EUROPEAN rules on primate experiments and fundamental research may suffer as a result.
As Â鶹´«Ã½ went to press, the draft directive on animal experiments, which aims to improve animal welfare, had still to be published. But some scientists fear it will curtail research involving non-human primates – into the basics of how the brain works, for example.
“Some earlier drafts suggested that experiments on monkeys would only be allowed for life-threatening and debilitating disorders, which could rule out all sorts of fundamental research to understand vision, movement or neurological diseases,” says Simon Festing of the UK-based
