“How can we do better?” With just shy of 62,000 non-human primates used in US research in 2015, according to the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, it's an important question and was a point of discussion among the participants at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) workshop titled “Ensuring the Continued Responsible Oversight of Research with Non-human Primates.” Held on September 7, 2016, its summary report was released on December 28; a video recording of the workshop is also available online.
Though the immediate prompt for the workshop was a congressional directive, non-human primate research had become a contentious subject in the Washington, DC area in the preceding months (Nature 28 January 2015; doi:10.1038/nature.2015.16814). Just northwest of the city, a NIH lab in Poolesville, Maryland, had attracted the attention of animal rights activists, who ran an aggressive ad campaign against a project studying the effects of maternal separation in young non-human primates. Though NIH Director Francis Collins reported that the agency found no major issues with that research, the congressional representatives who asked for the investigation of the Poolesville lab included language in the 2016 appropriations bill requesting that the NIH conduct a larger review of its non-human primate research.
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