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Gottlieb also told Goodall that he has appointed an FDA team, including senior career officials and guided by primate veterinarians, to assess the “science and integrity” of the animal research process for the study and whether the research should be resumed. If the study is terminated, he said, the monkeys will be sent to an alternative location that can provide appropriate long-term care.

An FDA spokeswoman said the agency is also considering creating a wider-ranging “function that would provide for even greater oversight of the care of animals in the agency’s possession.”

The FDA actions represent the latest change in how the federal government treats research animals. In 2015, the National Institutes of Health said it would no longer support biomedical research on chimpanzees. The Department of Veterans Affairs said Monday that it would step up its oversight of experiments on dogs after an investigation found canine deaths at a Virginia research facility, USA Today reported.

Photo by Kevin King/Postmedia Network file photo

Goodall was enlisted in the fight against the monkey tests by the White Coat Waste Project, an advocacy group that says its goal is to publicize and end taxpayer-funded animal experiments. In January, the organization obtained 64 pages of documents on the nicotine-addiction research from the FDA under the Freedom of Information Act. It is suing the agency to get more information on the research’s costs, as well as veterinary records and photographs and videos of the experiments.

Based on a brief description on the agency’s website and the FOIA documents, the experiments appeared to involve 12 adolescent and 12 adult monkeys. The goal was “to examine behavioural and biological effects of nicotine in squirrel monkeys,” comparing the two age groups, the website said. The idea seemed to be to get the monkeys addicted to nicotine and then to see how they reacted to decreasing levels of the drug.

“Characterizing the effects of decreasing doses of nicotine on rates of self-administration in a nonhuman primate species will provide valuable information to inform what we might expect in human users when nicotine levels in tobacco products are lowered,” said one of the documents obtained by the White Coat Waste Project. Another document noted that “further information regarding the role of nicotine dose in the onset and maintenance of tobacco product use, particularly during adolescence, would be useful.”

Under federal law, the FDA has the authority to lower nicotine in cigarettes, and officials have long talked about it. In July, Gottlieb said he wanted to curb smoking by lowering the nicotine level in cigarettes to nonaddictive levels.