Faces of Waste: 14 Experimenters Wasted $500 Million Killing Animals

PETA has pointed out frivolous spending and government waste for far longer than those have been buzzwords. The animal experimentation industry is rife with pointlessness that somehow absorbs taxpayer dollars like a dry sponge.

As an example, PETA has put together 14 experimenters responsible for wasting nearly half a billion dollars—$498,212,857, to be exact—in taxpayer cash on experiments on animals.

These 14 people are PETA’s Faces of Waste—experimenters who set fire to taxpayer dollars by the fistful. Each of their experiments plumbs new depths of cruelty or pointlessness. Often both.

Some will shock you. All should anger you, because these experiments are a taxpayer-subsidized jobs program, existing only so the people running them can get rich putting on white coats and playing scientist.

Scrapping every experiment that follows would not hinder the development of treatments and cures for human ailments one iota. In fact, if that money were to be redirected to human-relevant, modern methods of research, the chances of those developing treatments and cures would increase. Canceling them also would save countless animals from ongoing misery. It may even put a dent in the ongoing laboratory-fueled extinction of some monkey species.

These are some of the legions of experimenters who do abominable things to animals for, at best, dubious reasons. Every one of them sticks you with the bill.

Eugene Albrecht

University of Maryland–Baltimore
Amount: $36,415,592 since 1985

Albrecht is among the bumbling science cosplayers at the University of Maryland–Baltimore whose incompetence is routinely documented by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Albrecht’s pointless experiments involve repeatedly impregnating baboons, injecting them with hormones, and performing cesarean sections to remove the fetuses. They produce little other than piles of monkey corpses while doing nothing to help human beings.

Christine Lattin

Louisiana State University
Amount: $1,050,077

Lattin, academia’s leading crusader against joy, snatches songbirds from their homes, locks them in barren metal cages in what appears to be a broom closet at Louisiana State University, and torments them with poof balls and cocktail umbrellas before killing them and dissecting their brains. Lattin’s experiments are so patently dumb they wouldn’t win a ribbon at a fifth-grade science fair.

Michele Basso

University of Washington/Washington National Primate Research Center
Amount: $29,429,622 since 2002

Basso inexplicably became director of the Washington National Primate Center despite a decades-long rap sheet showing that she refuses to follow the rules, doesn’t get along with others, and does only what she wants—poorly. The board of regents yanked her title after PETA detailed her extensive list of failures. You’ve given her more than $29 million since 2002 to cut holes in primates’ skulls, attach metal headposts, insert electrodes into their brains, implant wire coils in their eyes, and force them to face a computer screen for hours, keeping them thirsty to force their cooperation.

Elizabeth Buffalo

University of Washington/Washington National Primate Research Center
Amount: $36,003,735 since 2006

Buffalo, whose compassion can only be measured in microns, runs cruel experiments on primates supposedly to study the neurobiology of human aging. She experimented on a 22-year-old monkey named Dorothy for the last 2.5 years of her life, tormenting her until her final days, when her frail, diseased body had withered and collapsed under the pressure of unrelenting experimentation.

Augustine Choi

Cornell University
Amount: $68,279,824 since 1991

Choi, a former Weill Cornell Medicine dean and current poster child for research misconduct, may have made up data on horrifying sepsis experiments on animals for 20 years. Nine journals have retracted his published papers, while a 10th has withdrawn his work after finding that Choi either duplicated images representing data from his experiments or spliced or copied them from previous publications. The papers date back to at least 2002.

George Daley

Harvard Medical School
Amount: $68,630,196 since 1998

Daley, another Ivy League medical school dean who apparently burns his school’s Honor Code to warm his office, has had one paper retracted, several corrected, and 10 others questioned because of spliced or duplicated images. Daley bred mice to develop kidney dysfunction or irradiated them, drilled holes in their bones, and injected them with cancerous cells. Then, he apparently lied about the results.

Gregory Ebel

Colorado State University
Amount: $19,649,655 since 1990

There are multitudes of methods to study the effects of West Nile virus. Colorado State University’s Ebel has found the absolute worst. He traps crows, robins, and sparrows, infects them with the virus, and then watches what happens as it infects the birds’ lungs, hearts, livers, kidneys, spleens, and central nervous systems. Some experience multiple organ failure and death. No cure or treatment comes from this. It’s purely academic cruelty.

Agnès Lacreuse

University of Massachusetts–Amherst
Amount: $6,260,503 since 1999

Lacreuse prefers the Eating Soup With a Fork approach to science, and has spent 26 years and millions of your tax dollars performing worthless experiments on monkeys. Her latest idiocy involves tormenting marmosets for menopause “research,” even though she knows marmosets do not experience menopause. She even forces hand warmers on their bodies to simulate hot flashes.

Margaret Livingstone

Harvard Medical School
Amount: $34,488,615 since 1985

Livingstone designed experiments so twisted and cruel they’d keep Freddy Krueger up at night. She stole perfectly healthy baby monkeys from their shrieking mothers, sewed their eyes shut for  a year and did other hideous things to distort their vision. After 40 years, do you know what the sum total of her life’s work was? Being blinded is bad for brain and vision development. Who coulda known? Livingstone’s terror has finally been defunded, but only after wasting tens of millions of dollars and harming countless animals. 

Elisabeth Murray

National Institutes of Health
Amount: $61,988,048 since 1998

Murray, whose experiments have all the subtlety of a monster truck rally, saws open monkeys’ skulls and injects toxins to burn brain cells, or suctions out parts of the brain. She sews the monkeys back up, puts them in a small cage, and deliberately provokes their worst fears—with fake snakes and spiders—just to see how they’ll react. When she’s through, she kills them.

Shreesh Mysore

Johns Hopkins University
Amount: $4,550,317 since 2017

There are sophisticated neuroimaging techniques being used to study humans with Attention Deficit Disorder. Mysore prefers to use your money to scramble the brains of owls to produce data that has produced nothing to forward human health.

Michael Platt

University of Pennsylvania
Amount: $37,878,615 since 1994

Michael “No Experiment Too Stupid” Platt recently strapped frightened monkeys into restraint chairs for hours and deprived them of water to force their cooperation, to see whether the animals could “predict” the results of different U.S. elections. He’s also conducted similar experiments to study sex and power in advertising, while gobbling nearly $38 million of your tax dollars.

Andrey Ryabinin

Oregon Health and Science University
Amount: $18,376,577 since 1997

Ryabinin’s experiments will make you angry that you have to work for a living. He paired prairie voles for a week, then separated them, gave them the equivalent of 15 bottles of wine a day, used them in a battery of tests, and then killed them. He says this somehow sheds light on human alcohol consumption and infidelity. Yeah, okay, dude.

Greg Westergaard

Alpha Genesis
Amount: $75,211,481 since 1997

Westergaard is a grown adult human man and the CEO of Alpha Genesis, not a 12-year-old school kid with a playground beef. But you might not know that based on how he conducts himself. Charmingly, he once publicly told PETA to “go f*%k themselves” when we asked for proof all 43 monkeys who escaped his facility were found alive. He might apply that zeal to cleaning up his facilities, which have been in federal hot water quite frequently.

What You Can Do

If you’re in the U.S., please take action by supporting PETA’s Research Modernization Now, which outlines a comprehensive strategy for replacing all experiments on animals with more effective, human-relevant, non-animal methods.

Support Animal-Free Science

Everyone, no matter where you live, can TAKE ACTION to help shut down the University of Massachusetts–Amherst monkey laboratory of Agnès Lacreuse and Margaret Livingstone’s Harvard laboratory:

Shut UMass Laboratory

Close Livingstone's Harvard Laboratory