Originally published 2021-01-20.
On 2 February 2019, all 27 monkeys housed at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley were put down with drugs on a single day. The animals were elderly, and 21 of them reportedly had Parkinson's disease. None had been used in NASA experiments. The deaths only became public in December 2020, when The Guardian reported on documents released under freedom-of-information laws, and the news drew criticism from a US lawmaker and animal-welfare groups who asked why the monkeys had not gone to a sanctuary instead.
This article sets out what is known about the monkeys, who was responsible for them, why the case caused anger, and how it fits into the wider debate about what happens to research primates when their working lives end.
What happened at Ames
According to the released records, the 27 primates were cared for at Ames by LifeSource BioMedical, a private biomedical company with premises inside the research centre's gates. The company said it had taken the animals in years earlier because no other home could be found for them, largely because of their age, and that it had paid for their care itself.
LifeSource's explanation for the euthanasia was that the monkeys' advanced age and declining health had reached a point where ending their lives was the humane option. In its statement to The Guardian, the company said the aim was to spare the animals a poor quality of life. Several of the animals were described as having neurological impairment, consistent with the Parkinson's diagnoses.
NASA or a contractor? The responsibility question
Many early headlines said that NASA had killed the monkeys. The picture is more tangled than that. The animals were not NASA research subjects, the care and the decision appear to have been LifeSource's, and NASA told reporters that it "does not have any non-human primates in Nasa or Nasa-funded facilities."
That statement puzzled observers. Keith Cowing of the space-news site NASA Watch pointed out that LifeSource's address was a building inside the Ames gate, so the monkeys had clearly lived on a NASA site. Whether the agency meant that it had never owned the animals, or simply that no primates remain there now, was never fully explained. What can be said with confidence is that the monkeys were held at a NASA centre by a private company that made the final decision.
Why the case caused anger
Critics focused on one point: sanctuaries for retired laboratory primates exist in the United States, so why were none of these 27 monkeys sent to one?
Congresswoman Kathleen Rice of New York wrote to then NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine demanding an explanation. She told The Guardian she wanted to know why the animals "were forced to waste away in captivity and be euthanized rather than live out their lives in a sanctuary."
Mike Ryan of the animal-rights group Rise for Animals was blunter, saying of NASA's practices: "Nasa has many strengths, but when it comes to animal welfare practices, they're obsolete."
Supporters of the decision would counter that moving very old, sick animals is stressful and not always kinder, and that euthanasia is a recognised veterinary choice when quality of life collapses. The released records did not show whether sanctuary placement was seriously explored, which is a large part of why the story struck a nerve.
Primates and the space programme
NASA's history with primates goes back to the first days of spaceflight. The best known is Ham, a chimpanzee launched on the suborbital Mercury-Redstone 2 flight from Cape Canaveral on 31 January 1961. His 16-minute trip helped prove that a living passenger could perform tasks in space, months before Alan Shepard flew. Ham survived, retired in 1963, and spent most of his life at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and later the North Carolina Zoo, dying in 1983.
Monkeys were also flown on US and Soviet missions in the 1950s and 1960s, and some of those flights ended in deaths. Public attitudes have changed a great deal since then, and primate research at space agencies has largely given way to other methods.
What happens to research primates afterwards
Primates remain in use in American research, mainly in drug development, vaccine work and neuroscience. The Guardian cited US Department of Agriculture figures showing more than 74,000 primates used in experiments in 2017; tallies for nearby years are of a similar order.
For chimpanzees there is now a clear retirement path. After a 2011 Institute of Medicine review found most chimpanzee research unnecessary, Congress funded expanded sanctuary space, and in 2015 the National Institutes of Health said it would stop supporting chimpanzee biomedical research and send its remaining animals to sanctuaries such as Chimp Haven in Louisiana.
Monkeys, which make up the vast majority of research primates, have no equivalent nationwide guarantee. Their fate depends on the institution, available sanctuary places and funding. That gap is what the Ames case exposed.
The takeaway
The 27 monkeys at Ames were old and many were ill, and euthanasia may well have spared some of them suffering. But the decision was made out of public view, the records surfaced only through a freedom-of-information request, and the agency whose name was on the site gave an unclear account of its role.
For anyone following animal welfare in science, the lesson is about transparency and planning: if retirement options are arranged early and decisions are explained openly, the public is far more likely to accept them, even when the outcome is the same.
Sources: NASA Watch, December 2020, citing The Guardian; Wikipedia: Ham (chimpanzee); Wikipedia: Animal testing on non-human primates; The Guardian, 22 December 2020 (original report).
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