Four Experimenters Leave Only a Legacy of Cruelty and Failure

They’ve built their careers on exploiting, maiming, caging, killing, and dissecting animals for “research”—and they’ve gotten away with it for decades. These experimenters have collected tens of millions of dollars from the government while tormenting countless living, feeling animals in laboratories. After all this time, the only consistent outcome has been animal suffering, not human-relevant results or treatments. 

Their work isn’t just outdated—it’s dangerous, wasteful, and cruel. Tick, tock: It’s time to hold them accountable.

Michele Basso

Michele Basso’s career is a case study in failing upwards. Despite a decades-long record of failure, rule-breaking, and documented conflict with veterinary staff at institutions across the country, Basso was inexplicably appointed director of the University of Washington’s National Primate Research Center in late 2021. She was unceremoniously canned in early 2024 following a scathing letter from PETA detailing her failings to the university’s Board of Regents.

For years, Basso jumped from university to university, leaving a trail of bad reviews and suffering monkeys in her wake. At both the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she repeatedly clashed with veterinary staff over the painful surgeries she performed on monkeys, which involved drilling into monkeys’ skulls, implanting metal posts to keep their heads forcibly still, inserting electrodes into their brains, and implanting wire coils in their eyes. 

One monkey she brought with her from UCLA to the University of Washington in late 2021 was already showing signs of distress upon arrival. Months later, the metal headpost in his skull became infected. Basso’s botched “repair” was catastrophic: She left multiple broken screws in the monkey’s skull and used even more screws to force a new headpost into place. Just five weeks later, the headpost broke off while the monkey was restrained in a chair.

While Basso may be out as head of the primate center, she’s still tormenting monkeys there.

Elisabeth Murray

Elisabeth Murray has deliberately damaged monkeys’ brains in a government lab for more than 40 years—and taxpayers have footed the bill. Her experiments at the National Institutes of Health have pulled in more than $50 million since 1998.

Murray induces permanent brain damage in monkeys, implants headposts directly into their skulls, keeps the animals hungry or thirsty to force them to cooperate in ridiculous tests, blows puffs of air into their eyes, and restrains them for extended periods of time. She saws her victims’ skulls open then injects toxins to burn brain cells or suctions out parts of the brain. She sews them back up then places them in a small cage that probably reeks of the previous victim’s fear. She then deliberately provokes their worst fears, just to see how they’ll react. When she’s done tormenting animals in bogus tests, she kills them.

In their forest homes, monkeys live in large, complex colonies and collectively raise the younger generations. Murray keeps them caged alone for years or even decades—and none of the monkeys in her laboratory has ever been retired to a sanctuary.  

After decades of torment, Murray’s lab has produced zero cures or treatments for humans. Thirty years, tens of millions of dollars, and unspeakable animal suffering—and not a single clinical benefit to show for it.

Gerald Pepe

For more than 50 years, Eastern Virginia Medical School’s Gerald Pepe has used baboons in some of the most disturbing pregnancy experiments imaginable. His latest horrors include injecting pregnant baboons with hormones, slicing them open at various stages of pregnancy, and killing their babies before they’re even born. When the mothers were allowed to carry to term, he ripped their babies from them shortly after birth and used them in invasive developmental tests. An estimated hundreds of baboons have been killed in these experiments, none of which have led to any beneficial treatments for humans.

In 2021, the university allowed Pepe to perform up to six cesarean sections on each of the baboons without a scientific justification—a grotesque violation of federal animal welfare regulations, resulting in citations for one critical and one repeat violation as well as an Official Warning from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Even after the agency temporarily allowed multiple major surgeries on five baboons in 2022, it revoked that permission in 2023 when the school failed to meet even the most basic veterinary care standards. Because of this, four baboons—Jemma, Cookie, Tara, and Toya—were no longer useful to 81-year-old Pepe, who has been doing this to baboons since the mid-1970s. Alissa died after a c-section surgery, and Pepe killed the remaining four mother baboons, two of them after PETA offered placement at an accredited sanctuary, along with the two males in his laboratory. Their unnecessary deaths led to the enactment of Virginia’s Senate Bill 907 into law in 2025, which affords nonhuman primates used in experiments at publicly funded animal testing facilities in the Commonwealth the chance to retire to sanctuaries.

Your Voice Is Powerful

We recently helped end the experiments of another serial animal tormentor. Margaret Livingstone spent 40 years and tens of millions of dollars torturing and visually impairing baby monkeys at Harvard University. While monkeys in nature stay with their mothers for years, the infamous experimenter tore infants from their mothers at birth and confined them alone inside metal cages. After relentless PETA campaigning, including emails and phone calls from hundreds of thousands of supporters, government funding of Livingstone’s experiments on baby monkeys was cancelled.

Modernize Research NOW!

Every animal is an individual who feels. No one wants to be used and killed in experiments. Plus, 90% of basic research, most of which involves animals, fails to lead to treatments for humans.

PETA scientists’ Research Modernization Now is a strategy for ending archaic experiments on animals and replacing them with state-of-the-art, human-relevant methods that can actually lead to medical breakthroughs.

If you live in the U.S., please take action today by supporting Research Modernization Now:

No matter where you live, you can watch The Failed Experiment—a 6-part docuseries produced by PETA Honorary Director Bill Maher that lays bare the failure of current methods of medical research, which rely heavily on cruel and useless experiments on our fellow animals.