PETA Calls for Investigation into Harvard Medical School Dean for Possible Research Misconduct

For Immediate Release:
February 20, 2025

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

In letters sent today, PETA urges federal authorities and Harvard officials to immediately investigate George Q. Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School, for possible research misconduct after more than a dozen of his publications have been flagged for questionable material.

Images in Daley’s published research appear mislabeled, spliced, or duplicated in at least 16 publications, leading to one retraction and multiple corrections.  

In some of Daley’s experiments, mice are bred to develop kidney dysfunction before their kidneys are cut out for analysis. In other tests, workers drilled holes into their leg bones, injected them with cancerous cells to create tumors, and fed them a high-fat diet to induce fatty liver disease, diabetes, and obesity. When the tests are over, the mice are killed. Now it appears some of Daley’s data from these experiments may have been manipulated or misrepresented in scientific publications.

PETA asks the federal Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity and Harvard Medical School’s Office for Academic and Research Integrity to immediately investigate Daley—who has taken more than $55 million from the National Institutes of Health for his mouse-killing experiments—for possible research misconduct.

“Anyone who makes millions tormenting mice only to apparently manipulate the results shouldn’t be the face of any medical school, let alone Harvard’s,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA demands robust investigations into Daley’s flagged papers and expects swift fallout if he is found culpable for research misconduct in any way.”

Daley isn’t the first animal experimenter at Harvard Medical School to have published data called into question. Last year, four cancer researchers at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and one neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School were placed under investigation for research misconduct, leading to the retraction of dozens of publications describing cruel animal experiments. Harvard Medical School is also facing scrutiny for traumatizing experiments conducted in the laboratory of Margaret Livingstone, where infant monkeys are taken from their mothers and subjected to distortions of vision, including by putting strobe-effect goggles on them for more than a year.

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 PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.