Credit: Photo:AP/Nick Ut

While expressing reservations about specific aspects of the measure, President Bill Clinton has signed the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection (CHIMP) Act into law. The measure is the outcome of a protracted legislative and public debate over how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should handle the estimated 150 to 200 surplus chimpanzees currently housed in laboratory facilities.

Under the terms of the act, the NIH must hire an independent contractor to establish and maintain a system of “sanctuaries” for the extra animals, in which the chimpanzees will be kept in relatively large groups under natural conditions. The arrangement is cheaper and considered more humane than laboratory cages (Nature Med. 6, 9; 2000).

Scientists had hoped that the surplus animals would remain available for future research, but once chimpanzees have been placed in sanctuaries, “for all intents and purposes it's going to be pretty much impossible to get them out,” says John Strandberg, director of Comparative Medicine at the NIH. The Clinton administration agrees, and has stated that the criteria for removing chimpanzees from sanctuaries for future studies “are complex and give insufficient weight to important public health issues, which could prevent or delay valuable biomedical research.”

Although the NIH currently has an excess of chimpanzees as a result of an aggressive breeding program at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, researchers argue that demand for the animals could increase sharply. The animals are also used in the development of hepatitis B vaccines, and are the best model available for hepatitis C infection studies.

The CHIMP Act raises financial concerns as well. As it does not provide funding for the NIH to implement the new system, money will have to be transferred from existing programs. NIH officials have not yet determined which projects will need to be cut, or by how much. In addition, the act appears to call for a sanctuary system operated by a single contractor. “If you only have one [contractor], and something happens to that entity, what kind of alternative is there? Some sort of a backup system strikes me as being very important for this,” says Strandberg. Clinton called for the next Congress and President to remedy these defects in the CHIMP Act.