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| A gun-toting chimp: fiction today, tomorrow a reality? |
CINEMA thinks the Planet of
the Apes trilogy may bring to focus the implications of real life scientific
research utilizing primates, as its plot revolves around the scientists’ search
for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease that created instead an ape with human-like
intelligence.
It’s a fact that primates are being
experimented upon by humans for medical purposes. According to US-based PETA—People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals—“over 105,000 primates every year are imprisoned
in US laboratories… abused and killed in invasive, painful, and terrifying
experiments…” (See https://www.peta.org/) Primates are prime targets for experimenters
because they share important biological and psychological characteristics with
humans, such as sensitivity and intelligence.
In July 2011, as Rise of the Planet of the Apes hit the theaters—showing, among
other images, a chimpanzee that fired an AK47 towards humans—the Academy of
Medical Sciences of Britain (AMSB) said the dangers of disturbing animal-human
experiments are real. In a hard-hitting
report the academics warned that research is close to pushing ethical
boundaries and urged the government to create tough new rules to prevent such a
scenario (of gun-toting primates) from becoming a reality. Professor Martin Bobrow,
a medical geneticist at Cambridge University and lead author of the report,
said society needed to set rules before scientists began experiments that the
public would find unacceptable. Three
particularly “sensitive” areas in animal research, the report stated, are
cognitive, that of reproduction, and creation of visual characteristics that
would make them see themselves as human.
Relating to reproduction, the report recommended that animal embryos
produced from human sperm or eggs do not develop beyond a period of 14 days.
Furthermore, the AMSB report called for
a ban on extreme attempts to give laboratory animals human attributes—such as
injecting human stem cells into the brains of primates—and called for a closer
monitoring of the experiments by a new body of experts. “If a monkey that
received human genetic material begins to acquire capabilities similar to a
chimpanzee, it’s time to stop the experiments,” said Bobrow. A co-author of the report, Professor Thomas Baldwin, said: “The
fear is that if you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into
the brains of primates suddenly you might transform the primate into something
that has some of the capacities that we regard as distinctively human—speech,
or other ways of being able to manipulate or relate to us. These possibilities
that are at the moment largely explored in fiction, we need to start
thinking about now.”
