Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, H.R. 3514 is the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection Act. It has 139 bipartisan supporters. Mr. Speaker, I am a member of the Committee on Commerce, and the Committee on Commerce has jurisdiction over the National Institutes of Health. The NIH is the world's premier biomedical research facility in the world. Because the chimpanzee is the closest genetic relative to humans, it has long been used as a model for physiological, biomedical, and behavioral research. We all remember in the early days of the space program the chimpanzee, Ham, pioneering space travel before we dared to allow humans to do that. We would not have a space program if it had not been for the contributions of the chimpanzees in the program. When the AIDS epidemic became apparent to researchers, since we had stopped the practice of importing chimpanzees, the NIH went on a crash program to breed chimpanzees, on the assumption that the chimpanzee, being so closely related to humans genetically, would be the perfect model to study AIDS and HIV and could be used as a means to do research to find cures. It turns out that the chimpanzee was not a good model for HIV and AIDS. It did not contract the disease so readily. And as a result, we now have on our hands 1,700 surplus chimpanzees, 1,700 chimpanzees living in six research centers throughout the country.”