Chartbook 426 Greenland v. the price of lab monkeys.

Another weekend. Another outrageous Trump-centered crisis to derail any kind of sustained thought. Venezuela, the Fed, now Greenland (again).

I start the weekend determined to write about something systemic, recurring and fundamental, but not obvious - the price of lab monkeys.

Instead, we are here. With the headlines warning of naked NATO-on-NATO violence and the real possibility of a historic European surrender. Or perhaps not. Who knows. What is clear is that the Trump-Greenland saga is gratuitous, grotesque, absurd. It would be a bad idea to spend too much mental effort trying to rationalize it. But how can we not? And how can we not ask, why there is no one in America willing or able to put an end to humiliating nonsense? But as important as those questions are, the crisis that provokes them is utterly gratuitous.

So what do we do? How to continue thinking seriously about the world when so much of the news is dominated by a very powerful clown with no one to stop him?

I am brought back to the dualistic image of a recent New York Times piece in which I contrasted Trump’s steam punk, COSPLAY madhouse with the classic dialectic of modern power, which in China is being raised to a new pitch. China is both rolling out massive green energy capacity and struggling with huge problems of decarbonization. These are real challenges. Trump, by contrast, simply denies the issue. Bans wind turbines and has his family money invested fusion.

The short Times piece was about energy. But I think this dualism applies more generally. We are living through a historic divergence in rationality. This isn’t to say that Trump does not have his reasons. Everyone has reasons. But his reasons and those of the subordinates who encourage and enable him, are clearly ordered in quite idiosyncratic ways.

Does one type of (ir)rationality condition the other? Is this another instance of uneven and combined development? Is it China’s rise that drives America mad? Perhaps. But the Frankenstein monster that is MAGA has roots that go back deeper.

In any case, there is a danger that trying to make sense of Trump becomes our sole preoccupation. This not only distract us from broader and more productive developments going on around the world. MAGA’s darkness makes more conventional modernity seem more clean-cut than it really is.

Which brings us to the price of lab monkeys.

This issue first caught my eye a few years ago in the wake of COVID, when I had first begun to follow pharma with real interest. As it turns out, the price of Non Human Primates - monkeys - that are used in their tens of thousands in pharmaceutical testing are regularly tracked by bank analysts. Why? Because, the more dynamic the biotech sector the more monkeys the scientists need.

The problem is that it takes four years to raise a monkey to sufficient maturity to be suitable for full blown testing. So you have what economists call a “hog cycle”, in which prices oscillate between highs and lows as supply adjusts in a lagged fashion to shifts in demand.

The report that caught my eye at the beginning of 2026 by Eleanor Olcott the FT’s China tech correspondent, informed us that monkey prices were now at historic highs.

“The cost of the monkeys — a proxy for the volume of clinical trials — is projected to reach Rmb150,000 ($21,000) at the start of 2026, up from an average of Rmb103,000 in 2025. … Monkey prices have see-sawed since the pandemic, rising to a record Rmb188,000 in 2022 before slumping the following year as investment retreated. Breeders did not increase primate populations during the downturn … contributing to today’s supply crunch. … it takes about four years for monkeys to be raised to a stage suitable for clinical trials.”

The price of monkeys is given in RMB because the driver of this entire story, is not simply the hog-cycle dynamics of a market with inelastic supply, but the secular, long-term rise of Chinese biotech. The reason that influential bank analysts like Chen Chen at UBS track monkey prices is that it is a good proxy for the volume of biotech testing going on across Chinese labs.

Source: FT

Before the current China-biotech boom began, back in 2019, lab monkeys could be had for as little as $4000.

The “monkey price has been on a roller-coaster ride over the past few years, largely mirroring the ups and downs of pre-clinical activities in China’s biotech sector”, opined Bruce Liu, partner at consultancy Simon-Kucher, back in 2022. At the time, falling primate prices were prompting Chinese biotech groups that bought monkey farms during pandemic-era supply crunches to write down the value of their assets. Beijing-based Joinn Laboratories, which acquired two lab animal suppliers in 2022, has warned about the impact of falling primate prices on its business. “The company’s main biological asset are NHPs used for pre-clinical trials. Because we have significant inventory of NHPs, price fluctuations will cause significant changes to the fair value of the biological assets,” said Gao Dapeng, Joinn’s general manager, during a call with investors at the end of last year. In its 2023 financial report, the company said the value of its primate assets had fallen by about $40mn.

Since then the Chinese pharma industry has come roaring back. Prices have recovered. The business of supplying monkey “models” to researchers is booming. And China is leading the world in the scale of the monkey populations it maintains in its research labs. Magazines like Science have reported on prominent neuroscientists from the West considering moves to China, where they are attracted by an abundant supply of NHP and the possibility to conduct their experiments sheltered from any possibility of animal rights protest.

And then MAGA struck. In December 2025 David Grimm reported in Science:

In his strongest condemnation yet of animal research, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said over the weekend that his department, which oversees several science agencies, is “deeply committed to ending animal experimentation.” He also called for an end to the importation of monkeys for scientific studies, claimed the federally funded National Primate Research Centers (NPRCs) are driven by profit, and floated the idea of moving research monkeys to sanctuaries. The remarks, made Saturday on a Fox News program hosted by the daughter-in-law of President Donald Trump, have sent shock waves through the biomedical community. “What a disaster this would be for not only infectious disease, but also neuroscience, behavior, reproductive biology, and transplant research,” says JoAnne Flynn, a microbiologist at the University of Pittsburgh who uses nonhuman primates to study tuberculosis. Leaders of the seven primate centers, all of which are funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), also pushed back. Kennedy’s claims that NPRCs are driven by profit are “wrong and offensive to those who have dedicated their lives to helping others and providing care for the animals,” says Joyce Cohen, associate director of animal resources at the Emory NPRC. “It has taken decades to build the NPRCs into world-class facilities that … produce scientific advancements that save and improve human and animal lives.” She adds that her facility is committed to researching nonanimal approaches, but such models currently “cannot replicate the complexity of multiple systems working together in a living organism.” Biomedical researchers who work with animals have been on edge since Trump took office for his second term in January. Over the past year, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and NIH have announced plans to reduce their reliance on animal studies. Monkey researchers have been especially concerned. In 2023, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report concluded that the supply of nonhuman primates for biomedical research was at a crisis point, with access to animals from both domestic and foreign sources becoming unreliable. U.S. labs use about 70,000 monkeys a year; the shortage, researchers argued, was compromising studies on infectious diseases, neurodegenerative conditions, and vaccines. Lobbying efforts to get the United States to increase funding for NPRCs have been unsuccessful, however. The concerns have intensified recently. Since last summer, rumors have swirled among researchers that the government is considering closing the NPRCs—which house about 20,000 animals used in academic labs—and converting them into sanctuaries, in part because private sanctuaries have no room. Then, last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moved to phase out all of its monkey studies. And on Friday, a group of Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to NIH Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya, urging him to prioritize nonanimal models and reduce funding to the NPRCs. Kennedy made his remarks during a pretaped segment of My View with Lara Trump titled “Ending Animal Abuse in America.” Seated between Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins and Attorney General Pam Bondi, who condemned puppy mills and dog fighting, respectively, Kennedy said internal studies by HHS had concluded that “the predictivity of animal models is very, very poor for human health outcomes.” Nonanimal approaches such as artificial intelligence “are much better,” he said. “We’re re-educating researchers so that they know that there are these other forms of research that are much more predictive.” … Kennedy didn’t specify why he wanted to end monkey imports, but the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) says it met with him in June to present evidence that foreign monkeys can carry tuberculosis, herpes, and other infectious diseases. “PETA applauds the secretary for speaking the truth and offering a way forward that will help human patients without caging and killing other primates,” the organization’s senior vice president, Kathy Guillermo, says. An HHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for more details on Kennedy’s remarks. “Across the Trump administration, there is a shift to prioritize animal welfare,” the spokesperson told Science. “At HHS, that includes moves to reduce unnecessary animal testing requirements and prioritizing human-based research.” The seven primate centers have an annual budget of more than $100 million. “Any cuts to the NPRCs would deliver a major setback to U.S. scientific progress,” Cohen says. Jay Rappaport, director of the Tulane National Biomedical Research Center, another NPRC, warns the U.S. could regret closing these facilities if a new pandemic emerges. “We have to be ready for new biological and infectious disease threats, and we need to be able to compete with China,” he says. (China has been rapidly expanding its primate breeding and research facilities.) Still, Rappaport notes that his center has recently rebranded, replacing “primate” with “biomedical” to signal a more diverse focus on nonmonkey studies. “Nonhuman primate work is still a foundational pillar of our center, but we’re expanding into other areas.”

The monkey supply chain issues go back to the early 2020s, as Science reported in 2023:

The U.S. uses about 70,000 monkeys per year in studies of the brain, infectious disease, and aging; the EU about 5000; and the U.K. about 2000. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, China stopped exporting research monkeys, shutting off a key pipeline for the United States and United Kingdom. At the time, the U.S. was receiving 60% of its imported monkeys from China. The vast majority of these were cynomolgus macaques (or cynos), a species mostly used by private industry for drug and vaccine research. (Rhesus macaques, the primary monkey species used in U.S. academic labs, are mostly bred domestically in the U.S.) The U.S. and other countries were able to make up for some of the shortfall by increasingly sourcing monkeys from Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. But the pandemic spiked demand, sucking up monkeys for vaccine research. “COVID left the cupboard bare, and we’re still struggling to recover,” says Jonah Sacha, an immunologist at Oregon Health & Science University who uses rhesus macaques and cynos to study various infectious diseases. In 2022, Air France became the last major airline to refuse to transport monkeys for research, increasing the difficultly of getting these animals to labs. That same year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature classified cynos as endangered, citing growing demand from the research industry and prompting fears that the animals would become even harder to import. Then, in November 2022, Cambodia—which had largely made up for the shuttered Chinese pipeline by supplying more than 29,000 cynos in 2020, the vast majority to the U.S.—was hit with a major smuggling scandal. U.S. investigators charged several individuals with illegally exporting hundreds—and potentially more than 2000—wild-caught cynos to the U.S. and falsely labeling them as captive-bred. Since then, two of the world’s largest suppliers of cynos—Inotiv and Charles River Laboratories—have stopped their imports from Cambodia. Both companies tell Science they are working on new procedures that would ensure any monkeys they import have a legitimate provenance. (Some groups have claimed that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is blocking monkey imports, but the agency tells Science in an email that it “has not implemented any new policies banning the importation or exportation of non-human primates.”) The U.S. and EU breed some monkeys domestically—a few thousand in total, and mostly for academic researchers—but these facilities, too, have struggled to meet demand.

Culture wars over the science establishment, Robert Kennedy Jr, China-US, Cambodia, supply chains, the COVID shock …. Here we are well and truly in the world of uneven and combined development. In the end perhaps the lesson here is that though Trump’s obsession with Greenland may still be a stretch, what expresses itself in the gyrations of lab monkey prices is, indeed, the polycrisis of our age.

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I love writing the newsletter. Can’t wait to get back to even more active posting in 2026 when the book is done. In the mean time, if you fancy buying me a coffee once a month, you know what to do. Chartbook will keep on coming in any case.