VIDEO: Mass General Hospital’s Laboratories Are Every Animal Laboratory

PETA has received never-before-seen video from inside the animal laboratories of Massachusetts General Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, where hundreds of monkeys and pigs, dozens of rabbits, and thousands of mice and rats endure cruel and deadly experiments every year.

What you’ll see in the video is the grim, unvarnished reality typical of animal experimentation laboratories:

• Animals who mutilated themselves for want of an outlet for their stress
• Animals with bizarre, surgically implanted devices jutting out from their bodies
• Animals driven mad by confinement in tiny cages—a madness that will eventually give way to debilitating despair, wrought from years of confusion and fear and the inability to do anything about either

These animals are confined to windowless rooms with no natural airflow, no natural light, and constant, frightening noise—a far cry from the complex, stimulating environments their bodies and brains were designed to navigate.

The depressing truth of what passes for “research” at this and every other animal laboratory anywhere in the world is this: Almost no animal ever makes it out alive.

These images are not unique. At Mass General, we uncovered no new depths of depravity or novel means to inflict violence on caged animals. PETA found only typical examples of workaday suffering :

• Experimenter Tatsuo Kawai cuts out baboons’ organs and replaces them with organs taken from genetically modified pigs. One baboon died during surgery to transplant a pig’s heart. Afterwards, experimenters sawed off her head.
• Experimenters Leslie Kean and Richard Pierson subject monkeys to invasive bone marrow and stem cell transplants. Kean previously conducted similar painful procedures at Yerkes National Primate Research Center and later at Washington National Primate Research Center, leaving a trail of suffering and death in her wake.
• Experimenter Joseph Mandeville drills into monkeys’ skulls and implants electrodes into their brains. Dried blood crusted around the device implanted in one monkey’s skull. The experiment was fully curiosity-driven. No treatment for any human ailment came from it.

In 2024, the National Institutes of Health gave Mass General about $327 million to bankroll experiments on animals such as those above.

The boondoggle at Massachusetts General Hospital is appalling—and it’s mirrored in the immense federal waste and animal suffering at the seven National Primate Research Centers. These facilities siphon hundreds of millions of federal dollars every year to imprison and experiment on monkeys, but have failed to produce the cures and treatments for humans they promised.

What You Can Do

If you’re in the U.S., join with PETA and urge federal officials to cut funding for all experiments on monkeys, including at the seven primate centers, and direct that wasted money to human-relevant, non-animal research methods that have a chance of helping human patients.