NIH Yanks Funding for Racist Experiment on Mice

The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD)—a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—has canceled funding for a racist experiment at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Experimenters were imposing “episodic aggression”  on mice—a euphemism for forcing them to fight or making a larger, stressed mouse attack a smaller one—to mimic “structural violence observed in urban [African American] communities.”

This insulting, cruel experiment was axed after PETA and tens of thousands of our supporters urged UIC and the NIMHD director to end it and after PETA contacted Susan Rice, the director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, to ask that the administration instruct NIH to stop directing a disproportionate amount of its research budget to white animal experimenters and instead direct funds to African American investigators who are more likely to propose research on health disparities and patient intervention that involves human participants—and not pointless animal studies.