A frequent PETA Files pastime is to announce some of the country’s most gruesome vivisectors. We have a solid lineup of monkey torturers this month, so please mull your choice over carefully. If you have trouble deciding, try to ask yourself: “Would I rather be raised without a mother and literally driven to alcoholism or die convulsing with a hole in my head?”
Stephen Suomi has been tormenting baby monkeys since the ’70s. Working for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and living off our tax dollars, he has made a career out of tearing infants away from their mothers and letting them try to raise themselves among peers. Suomi tests the traumatized monkeys for such things as right- or left-handed preferences and tendencies to self-bite. Suomi has also done extensive work with getting motherless monkeys drunk to see how stress and deleterious rearing affects monkeys’ desire to drown their sorrows. The connection in humans between early life trauma and an increased attraction to alcohol is also well-known.
Jason Cromer, currently a postdoc at MIT, is definitely a fledgling compared to Suomi, but he has been trained extensively in torturing and killing monkeys by his mentor, David Waitzman at the University of Connecticut, who is known for sticking coils into monkeys’ eyes and surgically fixing them to head restraints. According to a cage log, one of Waitzman’s monkeys, Cornelius, started convulsing in his restraints during an experiment performed by Cromer. He removed Cornelius’ restraints and electrodes and proceeded to drug him as the convulsions developed into grand mal seizures and eventually death.
Who is our most vile vivisector this month—the tried and true NIH employee or the young blood from Connecticut? Leave a comment to let me know!
—SeanPosted by Sean Conner, Laboratory Investigations Special Projects Coordinator
