Yesterday, PETA Associate Director of Laboratory Investigations Justin Goodman spoke at a National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine meeting on the issue of whether the U.S. should continue to be the only industrialized nation in the world that conducts harmful experiments on chimpanzees and other great apes. Justin told the committee, “In 2011, it lacks academic integrity to deny that chimpanzees possess all of the qualities necessary for us to afford them the right not to be treated as laboratory equipment.”

 Africa Expeditionary Force | cc by 2.0

He was joined by a host of scientists, doctors, and great ape experts, including world-renowned chimpanzee expert Dr. Jane Goodall, who resoundingly agreed that experiments on apes are not necessary in order to develop effective treatments for hepatitis C, HIV/AIDS, cancer,  and other illnesses that have often been cited as justification for experiments on chimpanzees.

Also supporting a ban on great-ape experiments is Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett, R-Md., who has introduced the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act in Congress. Bartlett is a former Navy physiologist who once experimented on primates. In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, he describes seeing chimpanzees suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and says that without question, they "experience pain, stress, and social isolation in ways strikingly similar to the way humans do."

You can help by urging your Congressional representatives to support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

In the '80s, when PETA began pushing cosmetics companies to stop testing their products on animals, those companies insisted that there were no alternatives to dripping mascara into rabbits' eyes and pumping copious quantities of lip gloss into the stomachs of guinea pigs. Miraculously, when consumers began sending cruelly tested products back to the companies and demanding their money back, the giants of the cosmetics industry—like Revlon—found alternatives. Ah, what a difference a little incentive makes!

For years, PETA has been saying that non-animal alternatives are faster, cheaper, and more effective than animal tests, and just last summer, a report published by the not-so-shabby National Academy of Sciences said much the same thing. But as long as the federal government continues to pour money into cruel and pointless animal tests—and as long as vivisectors can map out a tenured career for themselves feeding at the government trough—animal experiments will continue. And even as we work to hold up a mirror to the evil that is vivisection, we need more incentives for non-animal research.

World-famous primate expert Dr. Jane Goodall hit the nail on the head last week when she appealed to the European Union to end the use of animals in experimentation, suggesting that a Nobel Prize be conferred for scientific breakthroughs that use "new ways of testing and experimenting that will not involve the use of live, sentient beings." She added, "We need to recognize at the outset that what we do to animals from their perspective certainly, and probably from ours, is morally wrong and unacceptable."

It's not the first time that Dr. Goodall has ignited a firestorm of controversy, throwing monkey wrenches into conventionally held prejudices and preconceptions. In 1960, Dr. Goodall shook the world by documenting tool use in chimpanzees, an ability that was believed to be uniquely human. Her mentor famously commented, "Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans."

Forty-eight years later, Dr. Goodall continues to turn conventional thinking on its head, and our guess is that she's right once again!

—GracePosted by Grace Friedan