N.M. Primate Lab Is a Family Affair : Research: Groups of Papa, Mama and baby chimps live together, 540 in all, plus 800 monkeys.
Jeb bangs indignantly on the steel door of the cage, where he’s been banished for hogging bananas. The 25-year-old chimpanzee is the graying patriarch of an experimental family unit at Holloman Air Force Base’s primate lab, operated by the Coulston Foundation, which uses chimps in AIDS research.
In the chimp pecking order, Jeb feels entitled to as many bananas as he can get--notwithstanding hopeful looks from the rest of his clan, including Penny, 37; the wild-caught Olida, 21; Liza, 14; Gabriella and Marissa, both 8, and the 4-month-old Ace. Ace and Marissa are Olida’s offspring.
The tiny Ace is almost invisible, clinging to his mother’s belly as she swings from bar to bar.
Scientists here hope, through these family experiments, to find better ways to care for large numbers of chimps, to diversify the gene pool and to breed new subjects for medical testing. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires animal tests before any new medicine can be used on humans.
Researchers emphasize that the chimps are not harmed. Chimps cannot get AIDS, but are good hosts in which to observe the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, which causes AIDS.
Frederick Coulston and Travis Griffin, president of the Coulston Foundation, say they’re testing two AIDS vaccines, and continue working on other AIDS and hepatitis research.
Coulston, an 81-year-old retired professor of pathology, pharmacology and toxicology, has more than 50 years’ experience conducting research with primates. His foundation employs 155 people and has an annual budget of $10 million.
“We do have a couple of ongoing studies that look promising in the way of vaccine development,” says Griffin. One is for a private company, the other for the National Institutes of Health.
“I would say within six to eight months, we’ll probably have an answer” regarding the viability of HIV vaccination, Coulston says.
Rules of confidentiality preclude the release of details, although Griffin says both vaccines show promise, “at least in our chimpanzee model.”
NIH researcher Alan Schultz agrees: “We’re seeing some protection in chimpanzees. What Dr. Griffin said was, we’re seeing some impressive immune responses. We have seen better immune responses from other vaccines; however, we’re getting better protection from these experiments.”
But scientists aren’t ready to test AIDS vaccines on people.
“If you try to do that with HIV and it somehow reverts back to the wild type, then you have the fear that somebody is going to get AIDS from the vaccine,” Schultz says.
He says animal testing is “absolutely essential” in AIDS work.
“It’s the only way you’re going to find whether your predictions are right or wrong. . . . You cannot just use computers,” he says.
Pat Frost, principal investigator for the National Chimpanzee Breeding and Research Program, says the lab has been successful in breeding chimpanzees.
“In fact, we’re very proud to be able to say that we’ve put them in family configuration--and they’re clearly families,” Frost says.
The family program also seems to help new chimp mothers learn to care for their young--something that did not always happen when chimps, brought to Holloman for the U.S. space program, were kept surrounded by a moat.
“What they found was, number one, they couldn’t define the father because they had a certain incidence of inbreeding, a certain incidence of loss of infants because the parents just didn’t know how to take care of them. The moat didn’t keep them in,” Frost says. “They found some way to jump over the moat in order to run around the desert.”
On a recent tour of Holloman’s lab, in a nursery near the indoor-outdoor family cages, three diaper-clad baby chimps were playing with toys before their afternoon bottle feeding. Outside, older juveniles played in inner-tube swings in a huge cage that resembles play areas at fast-food restaurants.
Coulston’s facilities on and off the base care for 540 chimpanzees, all in family configurations, and 800 rhesus and cynomolgus monkeys. In addition, Coulston recently assumed management of 225 to 250 chimps at New York University Medical School.
NYU awarded Coulston custody of the chimps despite protests from animal rights advocates and British chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall, who wants to ensure that research chimps are retired to humane sanctuaries. She is considering building such a facility in the United States.
Coulston’s family experiment began with pairs in the 1970s. The larger family configurations were achieved last year after a new Holloman chimp facility opened in 1993.
Not all chimps took to the initial families they were assigned to. Some began making menacing gestures, called “displays.” No chimps were injured, and the staff simply moved various chimps around until all were in groups where they could get along, says Frost.
In recent months, Coulston has been negotiating with the U.S. Department of Agriculture over alleged violations of the Animal Welfare Act that resulted in seven primate deaths in the past two years.
Coulston complains that he’s also distracted by ceaseless criticism from animal rights activists, including a California group called In Defense of Animals.
“We’re sick and tired of always being attacked by these antivivisectionists. I’m a scientist. I run a big facility. I’ve got to get back to work,” he says.
In Defense of Animals has said the USDA allegations against Coulston are “the tip of the iceberg.” He emphatically denies that.
“We don’t kill the chimps,” says Coulston. “It’s a tragedy to lose a chimp.”
Coulston, who assumed full control of the primate facility last October, says most of the USDA allegations predate his takeover. The facility was formerly operated by New Mexico State University.
But he acknowledges that last December, four rhesus monkeys died when a central water line was shut off at Holloman.
Coulston suspects sabotage. Lab spokesman Don McKinney says Coulston had just taken over, and the alleged saboteur’s motive is believed to be revenge to embarrass Coulston.
In October, 1993, three chimps died when a thermostat failed, allowing the temperature in a sheltered housing facility to reach 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Coulston says his predecessors knew thermostats were defective.
The lab also was accused of keeping primates in undersized cages. Coulston says the cages were two inches shorter than USDA requirements issued three years ago. The USDA accused Coulston of having 37 non-complying cages in June, 1994. By last month, however, all were in compliance and inspected, McKinney says.
