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Lab advances AIDS research

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by Letters to the Editor

Friday, November 10, 2006

Rick Bogle could not be more wrong with his assertion that 'nothing has been learned about HIV from studying monkeys.' Monkey research forms the basis for much of our current understanding of HIV. To provide just one example — I assure you there are many others — monkeys infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) allow researchers to understand what happens during the incredibly important first weeks following HIV infection. HIV infection does not announce itself, making it very hard to study these early events. HIV+ people rarely know exactly when they became infected; in fact, there are 250,000 people HIV+ people in the United States who do not even know they carry the virus.

I should note that the HIV/AIDS research performed at the Wisconsin Primate Research Center is internationally renowned by the entire AIDS community, not only monkey researchers. Our research findings appear regularly in prestigious scholarly journals and groups including the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and the National Institutes of Health support our work. To falsely claim, as Mr. Bogle does in the article, that we are doing 'pie-in-the-sky research' is patently wrong and insulting both to me and other hard-working AIDS researchers at UW-Madison.

We do struggle with the ethical implications of our research. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I conscientiously objected to certain classroom lab exercises that involved animals and refused to participate in some of the experiments. I did not expect that ten years later I would find myself leading a research program that uses monkeys to understand HIV disease. Yet my moral compass on this issue is absolutely clear and unequivocal. SIV experiments in macaque monkeys allow us to answer questions that cannot be addressed in HIV-infected people. The five million people newly infected with HIV each year provide a clear mandate for continuing research that could help slow this terrible pandemic.

David O'Connor, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Wisconsin Primate Research Center UW-Madison Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine

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Anonymous (November 10, 2006 @ 9:33am):

Two decades of trying to model HIV with a different disease in a species not normally infected with the experimental disease, has been an abject, costly, and misleading failure.

Human immunodeficiency virus is a retrovirus that causes disease only in humans. It is a species-specific disease. Chimpanzees infected with HIV display very mild transient symptoms. Nothing regarding HIV infection in humans or in the treatment of AIDS has been a result of the use of chimpanzees. This has been acknowledged by leading primate researchers such as Dr. Thomas Insel, past director of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University and now director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Sooty mangabeys, an African monkey, are natural carriers of a disease called simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV). In spite of the similar name, HIV and SIV are caused by different viruses. When macaques, an Asian genus of monkey, are infected with a serially-passaged SIV, they become terminally ill. They develop chronic nosebleeds, diarrhea, and anorexia as they progress to morbidity.

This fact was discovered when the poor husbandry methods of the nation's NIH monkey labs inadvertently allowed the wide-spread infection of macaques with SIV. The disease was identified when primate researchers read about the symptoms of HIV. Always on the lookout for a new moneymaking animal model, the primate research community quickly claimed that the newly discovered disease would be a productive model of HIV.

Many hundreds of millions of dollars later, they are still asking the American taxpayer to be patient and to give them more money to kill many more monkeys.

In light of the fact that everything known about AIDS and how to treat the disease has been a direct result of human cell studies, clinical studies, and epidemiological research, it is difficult to understand why anyone without a financial interest in the research would want more money shoveled into this black hole of proven failure.

Anonymous (November 10, 2006 @ 3:24pm):

When these Bozos can convince Africans to stop EATING mockeys and apes then I will consider not experimenting on them for the benefit of all mankind.

Anonymous (November 10, 2006 @ 3:37pm):

Thank you Dr. O'Connor for your excellent letter. I've heard Mr. Bogle repeatedly make broad statements about the use of animals in research, yet he never provides any meaningful information to back up his assertions.

It's about time we heard more of the facts about medical research such as you have provided, and less of Bogle's propaganda

Anonymous (November 12, 2006 @ 9:19pm):

So rather than studying human populations who are already unfortunately infected and can communicate with us easily about symptoms, lifestyle, etc, the logical thing is to infect a different species who cannot effectively communicate with us and stick them in a stressful, unnatural environment and then call that a better way to conduct science? O'Conner is defending his paycheck with that letter plain and simple. It's sad that so many people will have to suffer for his "science" which seems to be nothing more than emotional manipulation.