Hunt says that he is not afraid of having the center reviewed, but adds that researchers want to be judged by "an established review committee" rather than laymen. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of the Interior, and the state of Massachusetts all review the New England Primate Center at different times, under different codes. One such review, an announced visit by 19 scientists representing NIH, was conducted September 30.

While he says regulation is necessary to prevent animal abuse, Hunt criticizes efforts to impose further research restrictions at many levels of government. "It becomes difficult because we have so many different agencies involved," he says.

Although Hunt says relations among this state's researchers, activists and government seem cordial enough to preclude "radical activities," he adds that break-ins by animal rights groups at other animal research facilities concern him. While the secluded Southboro center has not been attacked, Hunt says, "I don't think in any institution you're in a position to have complete security."

The Center's Research

Of all the projects that the center has worked on, it gained the most notoriety for its efforts to stop a viral epidemic among the lab monkeys in 1979. The disease attacked the monkeys' immune systems and weakened them--a pattern that had yet to become ominously familiar. Researchers studying the disorder found that it was similar to the human disease now known as AIDS.

The monkey disease, now known as Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), turned out to be "the very best animal model system to study AIDS," Hunt says.

Cooperative research--much of it done at Harvard--has shown that AIDS may have mutated from another virus that normally affects wild North African green monkeys but does not harm humans.

Hunt says that although the center was not prepared to do research on immune systems at the time of this discovery, it began to use cultures from the diseased monkeys in research at the center. He says AIDS research now makes up about a quarter of the center's work.

Associate Professor of Microbiology Ronald C. DesRosiers, who directs the center's AIDS research project, says several primate centers are now trying to find other viruses in wild monkeys that are genetically similar to AIDS. Certain strains of the human and simian viruses, he said, share as much as three-quarters of the same genetic material.

DesRosiers says it is especially difficult to study possible vaccines because AIDS affects only chimpanzees and humans. Humans would risk their lives if they volunteered to test such preparations, he says. As for chimpanzees, DesRosiers says they are too rare and expensive to be used in repeated experiments.

The center's work is in no way restricted to AIDS research, however. Hunt cites another project with implications for the care of delicate animals in captivity--an effort to determine why captive cotton-top tamarinds--an endangered species--often suffer from ulcerative colitis, a disease that can lead to cancer of the colon. The center has received an NIH grant to study this tendency in about 80 of the monkeys. He says it is not known whether this condition exists in the wild.

In the course of the experiment, Hunt says, the animals will not be operated on. They will receive varying levels of fat in their diets, and will be examined and treated by veterinarians. Some young cotton-tops, he says, will be raised away from their parents, to see whether they develop the disease.

McArdle criticizes this use of the tamarinds. He says zookeepers have told NEAVS that the endangered monkeys develop colitis only because of stressful environments in the lab. He said the researchers had probably isolated some of the young monkeys from their parents to "induce stress" above even normal lab levels.