Texas Baboon Colony Used for Medical Research : Science: San Antonio foundation supplied monkeys for human transplants. Activists protest that animals should not be used for ‘spare parts.’

Hundreds of screeching baboons scamper across a sandy plain, among tree stumps, logs and rocks. Some carry baby baboons on their backs or bellies.

It could be an everyday scene in Africa.

But this baboon colony, the scientific world’s largest, is in an industrial section of metropolitan San Antonio at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research.

All the monkeys are identified by number. Some have their entire genetic history tracked by computer. Some will be used in research here. Others will be shipped around the country in air-conditioned trucks for use in experiments or even animal-to-human transplants.

“You have to be very judicious, and you also certainly want to take care of them the absolute best you can,” said Tom Butler, chairman of laboratory animal medicine at the foundation.

Long known to researchers for its large baboon colony, which has about 2,700 baboons, the Southwest Foundation made news recently as the source of animals for two baboon-to-human liver transplants at the University of Pittsburgh.

In the first operation, the human recipient lived 10 weeks before dying of a brain hemorrhage that doctors say was caused by an infection. The second patient died after 26 days from a massive abdominal infection; the 62-year-old man had been suffering from hepatitis B, which made him unsuitable for a human liver. Baboon livers are not susceptible to the hepatitis infection, researchers say.

The Southwest Foundation also provided the baboon for “Baby Fae,” who received a baby baboon’s heart in a transplant at Loma Linda Medical Center in 1984. She died after 20 days.

Though licensed as an animal dealer, the Southwest Foundation sells only animals its researchers don’t need, Butler said. The foundation used to trap and buy baboons from Kenya but stopped the practice several years ago.

The foundation has sold baboons, which are not an endangered species, to about 20 institutions nationwide. Normally about 200 are sold per year, but from late 1991 through 1992, 350 to 400 were shipped out after a research project ended.

The baboons cost a little more than $3 per day to care for and are sold for about $1,600, plus the cost of any tests.

Animal rights activists oppose the foundation’s use of baboons, particularly for the Pittsburgh transplants.

“We’re opposed to it, naturally, on ethical grounds that animals shouldn’t be used and regarded as spare parts,” said John Hollrah, executive director of San Antonio-based Voice for Animals.

Hollrah said baboons experience pain, and using them in invasive experiments and transplants is a “despicable practice” demonstrating human arrogance.

Butler counters that humans are on a higher level and that many diseases--both human and animal--couldn’t be cured or treated without animal research.

“We certainly should use any alternative or adjunct methods such as computers, cell cultures . . . computer modeling, that sort of thing, as much as we can,” he said.

Butler said that there have been major strides in animal research over the last 25 years and that torture or unethical use of animals does not occur.

The Southwest Foundation has olive, red, yellow, chacma and hamadryas baboons, plus a smaller number of chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys.

With cages, open pens and laboratory buildings, the colony resembles a cross between a zoo and a college. It is located on the foundation’s 75-acre campus in an uncrowded industrial section of west San Antonio.

Most baboons live in large cages. About 450 baboons live in a breeding colony on a six-acre corral near the main campus.

An animal hospital is used for lab testing and medical treatment.

One staff member is in charge of “environmental enhancement” for all the foundation’s animals. Among her jobs is equipping cages with swings and other equipment and selecting a variety of foods. Baboons get special chow plus vegetables, nuts and popcorn.

Because animal technicians and veterinarians appear to have genuine affinity for the baboons, a natural question is whether caretakers ever grow too close to the animals.

“I’ve been working with them 30 years and I just love them,” Butler said as baboons shrieked and smacked their lips nearby. “I don’t know anybody that doesn’t like them. We try not to make a pet out of them, not so much for our benefit, but for the animals’ benefit. The animal is a baboon. He needs to stay a baboon.”

Foundation scientists use the animals for research in cardiovascular disease, genetics, and virology and immunology, the fastest growing field at the center because of AIDS and hepatitis studies.

“We’re kind of at the whim of the NIH--National Institutes of Health--and to others as to what’s the ‘in’ thing,” Butler said. “We try to be in a position to have some flexibility.”

The foundation is a private, nonprofit institution with an annual budget of $20 million; it receives federal and state money for specific projects.

The biomedical foundation is the brainchild of Tom Slick, an inventor, oilman, rancher, engineer and philanthropist. Slick founded it in 1941 as the Foundation of Applied Research and later formed the Southwest Research Institute and the Mind Science Foundation, both in San Antonio.

His scientific interests led him to conduct a rain-making experiment along the Mexico border, to study the mystery of Loch Ness and to search for the Abominable Snowman in the Himalayas and Bigfoot in the American Northwest. Slick was killed in a plane crash in 1962.

These days his Southwest Foundation is a cornerstone for what San Antonio business and political leaders promote as a growing biomedical industry.

The foundation plans to move to larger space in the next decade, according to foundation President Frank Ledford. But the baboon colony probably will remain the same size, Butler said.

“This seems to be a comfortable level for us,” he said as hundreds of baboons scurried around behind him.