Cutting Out Monkey Business

India's ban on exports perils U.S. medical tests

India's Prime Minister Morarji Desai, 81, is such a devout Hindu that he not only refuses to eat meat but he refuses to be vaccinated against smallpox because cattle were used to make the vaccine. Now Desai has decided to ban the export of rhesus monkeys as of April 1. India is the world's largest exporter of the animals (20,000 last year), and the U.S. is the largest importer (more than 12,000). If Desai's ban takes effect on schedule --and one aide says the Prime Minister's "mind is closed"--it will jeopardize the process by which polio vaccine and similar products are made and tested. Hundreds of scientific research projects in the U.S. will also be delayed or canceled.

Desai's personal beliefs can hardly be blamed, however, for the crisis confronting so much research. The chief culprits, according to American as well as Indian sources, are agencies of the U.S. armed forces, particularly the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI). When the U.S. and India first formally regulated the exports of monkeys back in 1955, their agreement specified that for each shipment, the Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service must sign a statement declaring: "I hereby certify that the monkeys now being purchased will be used only for medical research or he production of anti-poliomyelitis vaccine ... and that regular inspections shall be made to assure humane treatment of these monkeys." The agreement also declared that rhesus monkeys "will not be used in atomic blast experiments or for pace research."

Although U.S. officials deny any violation of that agreement, the Defense Nuclear Agency reports that in five years ending last June, AFRRI used 1,379 primates--undoubtedly nearly all of them rhesus monkeys--in its tests. One typical set of tests was designed to simulate the effects of the neutron bomb, which kills not by blast or burning but by radiation. In order to determine monkeys' work capacity when healthy, they were conditioned by means of electric shocks to run on a treadmill for six hours. Then they were subjected to huge doses of radiation --from two to ten times what would ordinarily be fatal for most human beings --then put back on the treadmill to see how their capacities had been impaired and how long they survived. They lasted from seven hours to almost six days. In the meantime they suffered the predictable effects of excessive radiation exposure: vomiting, diarrhea, loss of hair. Despite this, Lieut. Colonel William J. McGee of the Defense Nuclear Agency has declared: "To the best of our knowledge, the animals experience no pain from radiation experiments." Charles McPherson, head of the rhesus monkey certification program, insists: "What the armed forces were doing met the definition of medical research. There certainly wasn't any weapon used; the monkeys were simply exposed to radiation."

Though the Indians regarded the military tests as the clearest violation of the agreement limiting experiments to medical research and vaccine production, they cited other experiments in U.S. laboratories as highly questionable: -- Ten monkeys were immersed in water at 90DEG C. (194DEG F.) for 15 seconds for an examination of burns.

> Ten monkeys were shot through the head for a study of gunshot wounds. > Monkeys were operated on without anesthesia so doctors could study shock.

By far the largest single consumer of rhesus monkeys in the U.S., as foreseen in the 1955 treaty, is the polio-vaccine testing program. Lederle Laboratories of Pearl River, N.Y., now the sole U.S. manufacturer of the vaccine, grows the Sabin attenuated virus strains in cultures of African green monkey kidney cells. Samples of each batch of vaccine (currently totaling about 25 million doses a year) are then injected into the brain cavities or spinal columns of 45 rhesus monkeys. After three weeks of clinical observation, the animals are "sacrificed"--killed humanely by an overdose of sodium pentothal--so that their nervous tissues can be examined microscopically for changes that would result from any imperfection in the vaccine. If any are found, that batch of vaccine is thrown out. If none are found, samples of the batch are sent to the Bureau of Biologies, where the process is repeated. Lederle uses 1,200 to 1,500 rhesuses a year for its testing; Biologies uses 2,000 to 2,500. Similar testing of other vaccines may consume 2,000 or 3,000 more.

Scattered around the U.S. are scores of biomedical research facilities that use rhesuses for testing the effects of diet, drugs and other chemicals in relation to a wide variety of human diseases, notably cardiovascular disorders and cancer. Two important studies involve examination of the rhesus fetus while it is still in the womb, letting the pregnancy continue and checking hemoglobin changes that occur about the time of birth, which may be significant in relation to sickle-cell anemia.

For these purposes, the rhesus is considered preferable to other monkeys, both because its body mechanisms closely resemble those of humans and because it has been studied so extensively that new results can be measured very precisely. In the short term, therefore, many U.S. scientists are nervous about the prospective ban, and the Charles River Breeding Laboratories in Wilmington, Mass., the largest such institution in the U.S., is being inundated with telephone inquiries about future supplies. (At the moment, there are about 1,300 of the imports in the U.S.) In the long run, despite the expense of breeding rhesuses in captivity, the Indian ban can be overcome.

Biologies already has four rhesus breeding centers; the National Institutes of Health has five; the Charles River Breeding Laboratories has a colony on Key Lois in Florida and is planning another near by; Lederle has its own near Alice, Texas. The question is, how long will it take the U.S. to produce an adequate supply of home-grown rhesuses? Best estimate: five to ten years. -

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