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Victory Update: Following a year of vigorous campaigning, PETA has learned that government officials have grounded plans for a cruel and ineffective radiation experiment on monkeys. Learn more about this victory for monkeys.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that NASA’s plan to fund an experimenter who wants zap squirrel monkeys with massive amounts of radiation at Brookhaven National Laboratory is cruel and wrongheaded—but it clearly doesn’t disqualify you, either!
Case in point: April Evans, a NASA aerospace engineer working on the International Space Station as a team lead, has quit her job over NASA’s decision to irradiate non-human primates after 30 peaceful years without any space-related experiments on monkeys. Evans, a NASA Space Flight Awareness Honoree, wrote to Brookhaven director Samuel Aronson, explaining, “After much deliberation, I resigned from NASA because I could not support the scientific justification for this monkey radiobiology experiment.” In the letter, Evans also encouraged the agency to develop better space radiation shielding to protect astronauts—instead of tormenting animals.
Evans’ principled stance is in line with that of the European Space Agency, which has rejected the use of cruel and archaic experiments on monkeys—the kind that may violate federal guidelines here in the U.S. If you’d like to thank Evans for her commitment to justice, why not add your voice to the growing number of compassionate people calling for NASA to scrap its plans to torment monkeys?
Written by Jeff Mackey
