Why Stop at Using Baboons to Cure Human Illnesses?

There’s a slogan that says humans aren’t the only species on Earth; we just act like it. In the midst of reports of a bone marrow transplant from a baboon to a human AIDS patient, it’s something to think about.

The idea behind the transplant procedure is that the HIV resistant cells of the baboon might overtake and destroy the HIV cells of the human. As dubious as this seems, exchanging a baboon’s life for someone suffering the horror of AIDS has the appearance of a bargain.

Except that baboons aren’t lifeless objects. Rather, like us, they experience life, think and communicate, have family and friends, feel joy, contentment, fear and pain, seek comfort, trust. That is, they share with us the attributes that make experimentation on humans objectionable.

So let’s either stop exploiting baboons or else stop limiting ourselves to baboons. Perhaps there is an isolated group of humans who are also HIV resistant, but due to a lack of comprehension, are unwilling to donate their tissues.

We could kidnap these people out of their homes, isolate them in cages, manipulate their food intake, sleep and sexuality, force them to breed, utilize them for a variety of experiments, extract tissues from their bodies to inject into AIDS patients, kill them.

Of course, if we were to treat humans this way we would be labeled psycho-sociopaths and compared to Nazis. But isn’t our behavior toward animals similarly detestable? Aren’t we now merely substituting “species” for “race” as our justification?

The vivisection industry claims a need to experiment on animals, saying we would not have cures and vaccines for other diseases without it. They could just as easily (and more accurately) claim a need to experiment on humans.

A growing number of doctors and scientists are now saying that drugs and procedures are developed despite animal experimentation, and that they would be developed sooner and cheaper if we spent our resources more wisely. Animal experimentation is fundamentally flawed, they say, not only because of the ethical violation that occurs, but also due to the difference in physiology between species, which makes applying test results from one species to another imprecise at best.

Thalidomide is the most hideous of the countless examples: 50,000 deformed babies were born to women who took this tranquilizer when pregnant, their doctors having prescribed it based on the safety displayed in animal studies.

For more than a decade, billions of dollars have been spent on AIDS research, including untold amounts in trying to give HIV to other species. During this period, the animal experimentation industry in the U.S. has expanded proportionately.

What we have to show for all of the human and financial resources devoted to this research is, to put it as straightforward as possible, nothing. The epidemic rages, as potent as ever.

Perhaps baboons are now being readied for transplants as a way for researchers to hide the shame of a decade of tormenting these sensitive and intelligent animals. And perhaps if we had devoted our resources to scientifically valid and ethical research, we might have eradicated AIDS by now.

We need to ask ourselves, what is the value of the life of someone who didn’t have the grace to have been born human? Has it any worth other than that of a medical test subject, a slave, an inmate in a spare parts factory?

We must question the effect of our exploitative practices on our own society. Can we ever expect a world where we will treat one another with justice and compassion so long as we are willing to deny this to others?

We desperately need a cure for AIDS. Just as much, we need one for our willingness to harm others.