Dear colleagues,
Some of you may be aware of a rather incendiary letter published in The Independent last week describing all primate neuroscience research as “unjustifiable” - http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/testing-on-non-human-primates-in-neuroscience-research-is-no-longer-justifiable-a7230071.html. Sonya Sobrian thoughtfully brought a planned response to this letter to the attention of our DNTS Council late last week, and we agreed to sign onto it as our society. They still wanted a name to go with each organization, so my name appears as the current president of DNTS. Thank you, Sonya, for encouraging our quick action and thank you Council for your quick work!
The response letter is attached and links are listed below. If anyone is interested/able to pursue a US-based press release on this, please contact me.
Sincerely,
Gregg Stanwood
From: Tom Holder
Sent: 14 September 2016 01:12
To:
Cc:
Subject: Primate research letter is onlineThe letter is published!!
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/13/primate-research-is-crucial-if-we-are-to-find-cures-for-diseases-like-parkinsonshttps://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/13/primate-research-is-crucial-if-we-are-to-find-cures-for-diseases-like-parkinsons
I’m sorry to send this email to all of you at once, but everyone on the list has been involved in supporting their organisation to sign the recent letter on the importance of primate research. This is now public (we will send round a print pdf when we get it).
There was also a subsequent article about it in the Guardian by Hannah Devlin.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/13/brain-experiments-on-primates-are-crucial-say-eminent-scientistshttps://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/13/brain-experiments-on-primates-are-crucial-say-eminent-scientists
From all of us at Understanding Animal Research, we would like to thank you for getting sign off (many of you twice over) and joining us in supporting the important role of primates in research. Many of your organisation’s also sent emails to your members or colleagues, asking them to sign up, and they did in their hundreds. We currently have 450 signatories to our letter (I believe over 400 made it into the Guardian before their publication deadline expired). Among our signatories we have two Nobel Prizes and three Lasker Awards, as well as 21 organisations. And we did that in four working days! So thank you for all your support.
We will try and keep you updated with subsequent news, and we are actively trying to push this to the US press (you are welcome to put out your own releases).
To help you publicize this on your website, I will send a document containing the names of every person who has signed before our deadline (which was 5pm UK time Tuesday) (unfortunately my webmail is not allowing me to attach things, so it will be send tomorrow).
Thank you once again
Tom Holder
Head of Campaigns
Understanding Animal Research@tomholder
