Universities Urged by PETA to Scuttle Cruel Navy-Funded Decompression Experiments on Animals
For Immediate Release:
November 4, 2025
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
In letters sent today, PETA urges the University of Maryland, Baltimore, University of California, San Diego, Duke University and the University of South Florida to stop U.S. Navy-funded decompression sickness/oxygen toxicity experiments on animals and follow the lead of the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and others by pivoting toward cutting-edge, non-animal research.
Public records show that University of Maryland, Baltimore experimenter Stephen R. Thom spent more than $900,000 in tax money confining mice to a hyperbaric chamber at 100 psi for two hours, restraining them with a nose cone and bit bar, placing them in carbon dioxide gas chambers, inserting probes into their rectums, cutting into their scalps, drilling their skulls, injecting chemicals into their brains, and killing them by bleeding them out.The experiments continued to their conclusion in September 2025.
At the University of California, San Diego, public records show that experimenter Peter Lindholm spent more than $1 million in tax funds forcing rats to run on treadmills under threat of electric shock and confining them in a hyperbaric chamber at pressures up to 700 kPa for up to 45 minutes before making them inhale various gases, including radioactive nitrogen. The experiments continued until their conclusion in 2023.
University of South Florida experimenter Jay Dean has spent more than $1 million in tax funds inducing seizures in rats without administering pain relief, cutting into their abdomens, and drilling into their skulls to place various recording devices before killing them, public records show. The experiments are scheduled to receive nearly $760,00 through 2026 in additional funding.
The U.S. Naval Medical Research Center admits that test results from animals don’t mirror human results due to major physiological differences between species.
Efforts from PETA and other allies contributed to the early termination of similar Navy-funded experiments on animals at other institutions. State-of-the-art, non-animal research methods, including in vitro studies and analyses of human diver data, are widely available, cost-effective, and significantly more applicable to humans.
A rat in a hyperbaric chamber. One of many used by University of South Florida experimenter Jay Dean to supposedly study oxygen toxicity in humans, despite the wide availability of human-relevant methods.
“Archaic experiments on animals are a sinking ship, and the Navy must stop wasting time, money, and animals’ lives on junk science that benefits no one,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA calls on these universities to join the national shift toward scientifically superior human-relevant research.”
Since 2020, the Navy has wasted more than $5.1 million on decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity tests on thousands of animals at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, Duke University, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of South Florida.
More than 100 U.S. Navy veterans previously joined PETA and nearly 90,000 PETA supporters in calling on the military branch to ban these cruel and wasteful experiments.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
[AH1]Flagging that there is no paragraph below for Duke. If you add one please send back for proofing.
