Article content continued

He eventually grew more and more uncomfortable with the generation of transgenic monkeys, “or even worse, transgenic apes,” for studying brain development.

“So, yes, it’s morally risky to move towards humanizing primates, particularly when we are talking about the brain,” Styner said.

Styner’s co-authors, however, said the traditional mouse or rat models were “less ideal” than monkeys because of the vast dissimilarities in brain size and structure between humans and rodents.

When it comes to the scientific use of nonhuman primates, ethicists say the moral compass is skewed in cases like this.

Given the kind of beings monkeys are, “I certainly would have thought you would have had to have a reasonable expectation of high benefit to human beings to justify the harms that you are going to have for intensely social, cognitively complex, emotional animals like monkeys,” said Letitia Meynell, an associate professor in the department of philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

“It’s not clear that this kind of research has any reasonable expectation of having any useful application for human beings,” she said.

The science itself is also highly dubious and fundamentally flawed in its logic, she said.

“If you took Einstein as a baby and you raised him in the lab he wouldn’t turn out to be Einstein,” Meynell said. “If you’re actually interested in studying the cognitive complexity of these animals, you’re not going to get a good representation of that by raising them in labs, because they can’t develop the kind of cognitive and social skills they would in their normal environment.”