HIV/AIDS research, laboratory animals, activism, anti-vivisection

As AIDS activists voiced their demands for “drugs into bodies” in the late 1980s, American scientists injected drugs into the body of a highly controversial research animal—the chimpanzee. This paper examines the controversy over the use of chimpanzees in U.S. HIV/AIDS research that led to the decline of chimpanzees as laboratory animals. The author suggests that the AIDS epidemic raised the public profile of laboratory chimpanzee research, heightening its preexisting financial and ethical problems. The scientific and lay debate sparked by chimpanzee AIDS research demonstrates the intersection of ethics and economics in shaping laboratory research practices and disease politics in the late twentieth century. As animal advocates constructed laboratory chimpanzees as close human relatives, innocent of the imagined sins of people with AIDS, researchers working with chimpanzees confronted their ambiguity as an HIV animal model and the long-term costs of maintaining HIV-infected animals. By the late 1990s, an animal that had been a promising AIDS model became a public relations headache and a major expense for biomedical research. The pushback to the use of chimpanzees in AIDS research helps scholars understand how American scientists, activists, and animal advocates have made sense of the enmeshed concerns of human and animal welfare in a time of epidemiological crisis.