Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Department of Defense, Department of Health
and Human Services' Public Health Service,
and other US Government Laboratories
Many institutions and laboratories in the federal govern-
ment have provided leadership and contributed significant
knowledge to the field of medical primatology. Notable in
this respect were the US Department of Defense's (DOD)
Army laboratories at Edgewood Arsenal; the Army's
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at
Fort Detrick; the Army's Walter Reed Army Institute of
Research in Washington, DC, and its laboratory in
Bangkok; the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in
Washington, DC; the Air Force School of Aerospace
Medicine in San Antonio, Texas; the Balcones Laboratory
at the University of Texas in Austin; the Air Force Aero-
medical Laboratory facilities at Wright-Patterson and
Holloman Air Force bases; and the Department of Health
and Human Services' (DHHS) NIH intramural program in
Bethesda, Maryland, including the FDA's vaccine research
and testing programs and the Centers For Disease Control
(CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, each components of the US
Public Health Service (PHS). These activities had much in
common with the national primate centers in that they had
large and varied colonies of nonhuman primates, stable
core funding, ready access to comprehensive diagnostic
services, and multidisciplinary staffing.
In 1974, DOD laboratories had a total of about 2600
nonhuman primates, close to the 3000 held in the NIH
intramural program (
Southwick, 1975
). Through the
military draft that was in effect through the 1970s, many
veterinarians were assigned to these laboratories as
commissioned officers. A number who probably would not
have done so otherwise were introduced to medical
primatology, laboratory animal medicine, and pathology
and went on to pursue productive careers in these and
related fields in biomedical research. Evidence of the
contributions made by these individuals was the publica-
tion of the first laboratory handbook on the care and use of
laboratory primates by the group of veterinarians associ-
ated with the Army's laboratory at Edgewood Arsenal
(
Whitney et al., 1973
).
In the US Air Force, veterinarians were involved almost
from the outset of the US space program with the use of the
nonhuman primates that paved the way for manned space
flight later (
Butler and Britz, 2009
). In May 1952, two
rhesus monkeys, Patricia and Michael, rode an Aerobee
missile 36 miles above the desert over Holloman Air Force
Base and returned to earth, where they lived out normal
lives and eventually were retired to the national zoo. Ham,
a chimpanzee, and Sam, a rhesus monkey, became celeb-
rities in later flights (
Figure 1.7
). In a period beginning in
1948 and spanning a period of almost 50 years, 20
nonhuman primates were launched in rockets in the US
FIGURE 1.7
Dr Jerry Fineg examining Sam in a flight couch
equipped with psychomotor instrumentation at Holloman Air Force
Base in 1960. Sam was part of a group of chimpanzees selected for space
flights in NASA's Project Mercury. While Sam “washed out” of the
program because he was a gifted escape artist, a cohort, Ham, later
achieved fame for his successful MR-2 flight on January 31, 1961.
(Photo courtesy of Dr William E. Britz, Jr, and the US Air Force.)
space program. Wallace Wendt, the first veterinarian with
the space program, was assigned to the US Air Force's
Wright Aeromedical Laboratory in 1952 and participated in
the launches of Patricia and Michael from Holloman Air
Force Base in New Mexico. He prepared them for their
flights and provided care for them afterward. He was
among the first to serve in the largely uncharted area of
nonhuman primate medicine.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, The National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), primarily
at its Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California,
supported work using both squirrel and rhesus monkeys in
its space shuttle program. Primarily for the protection of
astronauts flying shuttle missions, on which squirrel
monkeys were included on at least one occasion, NASA
was the first major agency to impose an SPF requirement.
Only monkeys free of a long list of particular pathogens,
with B virus at the top, were permitted to be used in
NASA's manned flight programs. Fortunately, Charles
River Laboratory's island breeding colony in Florida was
able to provide B virus-free and microbiologically defined
rhesus monkeys.
Activities Abroad
During the 1960
1980 period, nonhuman primate centers
were being developed and expanded elsewhere in the
world. The Primate Center, TNO (Applied Scientific
Research), was started as a local nonhuman primate
resource in 1960 at Rijswijk, The Netherlands (
Anony-
mous, 1974
). The core research program of the TNO
e
