceville just up
the road they have the field station, a hundred and
seventeen acres of chimpanzee breeding and testing facilities. It's where
chimps go to get their drugs. Chimpanzees are endangered, their
(11:44):
native to Africa and uh because of their similarities, they thought,
you know this HIV thing in the eighties, maybe we
should start injecting these chimps and see how and if
they develop AIDS. That's what changed everything. The combination of
sites and the appearance of AIDS um combined with chimp similarity,
(12:08):
like really changed everything. We had a captive breeding program.
The federal government sponsored it, and so it became very,
very big and mysterious new disease. Yeah, the fear of
AIDS and HIV was so enormous that they within just
a few years of this captive breeding program that was
started by the National Institutes of Health in I think
(12:30):
maybe within a year two, there were I think five
chimps running around with HIV. The big problem was, as
we soon found out that while they can carry HIV,
and chimps are the only other animal besides humans that
can contract HIV because cats have their own, dogs have
their own um, other other apes and primates have their own,
(12:53):
but only but only humans and chimps can have HIV um,
we on the chimps don't get AIDS, they don't go
they don't move into full blown AIDS. Yeah, at least
not like humans do. And so it was kind of
a big failure on that front. And all the progress
we've made on AIDS rechurch has been because of human
(13:16):
experimentation basically or watching and seeing. Well, this is another
way to put it. Uh nine six The Animal Well
Welfare Act outline minimum care requirements for all animals and captivity. Right,
So these chimps were, you know, before the site's program,
the ones that they were importing, they still had some
(13:37):
sort of protection, but it wasn't you know, there weren't
that many bells and whistles. It was pretty pretty Southwest
Airlines not really Singapore air you know. Uh, I would
thought you would have said, like Virgin Atlantic or something.
Singapore are really nice. Really, it's up there with like Emirates,
Emirates Singapore Japan Airlines is pretty nice to concord. Remember that, Yeah,
(13:58):
we should do one on that. Do you remember the
time that Phil Collins played a show in London and
then Flute was it for live and he played two
shows and two different continents within each other. Awesome, Thank
you Concord, Thank you Phil Collins. Yeah, well, I thought
that might go without saying. I can just open my
shirt and shraining my t shirt to say that. And
(14:20):
by the way, that's a huge urban legend that he
saw his girlfriends rapist in the audience drowning not true.
Makes for a good story though. Yeah. All right, getting
back to Animal Welfare Act. You said it was didn't
have the bells and whistles, said temperatures had to stay
between forty and eighty five degrees fahrenheit, not bad, keep
(14:42):
him comfortable, Uh, gotta give him food and water. Gotta
isolate the sick ones, even though you can get a
waiver on that if they're supposed to be sick among
their their friends. Imagine that wasn't too hard to get
that exception. And um, basically it applied to all chimpanzees
were both biomedical and behavioral research, which was good, and
(15:04):
all animals, any animal that's being experimented on, any warm
blooded animals or in captivity period. Okay, like I think
it had just applied to zoos and everything, gotcha, that's good. Yeah,
So we had that in place in sixty six sites
came along in seventy five, the chimpanzee breeding program came
along in and then when that collapsed and failed, UM,
(15:27):
the US government was like, oh, what are we gonna
do here? We've got literally hundreds of chips running around
with HIV there like if they come in contact with people,
especially sickos, they could spread right well and they don't
live to be twelve, no, sixty. Yeah, So that's and
(15:47):
they cost some money to you know, hows and fifteen
bucks a day, So it doesn't sound like a lot,
but it adds up. That adds up, especially when um
there was only about I think five hundred that had HIV,
but there was something on the order of like twelve
the undred that were that the government was responsible for.
And it wasn't just the failure of the HIV AIDS studies. Uh.
(16:11):
You can thank Jane Goodall um and groups like Peter
and the s p c A in the Humane Society
in the early eighties around this time when chimp research
was really at its peak, UM for kind of a
learning the public to the cruelty of animal testing and research.
The Army of the Twelve Monkeys. Yeah, you can thank them,
(16:32):
I did. It was Uh, we should talk a little
bit about the the Kalston or Colston Foundation um that
is now defunct. It was shut down in two thousand two.
And here's the deal. Uh, it's controversial depending on who
you asked. Frederick Colston was the guy who was a
(16:57):
toxicologist who helped develop tree meant for malaria and hepatitis
B and AIDS or it was a house of horrors
and he performed experiments on human prisoners and then moved
to chimps. And uh, you know when one test chimps
had their teeth smashed in with a steel ball so
they could practice reconstructed reconstructed dental surgery, nine three chimps
(17:22):
were cooked to death when the temperature in there and
this is New Mexico and their unmonitored enclosure topped a
hundred and forty degrees And since n three chimps and
I think forty like forty five animals and all died
quote unintended deaths at the Colston Foundation. So you know,
(17:42):
it sounds like some awful, awful thing going on. But
then again, he's developing these treatments for these awful diseases,
so it's a very dicey situation. But they were shut
down in two thousand two because uh, negligent care on
a lot of fronts and any any I mean, there's
there are plenty of people who have like a really
good um there. They have really good ground to stand
(18:06):
on by saying like any animal testing is bad and
it doesn't matter how well you treat these animals, like
shouldn't be experimenting on where they put on this earth
to test to save humans. Some people back that. Some
people don't write UM. So oh you know, very recently
I saw UM. There was some researcher associated with the
Center for Great Apes. Yeah, yeah, apparently there's like a
(18:31):
number of them, uh, and one of them is in
Des Moines, and apparently somebody slashed the heels of UM
an infant chimp to keep it from being able to
stand upright. And this is like December, like a couple
of months ago. So one of the one of the
researchers acted as a whistleblower. Yeah, um or for a test,
(18:54):
not that I don't think that was the I don't
think that was the experiment. I think it was related
to it. But one of the researchers there was like,
I'm getting this chimp and all the rest of them
out of here and taking them down to another center
for grade eights UM, the main one in Florida. Yeah, well,
just to finish up on the Coulson Foundation. The good
news is, as of two thousand ten, about half of
(19:16):
the TCF chimps are now living at Save the Chimps,
which is basically where you want to be if you're
a retired chimp. Swinging, playing, running around, eating bananas, holding hands,
all that good chimp stuff. So well, let's talk about this.
That's the result of a sea change that was started
(19:37):
by Jane Goodall and and Peter and UM, a lot
of the Animal Liberation Front UM and Matthew Broderick. Yeah,
what was the name of that Project X? And interestingly,
real quick I just saw today. I didn't realize this
Project X was a movie that raised awareness for mistreatment
(19:58):
of chimps, obviously in medical reas, but Bob Barker at
the time accused them of mistreating animals on the set. Yeah,
here's a huge, huge animal cruelty guys. And he got
sued for defamation for that really yeah, and settled out
of court, actually against his wishes. He settled out of
court because he still believed that they were mistreated and
like said that they were like clubs and billy clubs
(20:20):
and batons used and they used like a snake to
scare the chimps and stuff to get reactions. Yeah, but
that was just a joke. That was just a you know,
a prank on set in between takes. But yeah, projects
go to see it, Hele and Hunt, go see it
in your in the theater near you in your time machine.
Did you see the Ferrespeuler commercial at the I saw
(20:41):
it out of the corner of my eye at the
superb Owl. Were you disgusted? Uh? I was looking forward
to it because I heard about it beforehand and it
was it was pretty bad. Yeah. Hey man, he's got
to support his kids. Oh dude, I'm sure he made
a mint good for him. Um. So, okay. We were
talking about Matthew Broderick in his career UM, which led
(21:04):
directly to a sea change in how people feel about
animal testing and specifically about chimpanzee testing UM, which is
kind of evidenced by the fact that Congress and its
endless ability to pass legislation with qut si names and acronyms.
This one was surprised me even in two thousand, Congress
(21:25):
pens the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection Act. And
guess what that spells out, chimp. Yeah, they passed the
Chimp Act in two thousand and Basically this said your
captive breeding program was gone once a chimp is retired
from biomedical testing or behavioral testing. I believe too, you are.
(21:46):
You can't kill it, sorry, all those um monkeys running
around with HIV, you can't euthanize them. You have to
provide for their care for the rest of their lives
and natural natural lives, which is pretty cool. It's bad
enough that given them HIV, at least care for them.
But this extends only as far as I know to UM.
(22:07):
Federally funded chimp programs, pharmaceutical companies that own it's federally
funded in pharmaceutical companies. All the chimps in the United
States are owned by them. That aren't pets, I should say, um,
they pharmacutic companies exist outside of this act, of course,
(22:30):
So Josh, if I were to ask you how many
countries in the world in the world still experiment on
chimpanzees legally, what would be I would say? Since the
United States, since a um, it's such a standard bearer
of human rights and animal rights. Sure that if the
(22:54):
United States still allows it, at least ninety two a
hundred and five other countries allow testing on chimpanzees. Am
I right, you did a very good job of playing
them there. By the way, uh No, United States and
Gabon are the only two countries in the world that's
still performed biomedical testing on chimpanzees. Great Britain said no more. Uh.
(23:19):
Netherlands in two thousand two. I can't even speak Dutch.
That would be a travesty. Uh, Sweden in two thousand three,
Austria two thousand six, Japan two thousand six. Everyone said,
we're drawn a line in the sand. United States still
allows it. But two months ago, three months ago, December
of last year, big news, the n i H suspended
(23:41):
all new grants awesome for biomedical and behavioral research on
chimps or apes the great the great apes um which
by the chimps, the great apes are chimps, guerrillas, bona bows,
and orangutanes. Correct um. So they suspended all new grants.
That doesn't mean that you can't test anymore. They basically
established some pretty rigorous criteria moving forward, which means it's
(24:04):
got to be necessary for human health and there must
be no other possible way to accomplish it. And basically
it's kind of being looked at as the beginning of
the end because they're finding that nowadays, with cultures and
cellular research, you don't need to experiment on chips anymore.
You can find out all you need to know Petrie dish. Yeah,
the n I H said, hey, um, over the next
(24:26):
four years, we're gonna hypercharge our biomedical testing. So we
so we, like you said, it can just exist in
the Petrie dish from now and we don't have to well, basically,
single celled animals that are going to start to bear
the broad no far our desire ceaseless quest for immortality health.
But you can't hold the hand of an amiba. No,
(24:49):
but if you could, I'll bet it would melt you.
Hepatitis apparently is one of two areas that they think
it could still be useful for. And um, but it
sounds like they're genuinely phasing it out. That's great, it's
about time. After that it'll just be on gabone. So
(25:09):
hats off to places like Save the chimps and what
were some of the other ones. Uh, the Center for
Great Apes, which by the way, I don't want to
defame them at all, not even for legal reasons, like
they do a good job. Um. I looked them up.
I looked up Save the Chimps, UM, Chimp Haven, the
Grade eight Project. I found one in Massachusetts. And if
(25:30):
you go on some of like the charity watches and
and ratings sites. Um, there's nothing bad for them, except
for the fact that they haven't filed with the I
r S even though they should for some reason. That
This Morning Star doesn't have anything on them. The Golden laptops,
but they they um, all of them seem to be legit.
But the Grade eight Project, the one that's mentioned in
(25:53):
this UM article that lobbies on behalf of the Great
Apes for testing and basically animal all right, they're located
in Brazil. Um, but keep thinking you're saying grape ape. Yeah,
the Great Pape Project, the Center for Grade Apes is
bona fide and good too. I couldn't find much on
anything that seemed to smack of like the Colston Foundation
(26:17):
or anything like that. Yeah. Well, the Colston Colston Foundation
actually morphed into uh, save the chimps. Okay, so yeah, yeah,
that's in Florida, right yeah. Fort Pierce along with Chimp
Have then and the Fauna Foundation. Um there you know
they're chimp sanctuaries. It's a nice thing. Yeah, so I
guess go there, give him some money, ask in exchange,
(26:41):
um for a chimp to hold your hand. Um, do
not feed chimps antidepressants and keep them at your house?
Is that what happened to the one? Yeah? Remember the
woman was like, yeah, he's on anidepressants. He he he
shouldn't have done this, And everybody's like, wait, what did
you just say? She's like nothing, do you remember? I
don't remember the anti depressants. Yeah, it came out like
(27:03):
a coach onlike the Today Show or something like days after.
She was like, I had him on anti pressants. I
don't know what happened. She was messed up too well
she oh yeah she was. It was pretty gnarmly. Oh
the yeah the victim, Yeah yeah that was something man. Okay, well, um,
we were all over the place there. If you can
(27:24):
figure out where we where we stand on this, hats
off to you. You got anything else about chimps? Great
apes are the Four Great apes, chimpanzees and orangutang's uh maccaws,
that's a bird, my Cobbs, No, uh, Clint Eastwood, that's everywhere,
(27:45):
way but loose. That's an orangutan right now, right turn
Clyde Bonabo, bona bos or bonobo uh, orangutans, gorillas, and chimps.
That's right. In humans, Zippy the Chimp was my favorite
toy growing up. I had a little hand you could
squeeze and it made a little squeaky noise. So yeah,
(28:07):
that was my favorite little toy. Zippy the Chimp. Awesome.
I bet you I can get one an eBay, okay,
because mine is probably, you know, disintegrated. Because I'm ninety,
I'm glad somebody finally said, um, okay, well that's it
for chimps. Then. I was not expecting you to mention
that when I said, if you do you have anything else? Yeah,
(28:28):
I just actually I just remembered about Zippy the Chimp
first time I thought about that twenty some years. Okay. Um.
If you want to learn more about chimps and biomedical testing,
including the delightfully named Chimp Act of two thousand, you
can type in uh, what's it called chuck what happens
to chimps? Used the medical research or any one of
(28:50):
those Christen Conger right, yeah, she wrote, both of the
ones who recorded today this Hey Conger day in the
search bart how stuff works dot com and if let's see,
I said how stuffworks dot com and search bar right now. So,
of course, as ever, without interruption or fail, it's time
for a listener and mail. Except what there's interruption and fail? What? Uh?
(29:18):
You wanted to talk about our million U? What is
it called the million March March for the millions? The
million dollar mark, million dollar March March for the millions.
That's good, too much of the million sounds more like
a car sweep steaks or something like that. The million
dollar March on Kiva Kiva team is rounding the band
towards towards having lent a million dollars. That's just baffling
(29:44):
to me. By the end of March, we're well on
the way, We're assured by Glenn and sonja um and
uh yeah we are the official team captains down. So
we set the goal. You set the golden shape. Yeah,
I typed it up. It's nice of you, um, but
we are not snobs are KEYPA. Team is extremely open
and accepting and if you'd like to join and Lenn,
(30:07):
don't just join. Why would you just join and not lend.
It's weird people do it. I get joining Facebook and
just stalking people right or just like sitting there and
saying like, Okay, I'm here, I'm not gonna do anything
on it. This is this, this is different. This team
is all about action, baby, just one loan, Just do
one loan or do several, um. But the team's very supportive.
(30:31):
The message board is very helpful. If you have any questions,
you can ask and people will tell you and you
can say, hey, I think this people need these people
need their loan fulfilled. Help them and people will go
and it's fun. It's cool. Um, but we are almost
two a million dollars and if you want to join
and help, you can join us on uh www, dot
(30:52):
k i v A dot org, slash team slash stuff
you should know and join up start lending and it'll
be cool. And you know, we don't mind if you
join up here at the last minute and kind of
receive some of the credit as hey, I helped them
reach a million bucks even though I just joined a
month ago. Who cares? We love that well, yeah, bandwagon
(31:14):
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