John Prescott's decision to grant planning permission for Cambridge University's controversial primate laboratory is based entirely on economic - not scientific or public health - considerations.
READ AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW
The planning inspector who conducted the public inquiry concluded that no national need for brain research on primates had been demonstrated at the inquiry.
In fact, he described the university's evidence in support of such research as "peripheral skirmishing".
He even went so far as to say that "the fears of some objectors that the outcome is a foregone conclusion is granted credibility".
There is abundant evidence of harm to humans as a result of experiments on primates. See some of the evidence to the inquiry at www.curedisease.com/Cambridge/contents.html
Such evidence includes:
The most dramatic differences between humans and other primates are in the brain.
Our brain is four times larger than that of a chimpanzee, which is four times larger than that of a macaque.
Biochemical pathways in the human brain are unique. Gene expression in our brain is dramatically different from that of the chimpanzee.
Future advances in our understanding and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases will come from where they always have - human-based observation and ethical clinical research.
'Science, not politics'
Everything we know about these diseases has been learned from autopsies of patients, population research and studies using human tissues cultured from biopsies or autopsies.
It is in human tissue that we will find the answers to these diseases.
UK ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS
When medical science was in its infancy, researchers learned things from monkeys and other animals that extrapolated to humans: the heart pumps blood; white blood cells are involved in immunity and so forth.
But as medical science advanced it became obvious that, with regard to the questions being asked, the differences between species outweighed the similarities.
Today, medicine is focused on variation between individual people at the level of "snips" (single nucleotide polymorphisms). This is where the clues to diseases and their treatments will be found - not in artificially induced versions of the disease in an entirely separate species.
The funding for the primate centre would be better spent on more scientifically modern and reliable research methods involving DNA microarrays; bioinformatics; microdosing with subsequent Pet analysis; human stem cells; large clinical studies and so on.
Science, not politics, should determine what research gets funded in the UK.
Now read an alternative viewpoint: "Why we still need monkey tests"
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