Monkeying Around At The New England Primate Center

SOUTHBORO--Dr. Ronald D. Hunt, director of Harvard's New England Primate Center, smiles as his visitors confess to missing a turn on the tortuous back roads of Southboro--a New England town just over a half-hour's drive from Boston. Secluded in Harvard's 140 acres of forest, behind a sign advertising the Harvard Southboro Campus, the primate center is easy to pass. While drop-in visitors are not welcome, the Center is at times willing to give tours of the facilities.

Public relations are important to Hunt these days. Although Harvard's New England Primate center is physically isolated from the Cambridge controversy over laboratory animal care, Hunt says that he is aware of the movements to regulate animal research further.

Inside the center, a large glass-fronted cage in the main building's vestibule displays 10 young crab-eating macaques Macaca Fascicularis--the most common species at the center--playing triple leapfrog and swinging on a network of pipes.

Amidst the academic clutter of the labs, humans' decorations are interspersed with bags of monkey chow, manuscripts of journal articles, and cases of rubber gloves. One receptionist's cubicle seems to be a normal office, except for the battling stenches of disinfectant and monkey dung. And down the hall, a researcher's door bears the sober proverb, "Mortui Vivos Docent."

The laboratory provides subjects and facilities for Harvard studies of human disorders such as AIDS, heart disease, and drug addiction. It also hosts 116 researchers from about 40 institutions all over the world, and gives them technical help with primate experiments. Outside researchers' work is funded by grants for their specific projects, while the upkeep of the center itself is paid for by a separate multimillion-dollar "core funding" grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Hunt says that the center strives to provide the best care possible for its captive subjects.

"By having a center with veterinarians who are devoted to the full-time study and care of primates and an animal care staff devoted to the care of primates, we provide a more sophisticated program...than is possible at other institutions," he says, adding that the center's advantages include better care for animals than would be available at smaller labs.

Researchers study monkeys not only to compare them to humans, but also to learn how to keep captive primates healthy--particularly endangered animals which are losing their habitat, Hunt says.

Part of that includes raising most of the primates in groups, rather than in separate cages, to "socialize" them. If the monkeys do not meet other members of their species, Hunt says, "They haven't learned that they're monkeys--if you put the male and the female together, they don't know what to do."

The mortality rates of the center reflect the importance the center places on caring for the animal. According to Dr. Prabhat Sehgal, director of veterinary care at the hospital, there was "no mortality rate" among the macaques, although some marmosets had died at the lab. Says Hunt of the center's researchers, "An investigator wants his animal to be healthy and he wants his animal to live."

Hunt is quick to defend the animal research as humane as well, carefully controlled, and sparingly used at the center. He says many researchers now use tissue cultures, DNA studies, and other "alternative" methods rather than live monkeys in studies to study the effects of disease. In the 1960s, he says, it was far more common to infect a group of animals with a deadly disease to see how it progressed. "90 percent of our research really does use alternative methods," Hunt says.

But the center is still very concerned about its image and would not allow a photographer to take pictures of animals in wire cages. "If you publish it, it looks like somebody is behind bars," Sehgal says. "Pictures are funny--they let people see whatever they want," says Hunt.

And sometimes people see what Hunt doesn't want them to. Researcher John McArdle of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society (NEAVS), recalls that when he visited the center several years ago, the monkeys were kept alone in rows of single cages. He said that while the practice of housing the monkeys in groups is a definite improvement over the old single cages, it is not enough.

As the groups of monkeys placed together do not resemble family groupings that would be found in the wild, the animals suffer from psychological deprivation, says McArdle, suggesting that the monkeys should be given toys or other "behavioral aids" in their cages to compensate for their lack of kin. A few branches were seen in the larger cages. yesterday, but most cages contained only the monkeys and their food.

NEAVS opposes hurting research animals "for any purpose from which that individual animal will not benefit."

Hunt says that he is not afraid of having the center reviewed, but adds that researchers want to be judged by "an established review committee" rather than laymen. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of the Interior, and the state of Massachusetts all review the New England Primate Center at different times, under different codes. One such review, an announced visit by 19 scientists representing NIH, was conducted September 30.

While he says regulation is necessary to prevent animal abuse, Hunt criticizes efforts to impose further research restrictions at many levels of government. "It becomes difficult because we have so many different agencies involved," he says.

Although Hunt says relations among this state's researchers, activists and government seem cordial enough to preclude "radical activities," he adds that break-ins by animal rights groups at other animal research facilities concern him. While the secluded Southboro center has not been attacked, Hunt says, "I don't think in any institution you're in a position to have complete security."

The Center's Research

Of all the projects that the center has worked on, it gained the most notoriety for its efforts to stop a viral epidemic among the lab monkeys in 1979. The disease attacked the monkeys' immune systems and weakened them--a pattern that had yet to become ominously familiar. Researchers studying the disorder found that it was similar to the human disease now known as AIDS.

The monkey disease, now known as Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), turned out to be "the very best animal model system to study AIDS," Hunt says.

Cooperative research--much of it done at Harvard--has shown that AIDS may have mutated from another virus that normally affects wild North African green monkeys but does not harm humans.

Hunt says that although the center was not prepared to do research on immune systems at the time of this discovery, it began to use cultures from the diseased monkeys in research at the center. He says AIDS research now makes up about a quarter of the center's work.

Associate Professor of Microbiology Ronald C. DesRosiers, who directs the center's AIDS research project, says several primate centers are now trying to find other viruses in wild monkeys that are genetically similar to AIDS. Certain strains of the human and simian viruses, he said, share as much as three-quarters of the same genetic material.

DesRosiers says it is especially difficult to study possible vaccines because AIDS affects only chimpanzees and humans. Humans would risk their lives if they volunteered to test such preparations, he says. As for chimpanzees, DesRosiers says they are too rare and expensive to be used in repeated experiments.

The center's work is in no way restricted to AIDS research, however. Hunt cites another project with implications for the care of delicate animals in captivity--an effort to determine why captive cotton-top tamarinds--an endangered species--often suffer from ulcerative colitis, a disease that can lead to cancer of the colon. The center has received an NIH grant to study this tendency in about 80 of the monkeys. He says it is not known whether this condition exists in the wild.

In the course of the experiment, Hunt says, the animals will not be operated on. They will receive varying levels of fat in their diets, and will be examined and treated by veterinarians. Some young cotton-tops, he says, will be raised away from their parents, to see whether they develop the disease.

McArdle criticizes this use of the tamarinds. He says zookeepers have told NEAVS that the endangered monkeys develop colitis only because of stressful environments in the lab. He said the researchers had probably isolated some of the young monkeys from their parents to "induce stress" above even normal lab levels.