Charlotte Uhlenbroek

In the UK, licences for research using chimps and other apes stopped in 1997.

In the US, it wasn't until 2015 that the Endangered Species Act classified all chimps, including captive ones, as endangered, thus making invasive biomedical research illegal.

There's still no ban on privately funded behavioural research, and 142 chimps remain in those labs.

But the laws on using great apes like orangutans and chimps for biomedical research didn't extend to other primates like monkeys.

So for Lisa Jones-Engel, the work continued.

The numbers are hard to prove conclusively.

But what we do know from the information released by the European Union, the Home Office in the UK and the US Department of Agriculture is that between 100 and 200,000 non-human primates are used in biomedical research worldwide every year.

But is the use of monkeys in research still necessary to mitigate extreme forms of human suffering?

Chris Petkoff, professor of neuroscience at Iowa University, believes it is.

Other scientists argue that since some diseases like Parkinson's don't naturally exist in monkeys, when it's created in them, the symptoms are only partially similar.

And there are also problems using animals to test new drugs.

Aisha Atka spent 10 years working as a medical officer for the US Food and Drug Administration.

Aisha, can you give me some examples of where you feel that these animal models have led us down the wrong path?

In a recent update to that document, on the 20th of April 2026, the US Food and Drug Administration announced that it's leading, and I quote, a transformative shift in drug safety evaluation, reducing, replacing or refining animal testing with advanced human-relevant methods that better predict how medicines work in people.

One of the great hopes for human-based research is a technology called an organ-on-a-chip, a tiny testable version of a working human organ.

But for Professor Chris Petkoff, this technology isn't nearly advanced enough.

Doug Cohn, who used to work at the Laboratory for Experimental Research and Surgery in Primates, LEMSIP, also doesn't believe an end to animal testing is near.

So do you think that there'll be a time when we don't need to use animals in research?

The COVID pandemic accelerated the use of non-animal methods, including organ-on-a-chip technology.

But testing on monkeys was considered essential to ensure human safety.