Last chimps leave Alamogordo lab; 47-acre facility with haunting past now for sale
The long, dark and aging buildings are lined with small steel cages that look rather like dog kennels. But the animals who lived in them were large chimpanzees, higher primates that are the closest relative to the human race.
For almost a decade, the massive biomedical research lab here was a chain link and concrete home for hundreds of chimpanzees used in medical research, the descendants of NASA's "astrochimps" that paved the way for the space flights of John Glenn and Alan Shepard.
No chimps were experimented on at the Alamogordo facility, but federal officials would come to discover that the chimps had been horribly abused and mistreated. They were isolated from one another, housed in dangerously hot or cold buildings, and worse. They were sent around the country to other labs where they were reportedly used in H.I.V. testing and in the development of the still elusive hepatitis C vaccine - a disease that is responsible for more deaths than H.I.V.
Now the facility is closed, and last Monday, a non-profit called Save the Chimps took the last 10 apes to Florida to retire. Save the Chimps purchased the facility from the infamous Coulston Foundation in 2002 for $3.4 million. Now it wants to sell the 47-acre property for $500,000, according to Save the Chimps executive director Philip Flynn.
Legislators seek to curb chimp research
DEC. 27, 2011 -- Congressman Silvestre Reyes is co-sponsoring a House bill called The Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act of 2011. The law would bar the housing of apes for invasive research, using federal funds for such research, breeding apes for such research, acquiring apes in interstate or foreign commerce for such research, and transferring federal ownership of an ape to a nonfederal entity, unless the entity is a suitable sanctuary. Other co-sponsors of the bill are Texas representatives Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston and Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Dallas, are co-sponsors of the House bill. The national debate over the necessity of using chimps in medical research is coupled with a recent Institutes of Medicine report that concluded most chimp research is unnecessary. To boot, the National Institutes of Health has barred, at least temporarily, new funding for new chimp research.
Alamogordo chimpanzees will stay for now [originally posted Jan. 03, 2011]
The Albuquerque Journal on Dec. 31 reported that almost 200 chimps housed at a federal facility in Alamogordo, NM will not be transferred to a primate facility in San Antonio, Texas, at least for the time being. An official with the National Institutes of Health informed Gov. Bill Richardson that the chimps will not be transferred until the National Academy of Sciences completes a review of policies related to the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research. Gov. Richardson has been trying to block the move, citing the economic impact on Alamogordo.
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