Free-Range Research Could Save Chimps — and Our Conscience

It's part vacation retreat, part blood drive, part zoo — and it could be the future of chimpanzee research, if not the species itself.
With wild chimp populations plummeting — some populations by 80 percent in three decades — and captive research slowed by rising costs and ethical qualms, primatologist Pascal Gagneux has a compromise: free-range research sanctuaries.
"You can learn incredible things by not mistreating chimpanzees," said Gagneux, a University of California, San Diego, geneticist.
Gagneux, who is noted for both his comparisons of human and chimpanzee genetics and his critical bioethical analysis of chimp research, says it's about time we studied chimpanzees humanely. http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/free-range-rese.html

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