Studies worthwhile

The 2016 National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded study of macaque monkeys referenced in your July 15 editorial entitled “Transparency needed for research funding” accomplished more than simulating what it would sound like for a monkey to say: “Will you marry me?”

The study revealed that macaques’ vocal anatomy can produce speech, but that they lack the neural capacity to speak. This conclusion has important implications for speech science because it enables scientists to focus on the neural networks in macaque and human brains to understand what enables human speech and what causes speech disorders. Like all biomedical research studies, this conclusion is helping further disease-related research for lifesaving treatments and cures.

Your editorial accurately points out the lack of federal funding to support research for diseases and disorders like aplastic anemia and the PraderWilli syndrome. But I disagree with the statement that the macaque speech study is “money wasted on a cruel and useless study.” Primate research has led to important breakthroughs in medicine, and it promises to unlock treatments for many types of diseases and disabilities in the future. What’s more, research in animals is subject to more regulations than even research in humans, including rules governing housing, cleanliness, and feeding.

Certainly, in an ideal world, scientists wouldn’t need to use animals in research. But the reality is that those alternatives are not sophisticated enough to model everything that happens in the body.

Scapegoating animal research and NIH-funded projects does not get us any closer to finding cures for all the patients who are suffering from diseases and disabilities. In fact, placing undue pressure on scientific institutions may ultimately discourage the next generation of scientists and prevent the research community from pursuing lines of research that address some of the most perplexing questions in medicine.

— Matthew Bailey, President, Foundation for Biomedical Research, Washington, D.C.