Rick Marolt: UW should quantify the costs, benefits of monkey experiments

UW-Madison has assured citizens recently at a public meeting and on public radio that experiments on monkeys are ethical because the benefits of the experiments exceed the costs. But an inquiry has revealed that the committees responsible for approving experiments cannot compare costs and benefits of an experiment because they have no method for quantifying them, and that there is little or no evidence that the committees even discuss costs and benefits.