the US even let one run the Whitehouse for eight years.
a bad move.

gee, chimpanzees are way more human than a corpoation shall ever be!

Is that a picture of Dub-ya from his days in the Texas Air National Guard?

"SPEAKING OF CHIMPS", FROM WIKIPEDIA: (excerpts) My Life as a Dog (Swedish: Mitt liv som hund) is a 1985 Swedish drama film directed by Lasse Hallström, based on a novel by Reidar Jönsson. It tells the story of Ingemar, a young boy sent to live with relatives...
...Throughout the film, Ingemar tells himself over and over that it could have been worse, reciting several examples, such as a man who took a shortcut onto the field during a track meet and was killed by a javelin and the story of the dog Laika several times, the first creature sent into orbit by the Russians (without any way to get her back down)...
~
...Laika (Russian: Лайка, literally meaning "Barker"; c. 1954 – November 3, 1957) was a Soviet space dog that became the first animal to orbit the Earth – as well as the first animal to die in orbit...
...Laika likely died within hours after launch from overheating,[2] possibly caused by a failure of the central R-7 sustainer to separate from the payload.[3] The true cause and time of her death was not made public until 2002; instead, it was widely reported that she died when her oxygen ran out on day six,[4] or (as Soviet government initially claimed) she was euthanised prior to oxygen depletion. Nonetheless, the experiment proved that a living passenger could survive being launched into orbit and endure weightlessness, paving the way for human spaceflight and providing scientists with some of the first data on how living organisms react to spaceflight environments.
On April 11, 2008, Russian officials unveiled a monument to Laika. A small monument in her honour was built near the military research facility in Moscow which prepared Laika's flight to space. It features a dog standing on top of a rocket... ~
Mitt liv som hund (My Life As A Dog) [VIDEO, 01:58] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPAJxGquXbo

Torture for the Chimps and no Single Payer Healthcare for the Chumps.

Save humans first. Stop overpopulation. Stop human expansion. Begin human optimization in a stable state society.

Stop unnecessary cruelty to humans and animals. Recognize that the burdens of upholding global society need to be reasonably equally shared, and that the unequal sharing of work and the pains of production amounts to 'cruelty' to 2-3 billion people, with one billion of them downright starving.

Next time someone pulls up a picture of a cute kitten, puppy or chimp in torment with a sob-story to go with it, consider the billion starving humans who are kin and closer to deserve your empathy.

When humans stop hurting humans, we'll naturally stop hurting animals unnecessarily too.

What we are headed for, I fear, is a retake..... of human civilization.......or some other species..... to develop in our place..... The situation we find ourselves in, in regards to enviornment, poplulation, climate change, does not look promising to me. I really have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that we will start to extend compassion, understanding to our fellow man, in time to save ourselves.
It's funny, I am home, trying to clean (raining) and watching movies..... two movies in a row, about the ability of humans to extend compassion and empathy toward their fellow humans and other species..... "The Box" and "The Day the World Stood Still" with Keanu Reeves..... I noted that the moon is also in Pisces, the sign which correlates with those very qualities...

It's interesting that they speak of the engineered mouse as a possibility towards hepititis research in 2, 5, or 10 years. This is just a tool for research. Meaning that they don't even anticipate finding definitive answers in the next 10 years? In another ten years, we might have progressed just as far as having another subject to experiment on ..? Speaking as someone not familiar with these fields, what are the interests, so to speak, driving this research? Is there an interest in obtaining real answers? Or is the interest in just funding continuing research that never gets anywhere?

There was a research breakthrough in cancer recently, but with 3 human subjects -

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/11/health/la-he-0811-cancer-therapy-20110811

With hepatitis C, I am guessing the most promise is in stem cell research, whereby they may be able to grow human organs, like livers, for transplant.

I don't have any problem with research using voluntarily donated human embryos. Since embryos are just a mass of cells that haven't yet developed into a being.

I do have a problem with chimpamzee research. Chimps are just far too intelligent, sentient beings, very closely related to ourselves.

Would you use dolphins or whales for these types of experiments? They too are very intelligent creatures with feelings, who suffer.

Animal Minds and the Foible of Human Exceptionalism
By Marc Bekoff
"Man in his arrogance thinks of himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity. [Yet it is] more humble and, I believe, true to consider him created from animals." (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man)

Nonhuman animals (animals) are magnificent and amazing beings. They clearly have wide-ranging cognitive, emotional, and moral capacities. We can learn a lot from them if we open or minds and hearts to who (not what) they really are. We should be proud of our citizenship in the animal kingdom. Scientific research is changing the way we view other animals. We don't have to go beyond the science or embellish what we know to appreciate how they express their intellectual skills and emotional capacities. We're clearly neither the only conscious beings nor the sole occupants of the emotional and moral arenas in which there are also some surprising residents including honeybees, fish, and chickens. Surely we have no right to intrude wantonly into the lives of other animals or to judge them or blame them for our evil ways.

When we say animals are conscious and smart we mean they know what to do to adapt to ever-changing environments. The versatility and flexibility of their behavior show clearly they are not machine-like automatons, but rather actively thinking and feeling beings. Donald Griffin, often called the "father of cognitive ethology" (the study of animal minds), postulated that the ability of animals to adapt to unpredictably changing conditions showed they were conscious and able to assess what needed to be done in a given situation. It's not a question of if animals are conscious but rather why consciousness has evolved.

There are sound biological reasons for recognizing animals as conscious beings. Charles Darwin stressed that variations among species are differences in degree rather than kind. There are shades of gray, not black and white differences, so if we have something "they" (other animals) have it too. This is called evolutionary continuity and shows that it is bad biology to rob animals of the traits they clearly possess. For example, we share with other mammals and vertebrates the same areas of the brain that are important for consciousness and processing emotions. We need to abandon the anthropocentric view that only big-brained animals such as ourselves, nonhuman great apes, elephants, and cetaceans (dolphins and whales) have sufficient mental capacities for complex forms of consciousness.

The ramifications of how we view other animals in relation to ourselves are wide-ranging and greatly influence how we treat them. There are social, political, and environmental implications when we ignore who other animals are and think of ourselves as above and better than them. An essay by philosopher Steven Best provides a penetrating analysis of why human exceptionalism, the belief that human beings have special status based on our unique capacities, is a false view and has serious consequences because of how we (or at least some of us) conduct ourselves when we view ourselves as "members of a distinct species in relation to other species and Earth as a whole..." Best provides a comprehensive review of recent research in cognitive ethology to support his argument that we do indeed share many traits with other animals. The database grows daily and science is supporting many of our intuitions about the cognitive, emotional, and moral capacities of a wide-range of animals.

Clearly, we need to rethink human "uniqueness" and dispense with speciesism. Best notes that humans do indeed show unique capacities such as writing sonnets, solving algebraic equations, and meditating on the structure of the universe, and he also points out that other animals have abilities and traits that we don't have. Speciesism, "discrimination against or exploitation of certain animal species by human beings, based on an assumption of mankind’s superiority", involves assigning different values or rights to individuals on the basis of species membership and constructs false boundaries among species. Speciesism doesn't work because it assumes human exceptionalism and also because it ignores within-species variation that often is more marked than between-species differences (see also).

What we now know about animal minds (certainly among mammals but also among a wide variety of other species) does not support human exceptionalism and we need to factor this into how we treat other animals and Earth. Best concludes, "If humans have for so long failed to understand animal minds it is because their own stupidity, insensitivity, and deep speciesist bias have for so long blinded them." We also can add arrogance to the list of why some people think other species are no more important than dispensable objects. But the blinders are coming off. And we're learning a lot about other animals that can make us better people.

Alienating ourselves from other animals and dominating them is not what it means to be human.

We are a significant force in nature. We need to be more compassionate, empathic, and humble and act with greater concern for animals and their homes. We suffer the indignities to which we expose other animals and in the end we all lose when we ignore nature and act as if we're the only animals who count, that we are exceptional and better and can do whatever we want because we can. Power is neither license to make other animal's lives miserable nor to redecorate their homes with no concern for their well-being.

Whether you agree or disagree with all of Best's arguments against human exceptionalism and their social, political, and environmental implications is immaterial. What does matter is that his stimulating essay should get us all to appreciate how fascinating other animals are and that we can no longer continue to be over-producing, over-consuming, arrogant, big-brained, big-footed, and invasive mammals who don't give other animals the respect, compassion, and love they deserve.

The time has come to debunk the myth of human exceptionalism once and for all... It's a hollow, shallow, and self-serving perspective on who we are. Of course we are exceptional in various arenas as are other animals. Perhaps we should replace the notion of human exceptionalism with species exceptionalism, a move that will force us to appreciate other animals for who they are, not who or what we want them to be.