At the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Congress commissioned a scientific committee to take stock of the nation’s nonhuman primate research.
Seven federally funded primate research centers, which maintain large colonies and breed a domestic supply of animals, had struggled to keep up with demand during the crisis. Just as the need for primates to study the novel virus was soaring, a major alternative supply source—imports from China—vanished, and the cost of research monkeys from the remaining commercial vendors skyrocketed by as much as 200 percent.
Primate research, the committee determined, is integral to the United States’ ability to weather public health crises and treat brain disorders: These models make up only half a percent of the animals used in research but have contributed to the development of the COVID-19 vaccine, personalized gene therapies and deep brain stimulation, as well as foundational knowledge about vision, cognition and motor control. The committee stressed that it was imperative for the federal government to ramp up its investment in the centers. A weakened nonhuman primate research field, they concluded, constitutes a national security risk.
Three years later, however, that investment hasn’t happened.
In fact, federal funding for the centers has remained relatively flat for almost two decades. And more recently, the government has made moves against its own program. The major subagency heads within the Department of Health and Human Services “are all deeply committed to ending animal experimentation,” department Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a television interview in December 2025. Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last year that it would end nonhuman primate research; the Food and Drug Administration shared plans to phase out animal testing; and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) declared an intention to reduce the use of animals in the research it funds. Instead, the government has put a priority on investing in novel alternative methods, or NAMs, including organoids, organs on a chip and computational models.
NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said in February that the agency was working to transition at least one of the primate centers into an animal sanctuary. Oregon Health & Science University, which hosts one of the centers, spent several months negotiating with the NIH and ultimately opted to instead significantly reduce the size of the colony and stop selling animals to outside researchers. In the midst of this back and forth, four of the other centers dropped “primate” from their name; several center directors told The Transmitter they are looking for ways to evolve but lack the federal support to do so.
“The primate centers in particular, and the primate research community in general, feels endangered at this point, and feels like their work is under a kind of scrutiny that we have not experienced in the past,” says J. Anthony Movshon, professor of neural science and psychology at New York University. “Nobody knows how it’s going to play out.”
The Chinese government, meanwhile, is ramping up its investment in primate work. If the U.S. doesn’t follow suit, it could be left behind, says Peter Strick, professor and chair of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh.
“We’ve been leaders in this kind of research, and that’s now going to be compromised,” Strick says. “If we don’t have nonhuman primates to make discoveries, we also don’t have them to train the next generation of scientists. We’re cutting off this pipeline of discovery, and the consequence of this is a disaster.”
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Various committees at the NIH had previously bemoaned the lack of primate research facilities in the U.S.—the species used in research are not native to North America, so they must be either bred or imported—but this trip and testimonial did the trick. In 1960, Congress allocated $2 million to set up the first two primate research centers and breeding colonies, and five additional centers soon followed. Members of the NIH committees that established the centers wrote that they should exist “for the next hundred years.”
Since then, the centers have knit themselves into the fabric of biomedical research and facilitated the growth of the primate model. Hosted at universities and research institutes in California, Georgia, Louisiana, Oregon, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin, they collectively house roughly 28,000 monkeys and 200 labs, including more than 60 neuroscience labs. Along with additional NIH-funded colonies, they accounted for a quarter of research monkeys in the U.S. in 2025. On their own, the seven centers bred 3,546 monkeys in 2021—a little more than one-tenth the number of monkeys imported to the U.S. that year, which totaled nearly 32,000. But they have had an outsized influence over primate research in the U.S.
For one, these centers are a wellspring of veterinary and scientific knowledge, and they field questions from scientists across the world about the primate model, Movshon says. “For anything out of the ordinary, or out of the realms that we have ourselves experienced, we go to the primate centers, because that’s where the experts live.”
The centers also afford opportunities to conduct population studies and provide a source of monkeys that come with detailed records—something commercial vendors do not offer. When purchasing from a commercial vendor, researchers can often select only the age and sex of an animal, says Katalin Gothard, professor of physiology at the University of Arizona. The primate centers, however, can provide intricate details, such as an animal’s early life experiences and its mother’s social status. “These are absolutely critical factors in the success of a lab focused on social and emotional behavior,” Gothard says.
Scientists have used the centers’ large, well-characterized colonies to study how genes and life experience contribute to anxious behaviors and to model autism through natural variation in social behavior. Investigators can even select monkeys that have dispositions well suited to learning complex tasks, which saves time and resources in behavioral experiments, says Matthew Smith, professor of biomedical engineering and the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
That rich information compelled neuroscientist Kathleen Grant to move her lab from Wake Forest University to the Oregon National Primate Research Center in 2005. She wanted to study the genetic basis of alcohol use disorder, and the center offered her access to thousands of monkeys, each with detailed pedigrees, lifelong medical records and identical upbringings. Armed with these data, Grant was able to characterize natural variance in alcohol consumption patterns and track their heritability.
Working at a primate center “allowed a level of success in the science that I’m quite sure I could not have achieved in a university setting,” says Grant, chief of the center’s neuroscience division and professor of behavioral neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University.
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When Rudolf “Skip” Bohm began his tenure as director of the Oregon center in 2023, he says he was instructed to breed as many monkeys as possible to make sure the national infrastructure had enough animals in case another pandemic comes. The message was “just do it, and there wasn’t any funding to support it,” he says. “That’s still the quandary.”
To scale up breeding requires major investments, and not only in money, says R. Paul Johnson, director of the Emory National Biomedical Research Center. More animals means more staff to care for them, and it also means new buildings to house the additional monkeys, which could cost upward of $10 million, he adds.
And it takes time: Many of the species used in research are seasonal breeders, carry pregnancies for about six months and give birth to only one infant at a time. It would take at least five years to see an increase in the number of monkeys available for research, Bohm says. “You can’t just say it and it happens.”
In 2022, the Chinese government pledged $746 million to its China Brain Project, which includes increasing domestic breeding of monkeys. One university’s new research facility can hold 5,000 monkeys, and another could hold up to 20,000 in a few years, according to reporting from Science. Last October, China also launched an international collaboration to map macaque and marmoset brains; the U.S. is mostly excluded from the project because of federal restrictions on international collaboration.
“China’s already been eating our lunch; they’re going to eat our dinner, too,” says Michael Platt, university professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. China’s investment could lead to new vaccines and treatments and cures for brain disorders—but “it’s not clear that you get to share in the fruits of those discoveries.”
By comparison, the U.S. centers have been “chronically underfunded,” says Movshon, who has served as chair of the external scientific advisory board for the Washington center since 2019. Each center receives a P51 grant from the NIH, ranging from roughly $7 to $14 million a year, to help care for the monkeys and maintain the facilities. But most of each center’s budget comes from other funding sources, including project-based R01 grants and contributions from host universities. As the P51 grants have stayed flat over the past two decades, the universities have had to offset the centers’ accumulating budget deficits, Bohm says.
“We’re working with the same dollars as we were 20 years ago, and the costs in the world are not the same,” says Corinna Ross, director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center. “There’s no extra wiggle room to innovate and try new things.”
One reason the P51 grants have not increased—or at least kept up with inflation—is because the primate centers are housed within an office that has had a flat budget itself. Funneling more money to the centers would require cutting funding to something else, says a former program official associated with the national primate research centers program at the NIH, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly. “NIH is in some ways, from a bureaucratic and an operational standpoint, a very conservative organization. So the status quo was to run everything at a flat line,” they say.
Some researchers say they are trying to build capacity beyond just increasing breeding. During their negotiations with the NIH, for example, a group of scientists at the Oregon National Primate Center developed a plan for a redesign of their facility, which they shared with The Transmitter. The “Innovative Habitat Initiative” would leverage artificial-intelligence behavior-tracking tools and noninvasive health monitors to collect as much data as possible from the colony living in social housing. This data could supplement more invasive experiments so that fewer animals would need to be used.
This and alternate proposals are still on the table, Bohm says, but the center’s main priority for the foreseeable future is to determine which research projects to continue and the colony size needed to support them.
The Tulane center is in the process of developing a similar initiative that couples 24/7 video monitoring with the animals’ extensive health records to track how different behavioral and physiological factors contribute to the progression of HIV/AIDs. “This is like a total living laboratory,” says center director Jay Rappaport. Another untapped possibility is pooling the centers’ health records into one cohesive database, Johnson and Ross say, which would make population studies even more powerful.
The centers’ extensive records also make them well suited to lead efforts to improve and validate the NAMs that the U.S. government is moving toward, Bohm says: When researchers validate NAMs, they need to compare their results with consistent, robust data from animals, which the centers have in spades.
The primate center directors are enthusiastic about efforts to improve NAMs and reduce the use of animals as quickly as possible, Ross says—but NAMs are still very much a complement to animal work, not a replacement for it. “I’m hoping that we don’t damage the networks and the infrastructure in this sudden push to jump ahead of where we are.” It’s like the U.S. is a toddler who, in the excitement of learning how to walk, throws themself down the stairs and hopes for the best, she says. “If we undo all of this infrastructure, we won’t be in a position to rebuild it.”
