Lies, Fraud, Cruelty—and You Paid for It

Following the finding by the federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI) that a former professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University hurt animals in experiments and then lied about the results to get more federal funding, PETA has sent a letter to the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) urging the agency to take back more than $2.8 million in taxpayer money granted to the disgraced (and disgraceful) vivisector during the period of misconduct.

Mean Methods, False Findings

Specifically, the ORI determined that Michael Miller—formerly a professor and chair of SUNY Upstate’s department of neuroscience and physiology—lied about the results of his experiments in which he forced alcohol into pregnant mice, rats, and monkeys. The babies of these animals were then killed and their brains were cut out. Miller submitted the fabricated data in his applications to get even more funding from NIAAA—part of the federal National Institutes of Health—and also sent them to scientific journals. Several journals have already retracted the articles.

Unfortunately, this kind of fraud isn’t unheard of. The only animal some experimenters seem to care about is the cash cow—and it appears some of them will do just about anything to keep the grant money flowing. If they’re going to lie about the results, they could at least have the decency to leave the animals out and fake the experiments altogether.

How You Can Help Animals in Laboratories

Please tell your representative and senators in Congress to divert public money away from cruel animal experiments like Miller’s and into promising, lifesaving, and relevant clinical and non-animal research.