Video: Protestors Disrupt NIH Director’s Speech to Protest Cruel Experiments on Monkeys

Action Is Latest in PETA Campaign Calling for an End to Much-Criticized Government-Funded Terrorizing of Infant Primates

For Immediate Release:
November 14, 2014

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Minutes into his address at the Association for Molecular Pathology’s 20^th anniversary celebration last night, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins was taken aback when two PETA supporters loudly disrupted his speech and brandished signs reading, “Collins: Stop Abusing Baby Monkeys” and “Collins: End NIH Tests on Baby Monkeys.”

The women were escorted from the room—but only after informing the roomful of Collins’ peers that at an NIH laboratory in Maryland, experimenters breed baby monkeys to suffer from mental illness, take the infants from their mothers at birth, and subject them to years of taxpayer-funded experiments designed to cause, worsen, and measure the babies’ severe fear, depression, and anxiety. Video footage and photos of the experiments recently released by PETA are available here. Video of the disruption is available here.

Collins refused to address the issue of NIH’s psychology experiments but admitted that his office has been overwhelmed with e-mails and phone calls from concerned members of the public.

“Dr. Collins has the authority and obligation to put an end to these cruel, wasteful, and irrelevant experiments on baby monkeys,” says Justin Goodman, PETA director of laboratory investigations. “In an age when superior human-based research can so effectively study the causes and treatments of mental illness in humans, it defies ethics and logic to terrorize infant animals in traumatic experiments.”

PETA’s campaign to end NIH’s maternal-deprivation experiments on baby monkeys has garnered the support of scientists such as Dr. Jane Goodall, members of Congress, and hundreds of thousands of citizens. For the past month, PETA has been running hundreds of ads throughout the D.C. Metro system calling for an end to the experiments, which have received $30 million from tax funds in just the last seven years and are approved to continue until 2017—even though the project has never led to the development of treatments for human mental illness.

For more information on NIH’s experiments, please visit PETA.org.