Right here! Beneath our feet! Are there 300 monkeys? They haven't seen any sunshine. In years!
Lisa Jones-Engel is one of two dozen people who are protesting outside of the Washington National Primate Research Center. She yelled into a megaphone with her long gray hair tucked over one shoulder. One part of her brain is saying that she sounds like an activist. You sound like one of them.
Jones-Engel would have been horrified if you had said she would be doing this two years earlier. She was a primatologist, not a silly monkey-hugger, for God's sake.
She worked at NYU's Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates and the University of Washington's primate research center. She spent decades in the field trapping and sampling macaques and other primate across Asia on prestigious grants, publishing her research in top journals and co-authoring a book on monkey diseases.
She was wearing a garish monkey mask on a sidewalk in Seattle and felt both excited and uncomfortable to be a part of this spectacle. She told herself to fight.
She had been trying to make things better for the animals in her care for a long time. She sat on her university's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. She was painted as a troublemaker rather than a concerned researcher when she questioned a protocol or requested information.
She said yes to a job at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as a senior science adviser, a move she never would have predicted when she started her career.
She promised to shut down the country's seven remaining primate centers within 10 years.
She might do it as well.
More than 108,000 monkeys were held and/or used in experiments in US labs in the last year for which research is available, along with nearly 200,000 guinea pigs, 58,000 dogs, 18,000 cats and millions of mice and rats. The EPA wants to eliminate the use of animals in animal testing by the year 2035. Few people care what researchers do to insects.
Controversy over the use of animals in research goes back to at least 18th-century Europe, when philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau began to argue that animals had rights. The US National Institute of Health established its primate centers program in the 1960s, which led to the controversy.
In this century, researchers and animal rights activists are usually in the antipodal corners of the ethical landscape. In one corner, the world of biomedical research insists that animals are crucial in developing new treatments for humans, that their pain is properly overseen and mitigated, and that research gains are a fair tradeoff for their suffering.
The National Institutes of Health agrees with animal rights activists that less than 5% of animal trials translate to viable human treatments. They say that humans have no moral or ethical right to use other species in these ways, that thousands of lab animals suffer and die unnecessarily, and that there are other options for research.
There are so many monkeys in airports of entry that are related to Monkeypox. Last week, she heard from a whistle blower about an EgyptAir cargo flight that took off from Cambodia with a hold full of longtailed macaques, which were trucked 1800 miles across the country to Texas after landing.
She says that the monkeys were exposed to diseases that could potentially affect humans.
The activist perspective got a boost from the accelerated development of the Covid-19 vaccines, made possible in part because animal trials were conducted at the same time as human trials instead of sequential. This proves that animal trials are not necessary.
When she was in high school, Jones-Engel volunteered for seven months at a research camp in Indonesia. Jones-Engel was asked by Galdikas to spend time with the wild macaques in the swamps around the camp. She paddled a canoe, but mostly she slogged through muck up to her armpits.
For more than 30 years, Jones-Engel followed macaques, building a database of blood, fecal, and other samples from more than 1,000 individual monkeys. She likes to think of herself as a macaque, a smart, social, good at protective. She's only joking.
She said that animal rights activists didn't understand that there were decent people who cared for animals in a laboratory setting. Animal activists are crazy, destructive, dangerous, ignorant and we are scientists. Let us do our work if you get back.
For a while, that was a good position for an ambitious scientist like Jones-Engel. She was five months pregnant with her twin daughters when she converted to Judaism in 1994.
She and her husband, Gregory, host weekly Shabbat dinners at their homes in Seattle and Barrow, Alaska, where he practices medicine. She says that building community is one of the things she does as a Jew. You have taken away their ability to have a relationship.
She asked her colleague to pull over when she saw a man walking a monkey on a leash while she was looking for monkeys to sample. The monkey ran into the van after she opened the door. She thought. Is my face going to be lost?
Instead, the monkey put her nose and mouth up to Jones-Engel, almost touching him, and for the next 30 seconds they stayed like that. The monkey let her go. The owner told her she could take a sample, but she couldn't. There was no way she could have caused that monkey any pain.
Jones-Engel was trapping monkeys in a village. She had taken samples, anesthetized the animals, and let them wake up after they 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217
The monkeys fled, except for the baby who was still holding the net. His mother ran back into the trap to get him after she realized he was gone. Jones-Engel had a revelation when she watched her put herself in danger.
She remembers that she was willing to do anything to get her baby. I can experiment on them any more because they are so similar to us.
The observation that they are just like us is in some ways a contradiction in the debate about primate research. John Gluck, a psychologist at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, explains in his book that when researchers want to generalize their animal results to humans, they emphasize the similarities between animals and humans. They emphasize the differences when justifying research that causes pain, fear, or death.
We can learn from them because they are just like us, and we can experiment on them because they are not like us.
When she read Gluck's book, she was already grappling with the paradoxes. She spent the next two years trying to navigate the opposing worlds of animal research and animal care after she accepted a seat on the University of Washington's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.
She was frustrated that the committee would rubber-stamp research. Her requests for more information on a protocol were often denied. She resigned from the university and the committee after she was branded a troublemaker by Jane Sullivan, the committee's chair. Sullivan did not want to be interviewed for this story.
She had a deep knowledge of animals in the wild that set her apart from other researchers. Most researchers don't know much about mice or monkeys other than they are captives.
If you have a person who is in prison their whole life, they are not an average person, says John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine.
It's easy to see the animals as research tools. They are not equal to you.
She learned how monkeys ate and groomed and slept, the way they built social hierarchies, how they solved problems and made choices from her time in the swamps with wild macaques. She had a different level of respect and compassion for lab monkeys. She wanted to do better by them. She felt she owed it to them.
She tried the science because she knew the moral argument wouldn't fly. There has been a growing awareness of the ways in which the conditions of lab animals affect them. Colonies with high levels of infectious diseases have been found.
Jones-Engel thought scientists would want to be aware of these issues. She says that monkeys are not furry little humans.
She couldn't get her colleagues to listen.
Shiu-Lok Hu acknowledges that the animal model we use is not a valid way to predict outcomes.
99% of the time things don't work, Hu says. If 99% of the experiments don't work, why do they bother? He doesn't want to answer questions about the ethics of putting animals through pain for the sake of research. He said that keeping animals in cages and experimenting on them was harmful to them. I don't know.
Rationalizations like this frustrate her. She thought she could change things from within the system.
She said that if you stand with science, you wear the mantle of the scientist. The moral, ethical person is the one who wears the mantle of the advocate if you stand with the animal rights movement. I understand both sides and have one foot on either side. It is a bad place to be.
The horrible place is mostly a memory. To see if one of her Freedom of Information Act requests has come through, Jones-Engel will open her email in-box. She knows what other scientists think of Peta, and sometimes she agrees.
At the protest, she heard other activists talk about storming in and releasing the monkeys, and thought, no, that's a really bad idea! She heard someone chanting "We are here today!" a few minutes later. At the University of Wisconsin! The hyperbole made her want to die.
She thinks hyperbole makes people pay attention in ways they wouldn't otherwise. The organization has come under fire for running media campaigns juxtaposing images of animal abuse with images of slavery, or comparing the pain of Jews during the Holocaust with the suffering of factory-farmed animals. Peta puts that right in your face. I believe that Peta's intent can be shocking.
She feels she has found her troop because she can tell Peta no. Once the organization takes on an issue, its commitment is absolute. It's worth letting go of the trappings of her former calling for Jones-Engel. She is making peace with the idea that she can never return.
There is relief in letting go, in standing squarely on the side of animal rights, and in using her scientific background and knowledge for a higher purpose. She says that her work is as much a calling as science was.