Personal attacks will get you banned on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. No more of this, please, and please don't post in the flamewar style to HN generally. It's not what this place is for.
Tell me one major biomedical discovery, not comparative anatomy or physiology, that we learned first or best from chimp research. I have a PhD in this and can’t think of one.
I agree that they're very genetically similar to humans. I agree that this, in some ways, would make them a good model organism. Where I disagree is that it's true we productively use(d) chimps in biomedical research for this reason. Instead, I would argue that the limited amount of biomedical research that's been done on chimps is because of the genetic similarity, which is the other way round.
If you need a realistic model of a human for (say), preclinical or toxicology studies, chimps are almost never used. Rhesus monkeys are. Dogs, sometimes, or pigs. Ferrets work pretty well for respiratory stuff. Models are sometimes picked based on genetic similarity, but functional or anatomical similarity also guide the choice. Pig hearts are a go-to model for cardiac stuff, even though a primate heart is obviously closer.
Very occasionally, people will study chimps qua chimps. This is indeed because they're close to humans, but it's not usually aimed at improving human health. Moreover, this was never particularly popular and is now incredibly rare. Primates account for like 1-2% of vertebrates used in biomedical research; chimps can't be more than a tiny fraction of that.
If you said "software is written in assembler because it's close to the machine", I think most people would agree that it could be, but also that it is, in practice, not. That's exactly how I feel about this. Chimps could be used for biomedical research--and for that reason--but in practice, they're not.
