500 Physicians Target Local STEM Education Company Over Outdated Practices

Doctors Support PETA Project to Cut Out Animal Dissection

For Immediate Release:
August 18, 2021

Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382

Nearly 16,000 PETA supporters have asked local science, technology, engineering, and math curriculum company Project Lead The Way (PLTW) to stop promoting animal dissection in its Gateway and Biomedical Science programs, and today PETA sent PLTW’s CEO a letter signed by more than 500 physicians who are also asking the company to embrace technologically superior options and cut out dissection entirely. The physicians and PETA note that PLTW already offers non-animal tools and that no medical school in the country still uses animal dissection to train future doctors.

“The accomplished physicians who have joined PETA in this fight know that students deserve modern tools that don’t harm animals,” says PETA Senior Director of Youth Programs Marta Holmberg. “If future doctors can train without using animal dissection, high school students certainly don’t need to engage in it.”

PLTW promotes dissection using piglets cut from their mothers’ bodies at the slaughterhouse as well as sheep’s hearts and brains, cows’ eyes, and pigs’ kidneys. Studies show that while dissection has been shown to foster callousness toward animals and turn students away from careers in science and medicine, students who use modern, animal-free dissection methods—which the company already offers—perform better in learning assessments.

Photos of animals typically used in PLTW’s dissection programs are available here.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.