Breaking: Harvard President Glitter-Bombed at Alumni Day Event Over Grotesque Monkey Experiments
For Immediate Release:
May 31, 2024
Contact:
Brandi Pharris 202-483-7382
Harvard University alumni got a sparkly surprise today when a PETA supporter, armed with a sign reading, “Harvard President Garber: End Baby Monkey Tests!” disrupted Interim President Alan Garber’s Alumni Day speech with a well-timed glitter bomb, shouting, “For the baby monkeys!” before being escorted out of the event by security and arrested. The protester, Brittany Drake, has been charged with Trespass A and B and failure to disperse a riot. The action was part of PETA’s relentless campaign demanding an end to experimenter Margaret Livingstone’s shockingly cruel tests on infant monkeys. Photos and video of the demonstration are available here.
Livingstone’s experiments—which have been widely condemned as unethical in the scientific community—have included tearing baby monkeys away from their mothers and sewing their eyelids shut for an entire year. Some are forced to wear goggles that simulate disorienting strobe lighting for 12 hours a day for 18 months. Others are raised by humans wearing welding masks so that they never see a monkey or human face. Livingstone also surgically implants electrodes in the monkeys’ brains to see how their brain cells—structurally and functionally altered due to sensory deprivation—respond to visual stimuli. After years of torment, Livingstone kills many of them and dissects their brains.
“While President Garber and his fellow alums sip prosecco and pat each other on the back, baby monkeys are trapped in a living hell in Margaret Livingstone’s laboratory,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA calls on Garber to listen to the scientific consensus, shut down this abhorrent lab, and invest in animal-free research that actually helps humans.”
Livingstone has conducted terrifying and agonizing experiments on monkeys and other animals for 40 years and collected more than $32 million in taxpayer money to bankroll them, despite never producing a single treatment or cure for humans. Last year, more than 380 experts—including primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall, conservationist Dr. Ian Redmond, and Harvard anthropologist Dr. Richard Wrangham—joined PETA and Harvard’s own Animal Law & Policy Clinic to urge the National Institutes of Health to defund Livingstone’s experiments.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
