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