Primates are a <i>very valuable resource</i> for medical research. Lots of research programes would highly benefit from higher primates. But researches have been driven to be <i>even afraid to ask</i> for access to such a resource if they want grants accepted anywhere in the world! Gould luck asking for any higher primate for any neuroscience research if you want it approved!<p>By artificially making them <i>prohibitively expensive</i> (by, for examples, demanding higher quality of animal care and all sorts of authorizations) and by adding tons of ethical and regulatory concerns, nobody even asks for them because the cost&#x2F;risk ratio for any project makes it not worth it.<p>It&#x27;s &quot;probably&quot; X times cheaper to go to a third world country and cladestinely test any crucial biotech stuff <i>directly on humans</i> as they are cheap and in some places &quot;unwanted&quot; anyhow. Governments&#x2F;army probably have access to prisons for their needs also.<p>I can imagine when cool and useful stuff like implantable high-res-and-bandwidth brain-computer-interfaces come to market with killer side-effects because of improper prior testing. Oh wait... they&#x27;ll probably come 50 years later anyhow because they&#x27;re too risky&#x2F;expensive to develop and test.<p>This kinds of stupid policy moves could have even nastier species-level consequences: imagine having a superhuman-AI pop up <i>before we have human-mind-uploading capabilities</i> and wipe out the whole goddamn human race before we get to upload even one human-intelligence to the cloud :| ...simply because the mind uploading stuff and its precursor technologies would&#x27;ve had to be developed through iterative testing on chimpanzees because it was illegal or too expensive (or the army&#x2F;gov was not interested in it strongly enough to have the experiments done directly on humans).<p><i>Sad...</i>