Get to Know Your Local Laboratories - Murphey-Corb and the Primate Research Center for Infectious Disease

Macaque used in AIDS research. Photo credit: Dan Lamont/Corbis

"What good does it do you to test something [a vaccine] on a monkey? You find five or six years from now that it works in the monkey, and then you test it in humans and you realize that humans behave totally differently from monkeys, so you've wasted five years."
-Dr. Mark Feinberg, Leading AIDS researcher [1]

"What has animal-modeled research of AIDS yielded? Wealthy primate researchers and dead ends... There is still no vaccine and there is still no cure. Arguably, this is due partially to nonhuman research. Grant-hungry animal experimenters have depleted AIDS research funds with highly dubious animal studies. The fact is that non-humans do not get AIDS..."
-Drs. C Ray Greek MD & Jean Swingle Greek DVM, Sacred Cows and Golden Geese [2]

This entry is preceded by these two quotations in order to create the most realistic picture of the group of studies we are going to discuss in this entry. Some people are immediately angered when the topic of AIDS research on nonhuman animals is brought up because they believe millions of animal lives are worth the cost of a cure. Those who support animal research exclaim "Would you support an experiment that would sacrifice 10 animals to save 10,000 people?" This is a false relationship.

The ethical reasons alone are enough to end animal experimentation, but it is equally important to acknowledge the amount of humans that still suffer because of AIDS research on nonhuman animals. Nonhuman animals can not get AIDS and as a result, they are given other viruses. While these studies go on, humans are dying everyday. This results in research, whose only benefit is lining the pockets of those conducting the experiments. The following researcher, the director of the Primate Center for Infectious Disease, has been profiting from this research for decades. Here we will attempt to briefly explain some of the horrific procedures done on nonhuman animals in her most recent publications.

Websites:
Faculty Page
Grant Support and Other Info

Firstly, Murphey-Corb's lab research has involved hundreds of animals. One of her articles used over 70 primates [3], all who suffered slowly with Simian Immunodeficiency Virus [SIV] (a virus similar to human AIDS in monkeys). In her research, monkeys are also given other diseases, like malaria or viral vectors like herpes, on top of their SIV in order to study the interactions between these viruses [3,4]. While learning a lot about how these viruses affect nonhuman primates in a caged and controlled settings, she learns almost nothing of how AIDS affects humans in real world settings.

Many monkeys used are listed as coming from "Indian origin". What this means is that these animals were either kidnapped from the wild or possibly bred in conditions that would be illegal in the United States. These practices are indefensible.

One of the most disturbing things about this research is that these animals are almost always "moribund" when they are finally euthanized. Moribund means that the animal is near death. The amount of suffering from the time the experiment begins until the time of moribundity is great and the animals are ultimately in the advanced stages of disease when they are finally killed. Even more disturbing is that there are still arguments and debates about when it is still "humane" to euthanize a moribund animal and what should be defined as moribund [5]. Even if these animals were given some sort of proper treatment for the diseases forced upon them, they can not tell the researchers they are in pain or that they feel sick. They can not ask for help or ask to be set free. They simply suffer to death, or are killed right before death.

This research also uses animals engineered to have a lower immune response in order to allow the diseases to progress further and faster than they normally would [6]. Researchers are taking nonhuman primates who differ greatly from human beings in the diseases they get and their reactions to treatments, they are engineering them to be more susceptible to the already different disease, then they given them diseases that are not HIV and AIDS, in order to predict HIV/AIDS responses and cures in humans. With most money being spent on harming nonhuman animals, there is little funding left for research using models whose findings directly apply to humans. To reiterate, this results in the ongoing suffering and death of those afflicted with AIDS. To read more about the issues with AIDS research on animals, you can click here or consult the sources below.

Michael Murphy-Corb can be contacted at mcorb@pitt.edu.
Office: E1252 Biomedical Science Tower, 3500 Terrace St, Pittsburgh, PA 15261
Lab: E1203 Biomedical Science Tower, 3500 Terrace St, Pittsburgh, PA 15261
Phone: 412.648.9462
Fax:412.648.1448


Have information on an animal laboratory that you would like to share? Email us about it. We will protect your privacy.


References
[1] McKenna, M.A.J. “Science Watch ‘Manhattan Project’ for AIDS Q&A With Dr. Mark Feinberg ‘We Need the Human Trials as Well,’” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 21 Sep. 1997.
[2] Greek, CR & Greek, JS. (2000). AIDS and Humbled Science. Sacred cows and golden geese: the human cost of experiments on animals. Continuum International Publishing Group. 183.
[3] Nti, BK, Slingluff, JL, Keller, CC; Hittner, JB, Ong'echa, JM, Murphey-Corb, M, Perkins, DJ. (2005). Stage-specific effects of Plasmodium falciparum-derived hemozoin on blood mononuclear cell TNF-α regulation and viral replication. AIDS. 19(16)4. 1771-1780.
[4] Wolfe, D, Niranjan, A, Trichel, A, Wiley, C, Ozuer, A, Kanal, E, Kondziolka, D, Krisky, D, Goss, J, DeLuca, N, Murphey-Corb, M, & Glorioso, JC. (2004). Safety and biodistribution studies of an HSV multigene vector following intracranial delivery to non-human primates. Gene Therapy. 11. 1675–1684.
[5] Toth, LA. (2000). Defining the Moribund Condition as an Experimental Endpoint for Animal Research. ILAR Journal. 41(2).
[6] Venneti, S et al. (2004). PET imaging of brain macrophages using the peripheral benzodiazepine receptor in a macaque model of neuroAIDS. The Journal of Clinical Investigation. 113(7). 981-989.

Send To Phone