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A chimp is sedated to draw blood in their efforts to find a cure for Hepatitis C, a potentially deadly virus, at Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. Government scientists now want hundreds of research chimps like this one to be retired to a national sanctuary.

Government scientists have agreed that all but 50 of hundreds of chimpanzees kept for federally funded research should be retired from labs and sent to a national sanctuary. 

The proposal from a National Institutes of Health committee also said all of the chimps should have plenty of room to play and climb.

The NIH Council of Councils Working Group approved the proposal on Tuesday. It also calls for major cuts in grants to study chimps in laboratories and no return to breeding them for research.

Nine chimpanzees arrived Tuesday at Chimp Haven outside Shreveport, La., from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette's New Iberia Research Center, which no longer has an NIH chimp research contract. Seven more are expected Thursday and another 95 will arrive over the coming months, sanctuary officials said.

The federal agency said in 2011 that it would phase out most invasive research on chimpanzees. The new 86-page recommendation describes how chimpanzees should be kept and what will be needed for any future research. Chimps should be used only if there is no other way to study a threat to human health, and the research should be approved by an independent committee with members from the public, said the Council of Councils proposal, which will be sent to the NIH director after a 60-day public-comment period.

Animal welfare activists said they were pleased by the recommendations.

"At last, our federal government understands: A chimpanzee should no more live in a laboratory than a human should live in a phone booth," the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said in a statement.

Chimp Haven was created on 200 acres of a Caddo Parish park in Keithville in northwest Louisiana.

"We should see more than 300 chimpanzees getting moved to the federal sanctuary system," said Kathleen Conlee, the Humane Society of the United States' vice president for animal research issues.

But Conlee said she was disappointed by the recommendation to keep a group of about 50 in case further research on chimpanzees is approved.

"But I'm glad they made clear those animals should be kept to much higher standards than they are currently being kept in," she said.

Chimpanzees should be kept in groups of at least seven, with about 1,000 square feet of outdoor space per chimp — roughly one-sixth of an acre for a group of seven, according to the proposal.

The space must include year-round outdoor access with a variety of natural surfaces such as grass, dirt and mulch, and enough climbing space to let all members of large troupes travel, feed and rest well above the ground, and with material to let them build new nests each day, the report said.

Chimp Haven's enclosures range from a quarter-acre to five acres, some of them forested and all with climbing structures.

The announcement that the first animals had arrived was delayed a day to keep stress on them to a minimum, officials said.

"Understandably, the chimpanzees are nervous when they arrive, and we do everything possible to ease their stress. That includes limiting the number of people in the area to only those who are required to help with the chimpanzees. We also must minimize the risks of the chimpanzees being exposed to communicable diseases," veterinarian Raven Jackson said in the news release.

A $30 million cap on total spending for construction and care of Chimp Haven's retirees has been looming. That would stop NIH from contributing 75 percent of the $13,000 annual cost to care for each federal chimpanzee.

Conlee said the Humane Society will urge Congress to move money now spent on research contracts to Chimp Haven. The sanctuary gives the animals better care for less money than the labs are paid, she said. 

 Related: A question of freedom for chimpanzees who spend lives in research labs

Don't miss the latest health news on NBC News.com

The federal government may continue to pay for controversial human embryonic stem cell research, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

The three-judge panel says the government has correctly interpreted a law that bans the use of federal funds to destroy human embryos for research. The ruling is unlikely to put the issue to rest and one of the judges pleaded for Congress to make clear what the government should and should not be able to do.

The hard-to-understand case pits science against mostly religious arguments against using embryos in medical research. It's even more confusing because there are so many differenlt types of cells called stem cells.

Dr. James Sherley of Boston Biomedical Research Institute and Theresa Deisher of AVM Biotechnology in Seattle, who both do research using adult stem cells and oppose the use of human embryonic stem cells, sued in 2009. They said federal guidelines violate the law and would harm their work by increasing competition for limited federal funding.

It’s been back and forth in the federal courts since then, and Sherley has vowed to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

The embryonic stem cells at issue are the body’s master cells. Found in days-old embryos, they are the source of all the cells and tissues in the body – blood, brain, bone and muscle.  Researchers are studying them to investigate how disease develops and are using some as transplants to treat diseases from Parkinson’s to cancer. They are being tested in people to repair spinal cord injuries and as a possible cure for some forms of blindness.

Opponents of the research say it’s unacceptable to destroy a human embryo to get the cells. The 1996 Dickey-Wicker amendment, added by Congress to budget language every year, forbids the use of federal funds in research that destroys embryos.

When he was president, George W. Bush decided that the ban extended to human embryonic stem-cell research and greatly limited the federal program.

As one of his first acts after he entered office, President Barack Obama issued an executive order reversing this and encouraging the National Institutes of Health to pay for embryonic stem-cell research, so long as federal money wasn’t used to directly make the stem cells. To get the cells, someone in a private lab using private money has to take apart the embryos – usually left over from fertility clinics and destined for the trash can.  Federal funds may be used to work with the cells that private labs make available.

On Friday, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, Judge David Bryan Sentelle, and Karen LeCraft Henderson of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington upheld an earlier court ruling throwing out the case. The law, they said “permits federal funding of research projects that utilize already-derived embryonic stem cells—which are not themselves embryos—because no ‘human embryo or embryos are destroyed’ in such projects.”

 “As we have held before, the NIH interpretation of the statute’s actual language is reasonable,’ they added.

"NIH will continue to move forward, conducting and funding research in this very promising area of science. The ruling affirms our commitment to the patients afflicted by diseases that may one day be treatable using the results of this research," NIH director Dr. Francis Collins said in a statement. 

But Judge Brown wasn’t entirely happy and asked Congress to please clear up the unclear wording of the Dickey-Wicker amendment and saying  “there are aspects of this case that … should trouble the heart.”

“Given the weighty interests at stake in this encounter between science and ethics, relying on an increasingly Delphic, decade-old single paragraph rider on an appropriations bill hardly seems adequate,” she wrote in Friday’s opinion.

Supporters of the research said they were thrilled. “This ensures that America’s best scientists can continue to move this work forward despite ideologically driven attempts to derail it,” said Amy Rick, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research.

There are other types of stem cells, including so-called adult stem cells, found in everyone's bodies. But scientists say they don't have the same powerful properties as embryonic stem cells. Labs are also working to re-program ordinary cells to behave like embryonic cells. A deeply divided Congress has decided not to weigh in on the issue until elections give one party or the other more power.