Meet Eliot Spindel and Judy Cameron

I’ve been taking a break from the Vivisector of the Week posts for the past month, but when my colleague Justin told me about these two nasty little specimens, I knew I needed to highlight their work—because, well, it really is something to behold:

Eliot Spindel and Judy Cameron both work at a place called the Oregon National Primate Research Center, and they specialize in traumatizing and hurting monkeys.

Eliot Spindel OHSU/Creative Commons Eliot Spindel has squandered more than $3.5 million of taxpayer money since 2000 in an attempt to show that (wait for it) smoking during pregnancy can be bad for the child. It seems like Mr. Spindel could have saved himself some trouble by just asking someone, but he wanted to do it the hard way, by impregnating monkeys, injecting them with dangerous levels of nicotine, delivering the babies pre-term via caesarian section, then killing and mutilating them shortly after they’re born.

Judy Cameron DevelopingChild/Creative Commons I don’t know whether there’s something in the water over at ONPRC, but Spindel’s colleague Judy Cameron seems to share his fascination with performing expensive and painful experiments in the service of a mind-bogglingly self-evident piece of information. Cameron’s work involves separating baby monkeys from their mothers to see how much it traumatizes them—which, as we already know, is an awful lot. Now, thanks to the long hours that Judy and her predecessors have spent in the lab torturing primates, we know that babies suffer when they’re ripped from their mothers and deprived of affection. Thank you, Judy.

Wonderful work those guys are all doing over at ONPRC, huh? We’re going to see what we can do to make sure their whole operation is shut down for good.