|| millennium || Maybe a nice condo? By Ted Gideonse From Newsweek, Jan. 19. 1998 THEY WERE THE ANIMAL elite. They flew in space. They were American Sign Language (ASL). They fought in the early battles against AIDS. But now they've been downsized, or aged out of their jobs, or watched helplessly as they've been replaced by robots. What's to be done with the chimps who are ready to be put out to pasture? It's a real, if unusual, ethical and practical problem. Other lab animals are cheap to keep or dispose of no one worries much about the fate of lab mice. But chimps, which are genetically so close to humans, are a breed apart. They cost $10,000 a year to keep, and, like humans, they have complicated social structures and emotional lives. "We have a moral obligation to meet the needs of whatever animal we're using," says Lilly-Marlene Russow, who teaches philosophy at Purdue. "But we need to do more for a chimpanzee than a rat." About 1,600 chimpanzees are kept in laboratories in the United States; up to 200 of them are probably not needed. In the mid-1980s, researchers were scrambling to understand AIDS. By the time scientists finally realized chimps weren't perfect subjects for experiment (they don't get AIDS), they'd bred far too many. Combine those with other chimps no longer considered useful for research, and you've got a bunch of underemployed animals with long life spans chimps can live to 60. "A number of animals have already done their service for research, and they are ready to be retired," says Dr. Dani Bolognesi, chair of a National Research Council committee that last summer recommended creating sanctuaries for the retiring chimpanzees. Nearly half of the research chimps in the United States are currently housed in the Coulston Foundation's multi-purpose research facility in Alamogordo, N.M. The foundation's controversial 83-year-old chief, Frederick Coulston, says he doesn't think there are too many chimpanzees; in fact, he wants more. At no point, Coulston says, does a chimpanzee stop being useful. Study their aging, he suggests. "I'm not against sanctuaries if [the chimps] were there to do some good," he says. Researchers in other facilities, however, say chimps are overbred. Roger Fouts would rather they got some rest. "Sanctuaries are the best life we can possibly give them," says Fouts, author of "Next of Inn", who has spent the last 30 years teaching chimpanzees ASL. Sanctuaries would provide large indoor and outdoor spaces, and would allow chimpanzees to socialize freely. This would be expensive. Returning the chimps to the wild, though, is pretty much unthinkable. Domesticated chimps lack the right survival skills. Lucy, the world-famous ASL-speaking chimpanzee raised as a "middle-class Oklahoman," was sent into the Gambian jungle in 1977. Friendly to every human who approached her, in 1988 poachers easily killed and skinned Lucy, her hands and feet taken as trophies.