Assessing cumulative severity in macaques used in neuroscience research.

如果我们想要了解人类的大脑，并为大脑功能缺陷引起的疾病开发新的治疗方法，对猴子的持续研究是必不可少的。然而，在科学研究中使用猴子是有争议的，因为人们担心它们可能会因为科学程序而遭受痛苦。在不久的将来，英国将通过一项新的欧洲立法，对在研究中使用猴子进行更严格的控制，并要求科学家评估他们的实验可能对他们将使用的动物的一生经历产生的影响。这些评估很重要，因为它们将使资助机构和内政部能够判断科学的潜在收益是否超过有关动物的福利成本。虽然这似乎是一个合理的方法，但由于我们几乎没有关于科学程序如何影响猴子福利的实际证据，它受到了阻碍。这个项目的目的就是收集这样的证据。假设动物可能会经历类似于焦虑和抑郁的负面情绪状态，这是我们对动物福利定义的核心。因此，开发有效的方法来评估猴子的情绪状态，这将使我们能够探测它们的感受，是动物福利科学的一个主要目标。由于动物不能告诉我们它们的感受，它们的情绪状态只能从它们的生理变化中推断出来。在猴子身上，我们应该测量的症状的最佳指南来自于对患有严重情绪障碍（如抑郁症）的人类患者的研究。在此基础上，我们决定采取两种主要方法：第一，我们将测量白细胞中染色体端粒长度的变化；第二，我们将测量大脑结构和功能的变化。端粒是染色体末端的保护帽，在心理压力期间被侵蚀，但在我们快乐时可以重新长出来；它们的长度可以从血液样本中测量出来，并有可能读出一个人所经历的累积压力。长期处于压力和抑郁状态的人，大脑中处理情绪信息的区域在活动和大小上也会发生变化；这些变化可以使用脑成像技术进行无创测量。我们相信，综合这些测量方法，很可能给出一幅准确的图景，即参与神经科学研究的猴子是否表现出与人类类似抑郁状态的生物学变化特征。我们将对参与各种神经科学研究的猴子以及来自未用于任何实验的繁殖群体的对照猴子进行上述变化的测量。对这些不同的群体进行比较，将使我们能够确定科学程序是否可能是导致福利低下的原因，哪些程序是最糟糕的。我们的结果将为评估神经科学实验对猴子可能经历的影响提供必要的证据。它们将揭示那些特别有压力的程序，这些程序要么应该停止，要么应该大幅改进。最后，他们将允许科学家和内政部做出明智的决定，决定让猴子接受多少程序是合乎道德的。我们计划在项目结束时举办一个研讨会，邀请所有感兴趣的利益相关者讨论我们的发现及其对未来猴子神经科学研究的影响。

Continued research on monkeys is essential if we are to understand the human brain and develop novel treatments for medical conditions arising from defective brain function. However, the use of monkeys in scientific research is controversial due to concerns that they may experience suffering as a result of scientific procedures. New European legislation due to be adopted in the UK in the near future places more stringent controls on the use of monkeys in research, and requires scientists to assess the likely impact of their experiments on the lifetime experience of the animals they will use. These assessments are important because they will allow funding bodies and the Home Office to make judgments about whether the potential benefits from the science outweigh the welfare costs to the animals concerned. Whilst this seems a reasonable approach, it is hampered by the fact that we have very little actual evidence about how scientific procedures impact the welfare of monkeys. The aim of this project is to collect such evidence.The assumption that animals might experience negative emotional states akin to anxiety and depression is central to our definitions of animal welfare. Hence, development of valid methods for assessing the emotional states of monkeys, which will allow us to probe their feelings, is a major goal of animal welfare science. Since animals cannot tell us how they feel, their emotional states can only be inferred from observable changes in their biology. In monkeys our best guide to the symptoms we should measure comes from the study of human patients with serious mood disorders such as depression. On this basis we have decided to take two main approaches: first, we will measure changes in the length of the telomeres of chromosomes in white blood cells, and second, we will measure structural and functional changes in the brain. Telomeres are protective caps at the end of chromosomes that are eroded during periods of psychological stress but can regrow when we are happy; their length can be measured from a blood sample, and potentially gives a read-out of the cumulative stress experienced by an individual. Areas of the brain involved in processing emotional information also undergo changes in both activity and size in chronically stressed and depressed humans; these changes can be measured non-invasively using brain-imaging technology. We believe that together these measures are likely to give an accurate picture of whether monkeys involved in neuroscience research show biological changes characteristic of depressive-like states in humans.We will make measurements of the above changes in monkeys that are involved in various types of neuroscience research and also in control monkeys from a breeding colony that are not used in any experiments. Comparison of these different groups will allow us to determine whether scientific procedures are likely to be a cause of poor welfare and which procedures are the worst. Our results will provide the evidence necessary to assess the impact of neuroscience experiments on the likely experience of monkeys. They will reveal procedures that are particularly stressful and should be either stopped or substantially refined. Finally, they will allow scientists and the Home Office to make informed decisions about how many procedures it is ethical to subject a monkey to. We are planning a workshop at the end of our project to which all interested stakeholders will be invited to discuss our findings and their implications for future neuroscience research on monkeys.