PETA Statement: Gene-Edited Lizards at UGA

For Immediate Release:
August 31, 2019

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA Vice President Alka Chandna on the creation of a pair of gene-edited albino lizards by experimenters at the University of Georgia:

Looking to lizards to solve human eye disorders is like looking at the atmosphere on Mars to learn about the air on Earth—it’s a bizarre proposition, singularly unscientific, and bordering on fraudulent. Whether genetic engineering is done to lizards, mice, sheep, dogs, or monkeys, it increases animal suffering without furthering human knowledge, as evidenced by University of Georgia experimenters’ admission that only 6% of the eggs injected with gene-editing machinery were successfully gene edited. Animals born through gene editing commonly suffer from unintended, debilitating conditions, such as missing eyes or ears, skin ulcers, deformed body parts, deafness, seizures, or heart failure. Most people accept that genetically engineering humans is morally unconscionable, and doing the same thing to lizards using CRISPR technology is also reprehensible.

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.