The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) bills itself as the largest and most influential gathering of conservatives in the world. According to the American Conservative Union, over 19,000 people attended CPAC 2019, some of whom had not missed a single conference since Ronald Reagan gave the first CPAC keynote speech way back in 1974.
There are several core beliefs in the conservative movement that virtually every attendee at CPAC agrees upon. Among them is a desire for a fiscally conservative approach to government, with most conservatives believing the government tends to waste taxpayer money. A second core conservative belief is that life is precious and always must be respected.
It is with those two basic principles in mind that the thousands gathering this week in National Harbor at the 2020 edition of CPAC find themselves with an unusual ally.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has fought for over a year and a half to get research records from the National Institutes of Health regarding unusual lab experiments. Among the records requested by PETA were budgets, government grants, photos and videos. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the federal government is supposed to make nearly all records available to the public upon request, but it has become the norm in some segments of government to ignore FOIA requests until and unless the requester takes the fed’s failure to respond to court and forces the release of the information via a federal court order.
Such was the case when PETA inquired at the NIH about a woman named Elisabeth A. Murray, who works in the National Institute of Mental Health’s Intramural Research Program (IRP) and has been in charge of a budget of tens of millions of dollars over more than a decade.
PETA’s specific interest is that Ms. Murray has been carrying out experiments on monkeys. The purported aim of these experiments has been to investigate which regions of the brain are critical to typical and atypical human emotional reactivity, behavioral flexibility and value updating.
PETA wanted to know what the purpose of the experiments was, to learn the track record and results of the experiments, and to see what if any evidence existed of the treatment and condition of the animals being used in the experiments. More than 18 months after initiating its request, PETA has answers, pictures and videos. All are disturbing.
The dollar costs of the monkey experiments have been staggering, the results have been disappointing and the manner in which the living primates have been treated is appalling.
Ms. Murray has received tens of millions in project funding from NIH, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. According to NIH’s funding database (RePORTER), she received $3.1 million from 2007 to 2008 and $33.2 million from 2009 to 2019. That is more than $36 million in 13 years to carry out experiments on dozens of monkeys without any tangible benefits to humans.
Why does any of this matter to the folks attending CPAC? Because $36 million has been tossed around on monkey business — literally — with no tangible results other than the suffering inflicted on the primates themselves. Money that could go to other health research is being spent to intentionally destroy intelligent life.
According to Ms. Murray’s own web page, her laboratory “studies the neural basis of learning, memory, emotion and response selection … the extent to which different medial temporal lobe structures must interact in storing information and their interaction with the prefrontal cortex. Her work has demonstrated that, for some types of memory, the entorhinal and perirhinal cortical regions in the ventral medial temporal lobe play a more important role than does the hippocampus. Not only does this area, termed the rhinal cortex, specialize in storing knowledge about objects, but it may serve as the core system for semantic memory.”
It may serve? After 13 years and 36 million taxpayer dollars, the researchers think they “might” be onto something? This sounds like the worst stereotype of unaccountable government spending of your money that conservatives everywhere fear. What exactly are Ms. Murray and her team doing?
The $36 million experimenters put healthy monkeys in tiny cages and then do surgical procedures on them. They inject toxins into the monkeys’ brains — creating lesions and causing permanent damage to various brain regions. Then they taunt the monkeys. I kid you not, the videos obtained by PETA show the researchers intentionally scaring the brain damaged monkeys to record their reactions. They continue to do this year after year after year. When damage to one portion of the brain yields no meaningful results, Ms. Murray’s group moves on to another portion of the brain and the fun begins all over again.
The problems with the program are many, but any NIH program that has gone on for more than a dozen years and can’t point to any applicable impact on human health care probably doesn’t need to continue.
Let me toss out a better idea. According to the National Cancer Institute this year an estimated 11,060 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed among children from birth to 14 years. Could $36 million be better spent researching childhood cancers instead of intentionally inflicting brain damage on monkeys?
Worse yet, the research appears to be badly flawed. In a letter to the Director of National Institutes of Health, PETA’s Katherine Roe points out that the monkeys used in these experiments are forced to live alone or in pairs in an impoverished environment lacking in normal social, cognitive, or emotional stimulation, which is known to have a negative effect on primates’ social, emotional, and cognitive functioning — precisely the matters Ms. Murray is purporting to study.
Holding highly intelligent, social, sensitive primates captive in laboratories, performing invasive surgical procedures, and subjecting them to stressful, painful and fear-inducing experiments causes extreme long-term psychological and physical harm. This is unacceptable not only ethically but also scientifically — the myriad behavioral and physiological abnormalities induced by the acute and chronic stress of laboratory life render all data from these experiments unreliable.
Your $36 million, and make no mistake, it is your money, has been tossed away on lab studies so flawed that their results are deemed scientifically worthless. The money is gone. The monkeys lives are gone and yet for reasons unexplained, the program continues.
In her letter asking the NIH to stop the program, Ms. Roe asserts that Ms. Murray’s studies can inform us only about the effects of very precise brain damage on unhealthy, overstressed, asocial, and emotionally and cognitively stunted primates. Essentially, work that has no meaningful value in the medical world.
Proud conservatives and PETA activists are often miles apart on their priorities. In this instance however, the two would be hard pressed to be more aligned. Government waste and a callous disregard for the value of life are combining for little more than a paycheck for a team running a cruel program 13 years into a never-ending series of dubious experiments.
Conservatives everywhere would be wise to join PETA in condemning this program and demanding its end. PETA has done the heavy lifting and finally gotten full access to records, photos and videos. The result is information that doesn’t seem valuable enough to warrant this cruelty or the expense of millions of taxpayer dollars.
Donald, Melania Trump Warned About Monkey Attack Ahead Of India Trip With Ivanka, Jared
The president and first lady of the United States will be flying to India later this month. They will be joined by Ivanka and Jared Kushner. However, a local warned them of monkey attack ahead of their next state visit.
Trump and Melania will take from Agra airport to Taj Mahal. The government of India has been preparing for POTUS and FLOTUS visit that mobile communications are already expected to be interrupted. However, the security lockdown doesn’t apply to the hundreds of monkeys in the area.
“The terror of the monkeys is so pervasive that women and children are scared of going up on the roof of their houses, which have almost been taken over by monkeys. If such a large troop of monkeys attacks Donald Trump's entourage, it will be a disaster,” a local resident told India Today.
CISF Jawan said that the catapult they have been using to scare off the monkeys work. However, it is only effective against a single or couple of monkeys. Unfortunately, it is no longer effective against a whole troop of monkeys.
The publication to the Agra Municipal Corporation officials and they admitted that they lack measures in controlling the monkeys from entering the Taj Mahal premises.
The monkeys and other stray animals have attacked numerous domestic and foreign tourists. Earlier this month, a stray cow injured a Danish tourist only identified as Niels. The cow lifted Niels on its horns and threw him in the air leaving him seriously injured. He was diagnosed with shoulder fracture and a head injury.
“People are being injured by stray animals in Agra as well as the entire state every day, but when a tourist, who is a guest of Agra, gets injured in an animal attack, it tarnishes the reputation of not only Agra but the entire country,” Vishal Sharma a local official said about the incident.
In related news, Melania is independent of Trump. The first lady is the “most free person in the Trump world.” According to Trump’s communications director, the FLOTUS can do anything she feels right.
NIH hosts nonhuman primate workshop amidst increased scrutiny of monkey research
More than 3 years after it hosted a workshop on the science and ethics of biomedical studies on monkeys, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) this week convened another workshop on nonhuman primate research. And much like the previous event, the meeting is drawing sharply divergent reactions from biomedical and animal advocacy groups.
“It was a very good look at the opportunities and challenges of doing this type of research,” says Alice Ra’anan, director of government relations and science policy at the American Physiological Society, a group that represents nearly 10,000 scientists, doctors, and veterinarians. It was “an excellent and robust discussion around fostering rigorous research in nonhuman primates,” adds Matthew Bailey, president of that National Association for Biomedical Research.
But Emily Trunnell, a research associate at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal rights group, counters that the event was a wasted opportunity to talk about the ethics of using nonhuman primates in the first place. “It was just a bunch of scientists clamoring for more money and more monkeys.”
The workshop comes at a time when scientists are using a near-record number of rhesus macaques, marmosets, and other nonhuman primates in biomedical research. The animals, many researchers say, have become increasingly important in revealing how the human brain works and in developing treatments for infectious diseases. There’s been a particular surge in demand for marmosets, which are being genetically engineered to serve as models for autism, Parkinson’s, and other neurological disorders.
But it also comes at a time of increased scrutiny of monkey research. In the past 3 years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ended nicotine addiction studies on squirrel monkeys, scientists have increasingly struggled to transport nonhuman primates, and some members of Congress have called for stricter oversight of research with these animals. In addition, President Donald Trump signed language into law in December 2019 that requires NIH to explore alternatives to monkeys, FDA to draft a plan to reduce the number of monkeys it uses, and the Department of Veterans Affairs to reduce or eliminate its use of nonhuman primates within the next 5 years.
None of these moves—all pushed by animal advocacy groups—was on the agenda at this week’s workshop, held Tuesday and Wednesday on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. Nor was there a discussion of monkey retirement to sanctuaries, a growing issue in the biomedical community.
Instead, the meeting focused mainly on improving the rigor and reproducibility of monkey studies. “We want to make sure experiments are designed well to best address scientific concerns, and that all of the information allows other scientists to confirm and validate the results,” says Carrie Wolinetz, NIH’s associate director for science policy.
Keynote speaker Steve Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, which conducts research on nonhuman primates, kicked off the workshop by stating that monkeys were “very important and valuable models”—a sentiment echoed throughout the meeting. Simon Barratt-Boyes, a primate researcher at the University of Pittsburg, said nonhuman primates have provided “fundamental advances” in our understanding and treatment of human infectious disease, and that they will be key to continuing to fight these diseases, including the current coronavirus outbreak. When it comes to this area of research, he said, mice can’t accurately replicate the physiology of humans.
Others called for more funding and facilities so that scientists could increase the number of monkeys they use. “We are going to need more primates in the short run,” said William Newsome, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. Because these animals are the best model for a number of types of research, he argued, “It may help us save thousands or millions of mice.”
Joseph Garner, a behavioral scientist at Stanford, pushed back. “There seems to be an assumption that primate models are better,” he said. “I don’t think that’s always true. I’m really scared that if we start mass producing genetically modified primates, we’re going to fall into the same traps we have with other animals.”
Garner was among a handful of participants who argued that improving the lives of research animals isn’t just good for their welfare, it’s good for the science as well. This could include providing the monkeys with larger cages and more naturalistic environments, others said at the meeting, and training nonhuman primates to volunteer for procedures like injections and blood draws. “Treating animals more like human patients is the future of lab animal science,” Garner said.
Other sessions focused on choosing the right monkey species for specific kinds of studies, better ways to share data so that unnecessary experiments aren’t conducted, and optimizing study design to collect the most accurate results. “We need to be very thoughtful and deliberate about the way we are answering these questions,” Wolinetz says. A study that isn’t designed well could end up using more animals than it needs, she says, or failing because it used too few animals. “Nonrigorous science is unethical.”
Still, Trunnell says there wasn’t nearly enough discussion of ethics at the workshop—something she blames, in part, on organizations like hers not being invited to participate. “People kept on saying that welfare was key to good science, but no one has stopped their research to make these vital changes,” she says. “If they truly cared about the data and the welfare of these animals, they would get these things done first.”
Asked whether there was a disconnect between Congress pushing for less monkey use and scientists arguing for more, Ra’anan agrees that there is. But she says there’s also a contradiction posed by Congress telling NIH that it needs to do more to address diabetes, the opioid epidemic, and other human health concerns, while at the same time telling it to stop using “the best research model you have” to study these things. “That’s a disconnect, too.”
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