Ari Daniel Bradshaw

this whole story sounds made up lol i just learned that AI is creating a lab monkey crisis. in 2019, a lab monkey cost $3,000. now they're $20,000+ each, and it’s about to get way worse. that's because AI can now design endless new drugs to cure diseases in humans. but a lot of these new drugs need to be tested on monkeys first before they can go into a human, because they're one of our closest living relatives. so the more drugs AI designs, the more monkeys we need to test them. but we were *already* running out of monkeys before AI showed up. it started in 2020 when China (who supplied 60% of America's lab monkeys) banned exports. so labs switched to Cambodia, until the US found out in 2022 that monkeys there were illegally being caught in the wild and sold as farm-raised so American labs stopped buying the obvious fix would be to just breed more monkeys but a female monkey only starts having babies around age 4, and after that she only has one baby a year. so supply simply can’t keep up. even China, which kept all its monkeys for itself, is now sold out at about $26,000 a monkey (roughly 12x the 2019 price) this is why this startup (Safer Human Medicine) wants to build a 30,000-monkey farm in the US the plan is to start with 500-1,000 macaques (the main monkey used in drug testing) from farms in Asia, then breed them up to 30,000 over about 20 years. so eventually, American labs can finally stop relying on the (increasingly expensive!) 20,000 monkeys imported every year.