The world-famous primate expert and other scientists appealed to European Union officials today to end the testing of animals for science and medical research. “We need to recognize at the outset that what we do to animals from their perspective certainly, and probably from ours, is morally wrong and unacceptable,” Goodall says, according to the Associated Press.

She presented a petition with 150,000 names to lawmakers at the European Parliament that calls on lawmakers and the EU’s executive office to find testing methods that do not involve animals. Goodall and animal rights groups want EU governments to revise 1986 rules by expanding expand a ban on the use of animals in testing and promote alternative technologies for medical research.

“Where is the big encouragement, where is the political will, where is the funding for this kind of research and where are the prizes?” Goodall asked. “Why is animal-alternative work never recognized in the Nobel Prize for medicine, for example?”

The governments of the EU’s 27 member countries, and industries in those countries, need to meet a 2009 deadline imposed by EU law, which the AP notes, will ban most cosmetics tested on animals from the EU, but will not entirely ban testing animals in medical research.

However, the European Commission and the cosmetics, chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries agreed in 2006 to voluntarily reduce and eventually replace animal testing for new medicines and other consumer products within the EU.

Scientist Gill Langley, from the British-based Dr. Hadwen Trust, an advocacy group that opposes animal testing in medical research, says about 12 million animals are used each year in experiments across the EU.

“The leading user countries include France, Britain and Germany,” she says. “Many of the countries that do those experiments don’t keep statistics at all.” Globally, she estimates 115 million animals are used for medical testing every year, and that the US is the world’s “single largest user” of animals for medical testing.

Langley points to studies that found that animal testing was not able to predict the effect of drugs on humans in 50 to 99 percent of cases. And she suggests the EU encourage more voluntary testing on humans and better use of computer models to predict the effects of new medicines on human health.

Goodall, for those who don’t recall, revolutionized primate research during the 1960s when she studied them at close range in Tanzania. She documented tool use, emotions and war in the chimpanzee groups she observed, and her books and TV specials about her work at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve sparked the world’s curiosity about apes, the AP writes.

Those studies have made it clear, she said, that no sharp line can be drawn between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.