If anyone has the authority to condemn the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for three decades of surgical and chemical brain damage to macaques, it is renowned primatologist and conservationist Dr. Birute Galdikas.
In a letter to NIH Director Francis Collins, award-winning primate expert and anthropologist Louis Leakey “Trimata” (a group that also includes gorilla expert Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey) takes over Elizabeth Murray’s experiments , stating that “Her years of research have led to nothing that applies to human psychology, physiology, or psychiatry” – and urges the NIH to put an end to them.
“To a primatologist, Dr. Murray’s scientific work seems meaningless,” Galdikas writes.
For over 40 years, Galdikas studied orangutans in the Tanjung Puting National Park in Indonesia. She fondly recalls watching the macaques in the surrounding forests.
“They clearly had complex social relationships and the young people played vigorously with each other. It was clear where the expression “fun, like a barrel of monkeys” came from, “she writes. “I also watched a sad macaque mother carry her dead baby for at least two days. The grief on her face was palpable. “
Dr. Galdikas, twice on the cover National Geography for her pioneering work and in 1990 she received the PETA Humanitarian Award – expressed her outrage that tax money is being used to support “seemingly useless experiments with no discernible value on suffering monkeys.” Over the past 30 years, Murray has received nearly $ 50 million in taxpayer money to continue this pain factory.
This compelling ad, with a striking quote from a letter from Dr. Biruta Galdikas to the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, appeared in Washington Post…
PETA obtained videotapes, recorded by the experimenters themselves, and found that Murray opened the skulls of monkeys, destroys parts of their brains, and then uselessly scares them with rubber snakes and spiders. Although these monkeys are highly social animals that crave companionship, they are isolated in sterile cells.
“The world went ahead and left unimaginable, repetitive research of little value, such as the study of Dr. Murray.”
– Dr. Birut Mary Galdikas
PETA demands that the NIH stop throwing money into Murray’s lab. Can you help us?
PETA would like to thank Dr. Galdikas for using her expertise to be a powerful voice for animals. Please join her in action! Call members of Congress to convince National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins shut down this little horror store, send surviving monkeys to safe havens, and redirect taxpayer money to more advanced non-animal research methods that benefit humans:
“Stop using my tax dollars to pay for the torture of monkeys!”