This is great!! I've long been a believer that at least at the point at which we get to great apes, if not sooner, we should really just find human volunteers. I know it sounds somewhat speciesist. However, some animals are just so obviously intelligent that keeping them in laboratory conditions and deliberately giving them medical conditions is horribly unethical.

I'm not sure exactly where to draw the line between mice and chimps, but somewhere, there is a line at which we should not be doing medical experiments on the species. Jane Goodall, at a lecture, told a story of walking through a lab and seeing a chimp in a cage signing in ASL "help me" over and over, truly heartbreaking.

At some level, the species that will benefit will be willing to volunteer for the experiment. If this is not true, perhaps the experiment is not worth performing.

The type of technology mentioned here may remove the whole ethics issue by removing all animal test subjects. This would be wonderful. I hope it pans out.

OMFG, Misanthropic Scott, I think you broke my heart with that Goodall story & the chimp's ASL call for help...

Sorry Julia. It broke my heart too. I hope sharing such stories might be a way to spread memes that will prevent such occurrences in the future. As someone who has been lucky (and determined) enough to see great apes in the wild, I can tell you it's like looking in a mirror. I think it would be impossible for all but the extreme fundamentalist crowd to look at these animals and not see a close cousin.

At least if we could perform such medical tests on humans, the subjects would be volunteers, would like be either themselves the ones to benefit from the research or be close to someone who would and would not be traumatized by the experience. Or, at least they would not be any more traumatized than they already are by dealing with a difficult medical condition. Oh, and we probably wouldn't keep human subjects in cages.

That's why I say that by the time we're ready to do testing on apes, the species of ape we should be testing on is homo sapiens.

Perhaps this new technology can give us hope to end animal testing all together. I think that would be a wonderful thing. Let's hope it works out.