University of Washington Officials Reveal Primate Center in Shambles: PETA Calls for Crackdown

For Immediate Release:
November 10, 2026

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

In letters sent today, PETA calls on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to reject the University of Washington’s bid for further funding of its Washington National Primate Research Center and urges the university’s animal-research accreditor to impose restrictions after university officials exposed the staggering extent of the center’s failures, including missing and inaccurate records, botched surgeries, and experimenters obstructing veterinary care.

At today’s Board of Regents meeting, PETA Chief Science Advisor Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, a primate scientist who worked at UW for 17 years, will put copies of PETA’s letters to NIH and AAALAC, the organization responsible for accrediting the university’s animal research program directly into the Regents’ hands and address the board during public comment. The letters seek actions that could put both federal funding and the university’s animal-research accreditation at risk. The Regents have not responded to PETA’s October 29 letter calling for immediate action over what UW’s own officials revealed in mid-October about the primate center. PETA supporters wearing “No Monkeys, Better Science” shirts will also pack the room.

Christina Cruzen, UW’s attending veterinarian, called the facility’s surgical and pathology recordkeeping an “egregious failure” at an Oct. 15 meeting of the school’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). Cruzen said an independent audit to determine the full extent of the center’s record-keeping failure is expected to take at least a year.

Cruzen also cited a years-long breakdown in veterinary care. Experimenters repeatedly blocked veterinarians from examining or treating monkeys, even covering windows to conceal what was happening inside rooms where monkeys were held.

Yet the university is already seeking another five years of NIH funding for the primate center anyway, before knowing the extent of the failures in its own records.

“The primate center is a five-alarm dumpster fire by the university’s own account, yet it already has its hand out for millions more,” says Jones-Engel. “PETA calls on the regents, NIH, and the center’s accreditor to stop propping up this disaster and shut it down.”

Credit: PETA

Among the cases disclosed by the university was a brain surgery by experimenter Fritzie Arce-McShane, whose experiments were previously suspended after she violated her own protocols and irradiated a monkey nearly to death. Yet Arce-McShane was allowed to conduct another invasive procedure under supposedly heightened veterinary monitoring. After cutting open a macaque’s scalp, she discovered that a custom head implant, designed using years-old MRI images, did not fit.

Records describe what followed as a “best guess craniotomy.” Experimenters forced the implant to fit anyway by removing bone. They used screws that extended beyond the inner margin of the monkey’s skull. The monkey later developed an infection around the implant.

Months later, the university still could not determine who authorized the surgery to continue, or whether the screws had entered the monkey’s brain, because, once again, there was no necropsy report.

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.