Oh No! A Couple of Monkeys Died!

But how many lives might eventually be saved?
PETA's pissed off again because scientists decided that identifying the virus that causes SARS was worth the lives of a few monkeys. Proving that a particular microbe causes a particular disease requires several steps, one of which is that you infect a vulnerable host with your suspected bug, see the disease appear and find the suspected bug in the host's tissues.
When SARS first appeared, nobody new what caused it, but had several suspects. They injected isolates of these bugs into monkeys until, voila, some contracted SARS.
This detective work has already saved human lives. It might allow us to head off a pandemic. But PETA is mad because a few monkeys died in the process. Perhaps in the future, they'd like to ask their membership for a few volunteers to stand in for the monkeys.

And now there's this. If scientists had not used monkeys to verify the virus, we would have SARS diagnostic kits ready to go.