Max Planck defends primate research

Germany's Max Planck Society has said it will continue to fund research on primates, despite a decision by a high-profile researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics to stop such experiments.

The society announced on 30 April that Nikos Logothetis, a director at the institute in Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, had decided that his ongoing experiments on primates would be the last to be conducted there.

Logothetis, a Greek neuroscientist who directs the institute’s department dealing with the physiology of cognitive processes, said that rodents would be the only animals involved in the institute’s future research. In a letter reported by Science magazine, Logothetis indicated that a lack of support from his institution had been part of the reason for his decision.