The Monkey Wars

by Deborah Blum

The controversy over the use of primates in research admits of no easy answers. We have all benefited from the medical discoveries of primate research--vaccines for polio, rubella, and hepatitis B are just a few. But we have also learned more in recent years about how intelligent apes and monkeys really they can speak to us with sign language, they can even play video games (and are as obsessed with the games as any human teenager). And activists have also uncovered widespread and unnecessarily callous treatment of animals by researchers (in 1982, a Silver Spring lab was charged with 17 counts of animal cruelty). It is a complex issue, made more difficult by the combative stance of both researchers and animal activists.
In The Monkey Wars , Deborah Blum gives a human face to this often caustic debate--and an all-but-human face to the subjects of the struggle, the chimpanzees and monkeys themselves. Blum criss-crosses America to show us first hand the issues and personalities involved. She offers a wide-ranging, informative look at animal rights activists, now numbering some twelve million, from the moderate Animal Welfare Institute to the highly radical Animal Liberation Front (a group destructive enough to be placed on the FBI's terrorist list). And she interviews a wide variety of researchers, many forced to conduct their work protected by barbed wire and alarm systems, men and women for whom death threats and hate mail are common. She takes us to Roger Fouts's research center in Ellensburg, Washington, where we meet five chimpanzees trained in human sign language, and we visit LEMSIP, a research facility in New York State that has no barbed wire, no alarms--and no protesters chanting
outside--because its director, Jan Moor-Jankowski, listens to activists with respect and treats his animals humanely. And along the way, Blum offers us insights into the many side-issues the intense battle to win over school kids fought by both sides, and the danger of transplanting animal organs into humans.
"As it stands now," Blum concludes, "the research community and its activist critics are like two different nations, nations locked in a long, bitter, seemingly intractable political standoff....But if you listen hard, there really are people on both sides willing to accept and work within the complex middle. When they can be freely heard, then we will have progressed to another place, beyond this time of hostilities." In The Monkey Wars , Deborah Blum gives these people their voice.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, History, Psychology, Biology, Animals

334 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author.

As a science writer for the Sacramento Bee, Blum (rhymes with gum) wrote a series of articles examining the professional, ethical, and emotional conflicts between scientists who use animals in their research and animal rights activists who oppose that research. Titled "The Monkey Wars", the series won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting.

Reviews

[Peacegal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Animal experimentation has long been one of the most contentious and complicated animal rights and welfare issues. The Monkey Wars won’t tell you what to think, but it will help those on either side of the debate better understand the arguments of their opponents—and may bridge some gaps and create more nuanced opinions in the meantime.

The book begins with the story of a scientist, Roger Fouts, who works with chimpanzees in intelligence and sign language studies, but refuses to subject them to harm in any way. His work with the chimps has led him to become an animal advocate who has joined with antivivisection groups in calling for an end to painful experiments.

[Fout’s] affection for his animals has lead him to alienation from his profession. It’s as if there’s no room for him, a researcher who becomes too fond of the animals he studies.

Because of his views, rather than the quality of his work, Fouts has become a pariah.

Fouts recalls that the grant officer encouraged him to apply, instead, for a grant to conduct medical experiments on the animals. “I said, ‘I study animal behavior, I’m not going to take money to harm the animals.’ And that was the end of that.” … He applies every year to the NIH and National Science Foundation. Every year, they say no.

Fouts shows the author one of his ‘pink slips’ that he’s received from the grant agencies, which the author says “reinforces the idea that the system is not blind to animal research politics”: the grant reviewer noted that Fouts membership of various anti-vivisection groups as one of the reasons the scientist was turned down.

We later read of Michael Fox, a former animal researcher turned animal welfare activist, who is in similar straits.

As Fox as learned, a scientist who becomes an animal advocate enters a curious no-man’s-land. …Any professional scientist who makes the choice to work for animal welfare risks setting his career in reverse.

On the other side are those scientists who are too happy too allow this way of doing things to continue indefinitely. Compassion for animals has no place in the field, they believe. Animal advocacy should be shuffled to the side and not find a place at the table.
Researcher Peter Gerone is one such individual:

With some impatience, he finds himself supervising scientists who get friendly with their animals. He can tolerate it, but it irritates him.

He also worries:


How can [today’s children] identify with the idea that animals—the ones they play and feed and sleep with—should be available as tools, for research? … “We’re losing the fight in education. The animal rights people are better at it than we are. I worry about tomorrow’s minds. I worry that they won’t come to us.

[Pro-vivisection] arguments were so widely accepted that, in 1926, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health declared the [animal advocacy] movement dead and its supporters “pathetic.”

Brain researcher Stuart Zola-Morgan has concerns about spreading some of the evidence he gathers because it may reflect negatively on invasive research:

“I hesitate to talk about how smart monkeys are because it tends to feed the animal rights movement,” says Zola-Morgan. “But as a scientist you have to honor what you see. I wouldn’t say monkeys have simple brains. Not simple at all.”

You get to see the man as a conflicted, multi-faceted individual, but then he whisks aside any serious ethics discussions with this incredibly arrogant quote:

“[Animal advocates are] anti-knowledge and anti-progress,” Zola-Morgan says. “And when the rest of our society really understands that, I believe we’ll be able to turn this issue of animal rights back into the minor discussion that it ought to be.”

So that’s where it stood at the moment this book was written, and to a large degree today. Two sides, pro- and anti-animal research, stand diametrically opposed, refusing to budge an inch. What of the animals, caught in the middle? How did we get here in the first place? And are there some promising cracks in the wall that separates the two sides?

One of the flagship battles between animal research and animal welfare has been that over cage size.

Scientists tend to be stingy about cage size. NIH had revised its cage standards in the early 1980s, but only after a panel found that some monkeys were packed into enclosures so small that they couldn’t turn around. Even so, the panel was bitterly criticized by researchers who were forced to buy new cages.

When the USDA ordered bigger cages,

Two powerful scientific organizations, the National Association for Biomedical Research and the Association of American Medical Colleges, had announced their own plans to fight the ruling. Researchers, [Christine] Stevens [of the Animal Welfare Institute] says, despairingly, will do almost anything to avoid increasing cage size for laboratory animals.

A great many primates are endangered, including some of the species most desired for research. This has also been a major source of contention between animal and conservation activists and the research industry.

It was in the late 1980s that people began to realize chimpanzees were in desperate trouble in the wild. … The US Fish and Wildlife Service…announced that it wanted to declare them endangered. The agency received more than 40,000 letters of support and six of opposition. Five of those six were from biomedical researchers; two came directly from NIH. The researchers were afraid that the endangered listing would interfere with use of captive chimpanzees.

(In the end, the USFWS gave captive and wild chimps a split listing, as the scientists wished.)

We read of a US based monkey importer who pleads guilty to smuggling critically endangered orangutans. We learn of a researcher who, desperate for the species of monkey he required for his leprosy research, found himself involved with illegal animal smugglers.

[The researcher’s] plight stemmed from swelling environmental pressure and the disappearance of monkeys needed for research.

He eventually got his monkeys without help from the smuggler, but the way wild monkeys get to labs, illegally or legally, isn’t pleasant or humane:

[T]rappers often have to kill parent monkeys to get the young. They shoot the mothers out of trees and grab the babies after they fall. They pry the youngsters away. The monkeys are carried away in cages, packed into shipping boxes, air-freighted to industrial countries seeking them for research use. … The typical conservationist’s estimate is 5 to 10 monkeys dead for every wild survivor that arrives at a research laboratory.

While researchers like Charles Chambers insisted that endangered species have no rights that should fall before the needs of man, others took a more holistic view:

“It’s all interwoven,” says Shirley McGreal, of the International Primate Protection league. “You can’t separate out the research demands from the logging, the pest-shooting, the pet trade. It’s a cumulative effect. … It seems to me that we’ve reached a point that scientists should be asking the Kennedy question. Not what the monkeys can do for them. But what they can do for the monkeys, to stop them from disappearing.”

What about the animals themselves, what are their experiences? Evidence suggests that most are not the least bit pleased with even minimally invasive procedures. Monkeys constantly have to be sedated:

There is no primate research facility in the country that doesn’t use Ketamine on a daily basis.

Others come down with unexpected diseases they wouldn’t encounter in the wild:

SIV in macaques is a disease born of captivity. It was carried by African monkeys who were packed into research centers with Asian macaques. Most probably, researchers think, it was transferred by the casual handling of animals, such as reusing needles.

There is a great deal of material devoted the Harry Harlow, arguably one of the most famous and most controversial animal researchers of the twentieth century. Harlow’s experiments infamously involved abusing and neglecting infant monkeys in a host of ways, all centering around the concept of maternal deprivation:

To animal activists, it’s sadism…There’s just something cold-blooded about deliberately wrenching a baby from its mother. There’s something cold-hearted about sitting for hours, taking notes as it cries. …. To most people, thankfully, radiation sickness is an unpleasant term on paper. But seeking comfort that does not come, a lost and frightened child crying for his mother – all of that is known human territory. … [I]t sometimes took two lab workers to hold the struggling mother down while a third pulled the baby away.

Suomi’s 1971 Ph.D. dissertation, done under Harlow, reflects the ethic of the day: “Experimentation…with human patients is seriously hampered by lack of experimental control and sound ethical constraints. No such problem exists for the monkey researcher.”

One researcher has this take on Harlow:

“I don’t think Harlow really liked animals,” Mason says. “I don’t think he hated them either. He just didn’t have any feeling for them. He stumbled into animal research and he did it very well.”

However, Harlow’s own words to seem to reflect a genuine malevolence toward other beings:

Here’s Harlow declaring his position on animal research [in a 1974 newspaper interview]: “The only thing I care about is whether the monkeys will turn out a property I can publish. I don’t have any love for them. Never have. I don’t really like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How could you like monkeys?”

Another researcher admits of Harlow:

[T]he older he got, the more the demon was in control. He would write things about his experiments as if he did them with glee, as if he enjoyed the animal’s suffering that he couldn’t wait to take these monkeys and destroy them. That’s the sort of thing that got me out of Harlow’s later writings. They made my flesh creep.”

And while Harlow was building “pits of despair” that subjected baby primates to “the hell of loneliness” (his own words), he also wore his crude sexism on his sleeve:

In his later career, Harlow seemed to develop a gift for offending women. Rape rack was only one example. He routinely referred to female monkeys as “the bitches” in his lectures…

Harlow also publicly praised a zookeeper who subdued an orangutan with a wooden plank as someone who “understood the needs of women.”

(Read into all that what you will. I wonder what Carol J. Adams would say?)

Not all scientists are pleased with Harry Harlow and his gleeful-sadist persona. I would tend to agree with this researcher:

Gene Sackett even today believes that the modern animal rights movement was, in part, born in the hissing anger over Harlow’s laboratory. He blames Harlow for being too in love with flamboyant description to recognize that times were changing. That informing the public that you were cheerfully building “pits of despair” might be a major public relations mistake.

As for public relations, none of today’s researchers are going to be as graphic in their published work as Harlow was. Many, despite having a front-row seat to animal cognition and intelligence, are loath to admit it:

There are rumbles…that we don’t really want to know these things. Keep it simple, keep it easy. The more science reveals about the intelligence of other species, the more difficult the questions about using them.

As early as the 1930s, Journal of Experimental Medicine author Francis Rous was giving PR pointers to vivisectors:

Under his direction, scientists could not say animals were starving. Instead they were “fasting”. Experimental animals didn’t “bleed”; they “hemorrhaged.” They didn’t receive “poison”; they were given an intoxicant. Anything too graphic, by way of description, was taken out.

Martin Stephens of the HSUS states, frustrated:

“They can’t even recognize their own bad apples, yet they’re constantly insisting that they should regulate themselves. They believe that if they criticize their own, they’re giving aid and comfort to the enemy. And we’re the enemy.”

We also learn that

Organized and angry, scientists have forced changes in network television shows and popular encyclopedias.

We read of the debacle over a 1991 episode of “Quantum Leap,” starring a lab chimp, which some researchers feared would be too sympathetic to the animal. They demanded rewrites until the final episode ended up a wishy-washy endeavor with no clear point.

I was interested by some of the historical information about the animal rights movement:

PETA was not the first group of activists to gain information by masquerade. In the 1920s, a group of animal activists in New York infiltrated a laboratory. They brought out photos of dogs with their mouths taped shut, so that the animals could neither eat or drink. The researcher involved—like Taub in the 1980s—was formally charged with animal cruelty.

However, the majority of the text deals with the research industry’s efforts to counter and even silence the pro-animal side. The American Medical Association’s “white paper” on animal research can be seen as the blueprint of all animal use industry groups into the new millennium.

The AMA plan was among the first to suggest labeling animal activists as “anti-science and anti-progress.” It advocated the kind of emotional appeal that Pete Gerone likes to use: Your child or a drowning rat? It suggested that scientists meet with the media, to warn of the real threat of animal activities. It advocated heavy pro-science advertising. The plan also explored the possibility of legal challenges to the nonprofit status of animal rights groups, building a private data base on animal rights activities and intensive lobbying on animal research legislation.

(Every few years when you see a clarion call by some industry front group to take away the nonprofit status of PETA or even a more moderate animal welfare group, you can thank the AMA. )

Nowadays, the new threat to animal welfare reporting are so called “ag gag” bills, which are meant to prevent animal advocates from filming or documenting the animal abuse that occurs on factory farms. Ever wonder what planted that seed? The National Association for Biomedical Research, founded by the nation’s largest breeder of laboratory animals, is one of the heavyweights of the pro-animal research lobby. Their tactic in regards to animal advocacy is often an attempt to silence it.

In fact, if you consider the National Association for Biomedical Research to be representative, then you can only conclude that researchers did not support unfettered freedom of expression, at least not for everyone.

(However, some researchers are disgusted by NABR’s tactics and are quick to state that they support freedom of speech, even from those they disagree with. )

If you spend any time following animal rights issues, chances are, you’ve come across a quote from the president of PETA and wondered about it. This quote has been repeated innumerable times and continues to find a home in countless email forwards and message boards:

Like their opponents, scientists have learned that half-a-truth can be better than the whole one. The most famous example is a statement by Ingrid Newkirk of PETA. In 1986, she was discussing animal suffering with a Washington reporter. She put it like this: “When it comes to feelings like pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” It’s only the last 11 words of that sentence that ever get repeated by animal researchers: “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”

There’s also information about “Putting People First,” an extremist anti-animal organization that defined itself by unwavering support of all animal research as well as whaling and the fur trade, along with opposition to environmentalists. While PPF is now defunct, its spirit lives on with its new-millennium, computer-savvy offspring, the Center for Consumer Freedom.

The heart of The Monkey Wars, however, lies in the middle. It can be found with scientists like Jan Moor-Jankowski, then-director of the LEMSIP laboratory. Moor-Janowski has opened his doors to animal advocates to look around and suggest changes. He’s joined them in condemning certain sectors of his industry when he feels they’re out of line. He’s willing to take criticism and work for a better future for the welfare of his animals. At the time, LEMSIP had experienced no protests, thanks to the director’s transparency and willingness to recognize that AR folks are part of the community, not just an amorphous enemy to be vanquished.

Scientist Ron DeHaven also recognizes the importance of animal advocates:

“There’s no question that the Animal Welfare act exists because of animal activist groups, and there’s no question they serve a useful function,” he says. “We rely heavily on the public and animal protection groups to notify us of problems in facilities.”

The author sums up:

The animal advocacy movement has changed the way all of us—in science and out—think about the use of animals. That’s not to say that most Americans don’t support animal research. The most objective polls suggest that they do. People do not, however, support it without qualification, without question.
…
It is too simplistic for reaches to sell science, as they sometimes do, as a one-dimensional tradeoff; the life of an ugly rat or mouse or monkey for that of a beautiful child. It is too simplistic for animal rights people to define the research community as a bunch of would-be butchers on the loose, sharpening their meat cleavers in the backyard.

[Mark Steadman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rhesus Monkeys share over 98% of their DNA with humans. As a result hundreds of the primates have been imported from India to take part in experiments, from being flown into space to being given Malaria. Deborah Blum walks us through the battle between scientists and activists and asks ‘How much is this knowledge worth?’. Monkeys develop far more quickly as infants than humans, can live with AIDS without detriment to their health and can play video games better than their handlers. The Villains of the book are scientists like Harry Frederick Harlow conducting social-isolation experiments, taking rhesus monkeys from their mothers and recording their behaviour. One wonders about the usefulness of these experiments as well as the ethical validity of ‘rape racks’, used to force monkeys to reproduce, ‘pits of despair’; isolated chambers used to study the effects of loneliness, and ‘iron maidens’; ersatz mothers made of cloth and given to stabbing their offspring. On the other hand we have David Gil Amaral slicing out portions of the brains of sedated chimpanzees to study their Hippocampus as well as the heroic work of lab workers in the 60s creating polio vaccines from the bone marrow of rhesus macaques. Fighting against this are PETA and ADL (the animal defense league), breaking into laboratories and stealing tapes of baboons with whiplash induced by pistons thrust against their skull. There’s foolishness on both sides of the divide however, animal rights activists advocating for cage sterilisation forget that bamboozled marmosets would lose their urine territory markings, whilst researchers waste time doing duff g-force experiments on squirrel monkeys whose brain-body ratio fails to bare relevance to humans. Above all Deborah points out the wastefulness of this research. Thousands of monkeys have been tortured to prove that infants need their mothers, surely something we knew already, how useful is this knowledge? The more we know about primates the more intelligent we realise they are. For researchers such as Roger Fouts, who studies their cognitive ability, killing them would feel like fratricide.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having come out in 1994, this exploration of the contentious and complicated animal rights and welfare issues related to our closest animal cousins may be dated. However, it is still enlightening and comes across as an honest exploration of facts without agenda. As I learned from books like The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations and Transplant: A Heart Surgeon's Account of the Life-and-Death ** that canine subjects were key to heart transplant development, so here the role of primate research in development of the polio vaccine is explored. This was at great cost to monkeys:

By all estimates, at least a million monkeys died in the race to halt polio; by some estimates, the toll reached five times that. The achievement has compelling human numbers as well. Before the vaccines, in the United States alone, 20,000 people a year were crippled or killed by polio viruses. In the early 1960s, when vaccine production was running smoothly, the numbers dropped to a few cases a year, cases suddenly so unusual that their appearance was startling.

Since the collection of the wild animals is so inefficient, the effect on wild populations it outsized:

...even primate researchers still talk with awe, and some dismay, about how many animals were used to develop a polio vaccine. "We went through a hell of a lot of monkeys," says one high-ranking administrator at the NIH primate program. Before the race for the polio vaccine, there were an estimated 5 to 10 million rhesus macaques in India. During the height of the vaccine work, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United States alone was importing more than 200,000 monkeys a year, mostly from India. By the late 1970s, there were fewer than 200,000 rhesus macaques in India.

Even by the time of this book, such slaughter seems less likely:

You could not, today, kill some 2 to 5 million monkeys in AIDS research, the way you could in polio work four decades ago. Look at the pigtail macaque model for AIDS; Seattle researchers have been criticized, not only by activists but by other scientists, for importing a mere 1,000 extra monkeys, much less hundreds of thousands.

Indeed, AIDS research seems a bit dangerous while being somewhat pointless as monkeys can be carriers (and thus transmitters) yet without symptoms, so how do you gauge treatment efficacy? The primates can be decimated by out measles and harmlessly care a threat to researchers in the deadly B virus.

Also, primate research appears to be a missed opportunity in the case of thalidomide:

In the midst of the uproar, primate researchers started to wonder. Was the primate metabolism different? Could that be why the drug's impact was so vague in rats and body-destroying in humans? They gave thalidomide to pregnant baboons. There they were again,
the flippers and the missing ears. Even today, scientists are not sure how thalidomide manages to twist an embryo so badly. The lesson, though, from young baboons and humans was that there was something in the monkey-human metabolism that turned thalidomide vicious. In rats and rabbits, the drug was a little dubious; in primates, it was unquestionably destructive. Take the polio success, take the thalidomide disaster—the conclusion was that we could not do without primates in biomedical research.

Still, the field undeniably supported pointless cruelty and apparent sadists such as Harry Harlow. (His infamous wire and cloth mother surrogates were tame compared to his "Pit of despair" and "rape rack".)

There is much here on the history and activities at Tulane National Primate Research Center from it being a destination for animals mistreated elsewhere, a leading infectious disease research facility and the genesis of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) in macaques:

No one is sure where, exactly, HIV moved out of the dark and into the human population. But in macaques, there's no doubt. Their version of the disease began at the hands of humans. SIV in macaques is a disease born of captivity. It was carried by African monkeys who were packed into research centers with Asian macaques. Most probably, researchers think, it was transferred by the casual handling of animals, such as reusing needles. The most clear-cut case occurred at the Tulane Regional Primate Research Center. Scientists there tried to infect rhesus macaques with leprosy by injecting the tissue from sooty mangabeys that carried leprosy bacterium. They didn't realize at the time that mangabeys were silent carriers for SIV. The macaques became much sicker than anyone had expected.

For the complicated subject that includes here many of the arguments and tactics of animal rights activists, there is summary point here:

Animal activists complain that scientists don't give them a fair hearing. On this ground, the reverse is true. Activists rarely give fair credit to the researcher who works quietly within the system, even though many have brought about real change in the country's laboratories. This falls again into the category of telling only part of the truth. If you spend all your time talking about what Martin Stephens, of the Humane Society of the United States, calls "the bad apples," then you leave no room for the rest of the crop—the veterinarians, the psychologists, the behaviorists, the animal technicians, the individuals within the community who believe that status quo is not good enough. The often-cited "research community" is not made up of one single-minded scientist, cloned multiple times.

[John Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book although published twenty years ago is still timely for anyone interested in the use of animals in research especially scientists who should know how some of the conflict between animal rights advocacy groups and medical scientists began. I lived through this period carrying out research with rats and mice but got a much more holistic understanding from reading the book. It is also very interesting in understanding primate intelligence. It also shows how standards for carrying out research have changed. The book is easy to read and in my opinion is fair to both sides of the controversy which reached its peak at the time the book was written. I highly recommend it.

[Lucy Wiegard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Time to admit defeat on this one. DNF. Started out interesting, but each chapter lacked cohesiveness and I got bored.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Maya Vita · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insightful look into the history and morality of primate testing in western science. This book focuses on events in the 80s and was published in 1994. Reading it nearly two decades after its publication was fascinating, as many threads followed in this book (the rise/creation of PETA, other animal rights debates) continue to have impacts today. For the animal lover, it is in turns delightful and stomach turning. There were nights while I read that I stayed up thinking about the implications of what I read here. This was the book that finally got me into reading nonfiction.

[Mirrani · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book because I needed to read something about apes for my Year of the Monkey challenge and I'm glad I discovered it. Reading helped me see things in an interesting way. I was surprised at the author's ability to refrain from picking a side in the debate over animal rights. Do we need animal testing? What is right and wrong when it comes to the care of these animals? Both sides get to tell their stories and the reader is pretty much left to make up their own minds on the subject. As the owner of pet rats I am always hurt by the idea of tests on animals, but this book gave me the eyes to see the other side. Did it change my mind? No. I will always believe that we have reached a point in our scientific evolution where most of the tests done on animals are simply unnecessary. What I did come to terms with was that I had the ability to observe the other side of the argument and accept that some of those arguing for testing do have legitimate reasons for their beliefs, they just aren't mine.

[Rae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never really thought too much about how we use primates in medical research, but boy do I now. This book is written like an ethnography as it follows the two sides of the debate around the ethics and efficacy of using primates such as the Macaques as stand ins for human participants. After reading this book, I found myself looking into Neuralink and feeling revolted by the entire operation. Readers will draw their own conclusions but I for one am decidedly uncomfortable with the ongoing use of monkeys in medical research, though I purport no alternative as I am not a medical researcher nor biologist and therefore find a suitable alternative does not fall to me.

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book as a hardcover when it first came out when I was in High School.

This book had a huge impact on how I think about different topics. This author tells the story of using monkeys for research from both sides of the arguments. It's amazing to see this from one person and the message is loud and clear...both sides of an issue must consider the other side to be truly intelligent.

I learned a lot not only about monkey research, but like I said, how to approach making an opinion about anything controversial.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute Must Read for anyone interesting in biomedical research on primates. This provides a compelling history of the modern animal rights movement and primate research practices, and the war of attrition that occurred between these two divergent interests. Blum's writing is about as good as science writing gets (these pieces won Blum a Pulitzer), and her ability to provide a balanced view is commendable. Blum also gives solid focus to the individual personalities of major players, which is of utmost importance when learning about how hostilities escalated.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extraordinarily well written at times, and brilliantly reported throughought, the book walks a careful line between two battling contingents, those who strive to use these animals for critically important research, and those who believe we humans have little or no right to do so. Thought its almost 20 years old, it's still a must read to understand the background of this ongoing debate.

[Katherine]

A good overview worth reading, but I didn't agree with the author's perspective on many points.