Former WaNPRC Scientist Calls For Its Immediate Closure

For 60 years, the Washington National Primate Research Center (WaNPRC) has exploited monkeys in traumatic, painful, and irrelevant experiments with the support of the University of Washington (UW).

The lab, which is one of the remaining seven National Primate Research Centers (NPRCs), is PETA’s longtime target for its horrific nursery-growing experiments.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

inspiring like this?

Want more inspiring stories like this? *

Enter your email below to stay updated!

Submit

I witnessed the brutality of the VNPR at first hand

For decades, I have studied how diseases are transmitted between and affect populations of monkeys and humans. In 2002, my job brought me to WaNPRC, where I worked as a primate scientist for 14 years, and then worked for almost two years at the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) at the University of Washington, which is responsible for meeting minimum animal welfare requirements. standards in the laboratories of the university.

In both of these roles, I was in the front row due to the dysfunction that WaNPRC suffers from. I found that the center is a ruined institution that does not fulfill its main functions. It lacks a moral compass, is inept, and unconsciously perpetuates the futility of primate experimentation at a time when alternatives to animal experimentation are available and the need for ethical and reliable science is more pressing than ever.

During my work, I saw tuberculosis, uncontrolled staphylococcal infections and chronic diarrhea devastate monkeys, destroying their bodies and making experimental results even more unreliable than they were before.

IACUC—lacked ethicists and instead were dominated by institutional employees and community members whose livelihoods are linked to animal experimentation—Gave it to the experimenters flame…

Veterinary and scientific personnel were allowed to do the following:

• Keep monkeys in dark booths for up to 10 hours a day.
• Repeatedly implanted devices in the skulls, eyes, arms and limbs of monkeys
• Separating mother monkeys from their young is very difficult for very social and emotionally intelligent animals.
• Only monkeys in a cage
• Submit monkeys to intensive testing (one protocol allowed researchers to collect 62 intestinal biopsies twice a month, take lymph node biopsies, collect bone marrow, and draw blood).
• Experiment with the rarely used and endangered species, the pigtailed macaque.

Throughout my tenure as a member of the IACUC, I was constantly rebuked by the leadership of the UW Animal Use Program when I tried to raise questions about aspects of animal use protocols. My concerns about study design, proper animal selection, animal screening for possible undetected coinfection, number and frequency of sedated specimens, and other issues were repeatedly knocked down– although these problems may have influenced the results of the experiments being carried out.

Can an animal welfare advocate “work within the system” to change it?

I have lived and worked in countries that supply the macaques used by WaNPRC. I have followed and studied macaques in almost any environment in which they live: in the swamps of Borneo, on the streets of Singapore, around temples and villages throughout Asia. I was in overseas monkey farms, where I heard the screams of monkeys, feeling their fear and illness, and witnessed how badly they broke in their cages.

Monkeys used in experiments such as this one are often housed in small, virtually sterile cages for their entire lives, unable to fulfill their natural desires to live in large family groups, form strong bonds with each other, play, explore and communicate. together.

As part of the primate biomedical system, I thought I could educate staff and researchers about the needs of captive macaques in order to maintain some semblance of their natural life. I was convinced that if I could improve the conditions of housing and experimentation, it would lead to better animal welfare, leading to better scientific results. But I was wrong.

Neither the laboratory nor the IACUC wanted to change. Carton regulatory inspection has triumphed over best practice. It was immediately clear that IACUC UW did not want a primatologist to advocate for the welfare of macaques. When I worked at IACUC, I was not an animal advocate, but after witnessing the extreme contempt for animal welfare and the consequences that this neglect has on science, I knew that my inner work had been done.

PETA protesters have erected headstones in Seattle, each representing 100 monkeys killed by the Washington National Primate Research Center since 1961. Take action at PETA.org/Seattle.

Macaques are unusual monkeys whose ecological, behavioral and immunological adaptations help them thrive in a wide variety of environments. But the macaque
in
the cramped and impoverished laboratory cage is not at all like the very social, adaptable, intelligent and beautiful monkeys in their natural habitat that I knew so well. WaNPRC has an overwhelming notion that monkeys are disposable gadgets in a machine whose suffering does not matter.

WaNPRC fails everyone, including the public

The object is currently failure in number of critical areas:

1. WaNPRC is conducting bad and increasingly misleading and irrelevant experiments. Inadvertent infections are common in the center, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), valley fever, tuberculosis, and others. The stress of bondage, loneliness and despair wreaks havoc on the monkeys’ immune systems, distorting already dubious experiments. Inadequate screening and surveillance for chronic or unrecognized infections further complicate research (for example, in trials of vaccines and drugs).
2. UW is failing at animal welfare. WaNPRC has a history of gruesome violations of the Federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA) as employees and investigators consistently fail to comply with even the most basic federal requirements. The monkeys died of suffocation, hunger, dehydration, veterinary error and asphyxiation with their own vomit. WaNPRC is currently under investigation by the USDA for its alleged refusal to report violations to the AWA and USDA due to apparent violations of state animal import regulations and a requirement to notify government officials of disease. in the colony.
3. The UW Animal Experimental Supervision Committee (IACUC) is rife with conflicts of interest that jeopardize animal welfare and scientific integrity.… IACUC’s oversight functions have been used and circumvented. UW has refused to allow animal ethics specialists to work at the IACUC and has even appointed the executive director of the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research (NWABR), an animal research organization that considers UW a platinum member, to represent the “community”. The NWABR explicitly states on its website that one of the benefits of membership is to help “recruit and place community members on ethics councils for animal and human research.” Several UW IACUC members also serve on the NWABR board.
4. WaNPRC is in free fall… Over the past decade, several WaNPRC directors have come under scrutiny and disciplinary action on charges of sexual harassment, poor financial management, and failure to ensure animal welfare. Moral and intellectual bankruptcy has affected animal care and staff morale and jeopardized scientific integrity and productivity.

No monkey should tolerate cruel experiments – it’s time to shut down WaNPRC

In 2013, Harvard University’s New England National Primate Research Center faced a similar crisis. Harvard officials looked at numerous breaches of animal welfare, laboratory problems with monkeys and future research priorities and decided to close the primate center. This was the right course of action and UW should have followed suit. closing WaNPRC.

Join tens of thousands of PETA supporters in calling for the immediate closure of WaNPRC and the release of monkeys to appropriate sanctuaries so that they can live their lives with the safety and dignity they deserve.

Call UW to close WaNPRC

Fulbright Fellow Lisa Jones-Engel, Ph.D., has studied human-primate interactions for 36 years. Her academic career spanned the field, research laboratory, and student audience. Dr. Jones-Engel is Senior Scientific Advisor for Primate Experiments at PETA’s Department of Laboratory Research.