For research chimpanzees, a retirement home: aging chimps are getting a taxpayer-funded sanctuary. Some scientists worry it s a step toward getting apes out of labs for good. (science times).

The chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center were acting up. Jessie, a pink-faced 20-year-old, slapped her belly and hooted wildly from behind a steel gate. Dover, a mischievous 4-year-old, spied a visitor and served up his standard greeting for strangers, a fistful of feces, pitched with remarkable accuracy.

Jessie and Dover do not really have to be at this Yerkes field station in Lawrenceville, Georgia, but they have no place else to go. Bred for biomedical research, they are now unemployed, a result of a vast surplus of laboratory chimpanzees. They pass their days in small steel-and-concrete enclosures, playing with burlap bags and shredding old telephone books for fun.

But better times may be ahead for these great apes and hundreds of their captive kin. Acting on a mandate from Congress, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced last year that it would spend $24 million to help build and operate a chimpanzee sanctuary--in essence, a taxpayer-supported retirement home for research chimps.

"It's a good moment for chimps, a very good moment," says Frans de Waal, a Yerkes primatologist and board member of Chimp Haven, the organization that will mn the sanctuary. "If we are not going to use them for biomedical studies, let's move them to a situation that is attractive to the chimps for retirement."

TOO MANY CHIMPS

Of the 1,600 laboratory chimps in the United States, more than 400 are not involved in experiments, NIH officials estimate. Chimp Haven, to open next year, will occupy 200 acres of donated land near Shreveport, Louisiana. Up to 300 chimps may eventually live there. Others may retire to a private sanctuary in Florida.

Some scientists, however, including Yerkes director Stuart Zola, fear that the federal government is setting a bad precedent by giving its stamp of approval to the retirement concept.

"I see the retirement community idea as simply another ploy by the animal-rights community to reach their eventual goal of abolishing the use of animals in research," Zola says.

TEMPORARY RETIREMENT?

Advocates for animal rights are also angry because the bill that authorized the sanctuary included a provision permitting the animals to be returned to labs in a public-health emergency.

"They cannot call a place a sanctuary if what it really is is a holding pen for when they need the chimps the next time," says Holly Hazard, executive director of the Doris Day Animal League, a lobbying group.

The chimp surplus is an unexpected legacy of AIDS. In the early days of the epidemic, scientists theorized that the chimp would be a useful model to study the disease in people.

In 1986, the health institutes began an aggressive breeding program that doubled the laboratory chimp population, only to find that although the apes could contract the AIDS virus, it rarely made them sick. That distinction makes it hard to use the animals to test treatments.

With their striking genetic similarity to people--chimps and humans share the same blood types, and their DNA is more than 98 percent identical--the apes are attractive to scientists. The vaccine for hepatitis B, for instance, was developed in chimps, and they are still used to study hepatitis C, malaria, and other diseases. Moreover, Zola says the scientists who mapped the human genome are now planning to do the same for chimpanzees, an effort that may make the apes even more valuable to science.

"They may provide us with very important information," he says, "about what makes us human."

But the similarities have created a growing sentiment, even among scientists, that chimps, the only great apes still used in medical research in the U. S., should not be treated like other lab animals.

In 1997, a panel of scientists said reducing the surplus chimp population by killing them would be unethical. Citing the genetic similarities, they said the government had "a moral responsibility" for chimps' long-term care. The report prompted Congress to pass the law that led to the sanctuary.

"They are animals that have powerful emotions and powerful intellects, and it is really quite inhumane to keep them contained in little enclosures," says Representative James C. Greenwood, a Pennsylvania Republican who sponsored the bill.

With life spans of 50 years or more, some chimps may outlive their scientist keepers. Big and strong, they are expensive to maintain. Yerkes, with 174 chimps at three locations, budgets $500,000 a year for their care.

In addition to housing and veterinary care, the apes also need activities. Federal regulations demand "enrichment programs" for captive primates, whether or not they are used for experiments. At Yerkes and elsewhere, television is a favorite entertainment.

"There are some that like soap operas," says Linda Brent of the Foundation for Biomedical Research. "I knew one named Sammy. He liked to watch Barney. Sometimes, they like shows like Jerry Springer, because it looks like the people are fighting."

Relocating chimps for retirement will not be easy, she says. Chimps reared apart will have to be carefully introduced to one another, which could take months. At Yerkes, the nation's oldest primate center, about 100 chimpanzees, including nine infected with the AIDS virus, live in an Atlanta research compound. An additional 20 are in New Iberia, Louisiana, and 55 are in Lawrenceville, at a 117-acre field station where de Waal studies their social behavior.

The 40 or so apes in his studies are clearly the more fortunate ones. They live in two separate spacious outdoor yards, with playground equipment for swinging and climbing. On a fall morning, they lolled about in the sun, grooming and picking nits from one another's fur. De Waal, who studies how chimps fight and reconcile, has been teaching them to use a joystick to identify pictures on a computer screen.

Jessie and Dover, however, are not part of the behavioral research, and despite their unemployment, they are not likely to be among the first Yerkes chimps to relocate; Zola, the Yerkes director, says the New Iberia chimps will probably move first. While Zola says he would love to build similar large outdoor enclosures for Jessie, Dover, and other unemployed apes, the hard reality is that he has neither the space nor the money to do it.

But as to their current living situation, he admits, "It isn't optimal."