The elusive cure for AIDS is one of the most important humanitarian quests of the 21st century. Over 40 million people in the world live with AIDS; almost 3 million die from it each year. No sensible person denies the pandemic scope of this disease. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I found out that neither the scope nor the immediacy of this problem stops some activists from ranking it below, say, the well-being of 100 monkeys.
Since the 1960s, scientists at the Yerkes Research Center have raised a group of sooty mangabeys, which, according a recent Associated Press report, are "natural carriers of a form of the AIDS virus but do not get sick." The monkeys were raised in captivity for the research purpose of finding out whether their immunity can guide us closer to curing, or preventing, AIDS.
The title of the Associated Press article tells the rest of the story: "Researchers abandon monkey experiments." After submitting their research proposal, Yerkes was beset by, and eventually bowed to, animal rights activists, who claimed that monkey mistreatment creates an unacceptable precedent. (Where are the human rights activists when you need them?)
That's right. Not the ideological differences that usually split public opinion along the lines of science or abstinence, but the lack of a liberal consensus on key issues prohibits AIDS research.
Wait, you might say, solving AIDS matters, but so does saving monkeys! The sooty mangabeys are, after all, not only an endangered species, but also primates with rights. These sound like valid objections, but let's examine the facts. Over a million people in the United States live with AIDS. Since 2001, the incidence rate -- the number of people diagnosed with the virus -- has been rising, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Another number that shows a positive upward trend is the number of sooty mangabeys. In 1988, the monkeys were listed as endangered. In 2005, the World Conservation Union listed the primates under the category that "does not satisfy the criteria for any of the categories Critically Endangered, Endangered or Vulnerable." Aside from nurturing the primates in captivity, by the way, Yerkes has also provided $30,000 since 2005 to promote their preservation.
So the problem of AIDS is growing, while the danger of disrupting the population of sooty mangabeys is shrinking. By utilitarian standards, solving AIDS matters more than saving monkeys.
If the activists who spooked Yerkes into submission argued for the sanctity of all primate life, human and monkey, this story would be different. But they play to a different tune. Animal rights representative Tanya Sanerib told the AP that the decision to use these monkeys for the good of humankind would set a dangerous precedent of "harming endangered species in exchange for financial contributions to conservation programs." If now we kill monkeys to cure AIDS, she seemed to say, what's to stop us from killing other endangered species to cure other diseases?
To buy this argument, you have to assume that no regulatory body can possibly distinguish between a serious AIDS research institution using no-longer-endangered monkeys to search for the cure to a global epidemic, and renegade scientists destroying an ecosystem to cure baldness. I don't buy it, and neither should you. Sanerib's argument is a slippery slope from the pandemic to the pedantic.
Liberal activists need to draw the line between the righteous and the ridiculous causes. Letting chickens range free for only a three-cent increase in the price of eggs is great. This hurts few people and helps many chickens. Letting animal rights activists hijack the AIDS agenda, however, hurts many people, while helping very few captivity-bred monkeys. For all the good these animal rights activists have done for AIDS research, they might as well preach abstinence.
