Contact: Eric Kleiman, 717-939-3231
Americans should know where their taxes go, animal research watchdog group says
Univ. of Wisc. Primate Ctr. Has 2 of the “Top 10 List of Most Ridiculous Research on Animals for 2011”
Madison, WI (April 17, 2012) – Today, as Americans file their tax returns for 2011, In Defense of Animals (IDA) is unveiling its “Top 10 List of Most Ridiculous Research on Animals for 2011” and relaunching its Real Ridiculous Research (RRR) campaign in recognition of ridiculous, wasteful experiments funded by your tax dollars. The University of Wisconsin Primate Center has two studies on the list, numbers 3 and 1, including a study showing that lemon scent can induce erections in marmoset monkeys. And that’s not even number 1.
“With unemployment sky-high and our economy still suffering from the Great Recession, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) still spends billions of your tax dollars every year to fund animal experiments,” said IDA Research Director Eric Kleiman. “Our own research indicates that this is little more than ‘white-coated welfare’ for experimenters living off of a grant gravy train funded by hard-hit American taxpayers.”
IDA’s “Top 10” list is comprised of NIH-funded experiments that were selected from scientific papers published in 2011, approved by federally-mandated oversight committees, and published in peer-reviewed journals.
In one of the experiments, number 3 on the list, researchers at the University of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, Merck and Northeastern University demonstrated that male marmoset monkeys can be conditioned to associate an arbitrary odor – in this case, lemon – with sexual experience. After conditioning, the odor of lemon caused male marmosets to become sexually aroused, even in the absence of a female marmoset.
This study was funded by two grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Primate Research Center Grant, which is now in its 51st year of taxpayer funding.
The number 1 experiment on the list was funded by seven different grants, including both the University of Wisconsin and Tulane University Primate Center grants, both in their 51st year of taxpayer funding. Researchers acknowledged that daily uncontrollable stress is a basic part of an animal’s life in a laboratory, regardless even of which experiments are performed on them. In their words: “It is widely accepted that procedures that are performed as part of routine husbandry have the potential to affect both physiological and behavioral parameters that are associated with stress.”
Unsurprisingly, rhesus monkeys showed “abnormal behaviors,” stereotypies like rocking or pacing back and forth, while watching another monkey be physically restrained and injected with anesthetic, and they exhibited these abnormal behaviors less when they were sharing a cage with another monkey.
What is surprising is that “there is widespread hesitance to pair-house adult male rhesus macaques,” despite the evidence that it is better for primates on the whole than social isolation. Despite the overwhelming evidence that it is better for primates to be housed together, experimenters continue to waste precious tax dollars on studies “finding” what has been known for many decades: that monkeys are highly social and intelligent beings who are greatly harmed by social isolation and seeing their friends suffering.
According to Kleiman, these types of experiments get funded because of the NIH’s fundamentally broken system of funding, which has:
•Resulted in a glut of researchers and scientific misbehaviors as fierce competition for funds increases;
•In a March 2012 expose published in Nature, called into question the reliability of highly-prestigious, highly-cited preclinical research;
•Been blasted by past NIH Directors, thousands of NIH-funded researchers and eminent scientists as preventing innovative, risk-taking research;
•Spawned predoctoral grants in which taxpayers help fund “underrepresented” researchers’ obtaining Ph.D.’s by experimenting on animals, thus breeding the next generation of animal experimenters;
•Funded the National Primate Research Center System to the tune of $1.5 billion over the past 20 years simply to keep the Centers open (half of IDA’s Top 10 List contains experiments conducted or supported by these Primate Centers).
Kleiman said that these systemic problems – of which stupid and wasteful animal experimentation is a clear symptom – have prompted IDA to ask the House Committee on Energy and Commerce to re-launch and expand its 2003 investigation of NIH’s management and oversight of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants.
“In today’s exigent economic climate, the need for Congress to re-open and widen this investigation is more urgent than ever,” concluded Kleiman. “For Tax Day 2011, we hope this is a wake-up call about how NIH wastes your tax dollars. IDA’s RRR campaign plans to regularly reveal the sad reality of animal experimentation and the fundamentally broken, taxpayer-supported NIH system that continues to fund this ‘white-coated welfare.’”
IDA’s complete Top 10 list and more details regarding NIH’s systemic problems are available at http://idausa.org/rrr
