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Correspondence

Nature Medicine 14, 1011 - 1012 (2008)
doi:10.1038/nm1008-1011b

Experimental use of nonhuman primates is not a simple problem

Jarrod Bailey1, Theodora Capaldo1, Kathleen Conlee2, Michelle Thew3 & John Pippin4

  1. New England Anti-Vivisection Society, 333 Washington Street, Suite 850, Boston, Massachusetts 02108, USA.
    e-mail: jarrod.bailey@ncl.ac.uk
  2. The Humane Society of the United States, 2100 L Street, Northwest, Washington, DC 20037, USA.
  3. British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, 16a Crane Grove, London N7 8NN, UK.
  4. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, 5100 Wisconsin Avenue, Northwest, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20016, USA.

Your recent defense of nonhuman primate research1 rests on assumptions of its utility that have little supporting evidence and implies that critiques of it are selective and anecdotal. On the contrary, the only scientific analyses made to date have been critiques that have revealed nonhuman primate models to be of little relevance to human medicine.