No to primate brain research

The Bremen health authority rejected the request for research on the brains of non-human primates, which could be a historic turning point.

Good news comes from Germany.In Bremen, the health authority has just rejected the request of the researcher Andreas Kreiter, of the University of Bremen, which aimed to continue his research on the brain of non-human primates.An important decision, motivated by the consideration that animal suffering does not justify the acquisition of new scientific knowledge, thus making the project ethically unacceptable.

Brain research rejected by University of Bremen

In the press release the health authority stated that:“After an attentive examination of the project:'Spatiotemporal dynamics of cognitive processes in the mammalian brain', combined with the consultation of the opinion of various experts, the suffering of macaques (gen. Macaca) cannot be justified by the expected benefits in terms of scientific knowledge".An evaluation that led to classify the suffering of primates as "serious"., in accordance with the European Directive on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes, that is, an experiment can only be authorized if the benefits outweigh the harm (animal suffering).

A historic decision

The German organization Doctors against animal experiments (Daae) welcomed this decision as a turning point:“The decision of the Bremen authority to reject the request despite possible legal litigation is a historic decision that will have a great impact overall on the legal and scientific classification of cruel brain research on non-human primates,” he says Silke Strittmatter, biologist and scientific consultant of Daae.The organization immediately appealed to all other authorities to follow Bremen's example.In Germany, similar experiments on the brain of primates are also conducted in seven other institutions and therefore it is hoped that the Bremen decision will have a significant impact to change the situation across the nation, putting an end to these atrocities.

Animal welfare weighs less than scientific research

A similar request had already been rejected by the health authorities in the past, but the situation was overturned in court.In fact, the German Federal Administrative Court, after the complaints, changed the decision by establishing that the welfare of the animals outweighed the scientific importance and that the suffering was to be considered moderate and not severe.Daae made public later the case of the Jara monkey demonstrating how wrong this decision was:thanks to official internal documents, the true condition in which the monkeys were involved was revealed.The Jara monkey's injuries included holes in the skull bone and inflamed sutures in the brain - officially regarded as an "inevitable consequence".

Today, one of the main reasons that led to this decision was the suffering of the macaques. Finally defined as unacceptable, since non-human primates are intelligent animals and capable of understanding the reality of their lives, suffering from the situations in which they are involved.