PETA Urges Feds to Claw Back Grant Money from Disgraced UW Monkey Experimenter
For Immediate Release:
August 25, 2025
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
In a letter sent today, PETA urges the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to take back the more than $2,200,000 in grant money awarded to the University of Washington (UW) and experimenter Michele Basso for her experiments on monkeys and to bar any future funding.
PETA’s request follows the rare decision by the university’s own animal oversight committee to suspend Basso’s experiments because of her repeated violations of animal protection regulations and her refusal to take direction from veterinarians and committee members. PETA also calls on UW to return the grant funds in full. The university hired Basso despite her track record of noncompliance at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Los Angeles, and it was slow to act to protect the animals she controlled. UW received a significant portion of Basso’s grants for indirect costs.
The monkeys Basso used at UW were subjected to unapproved and improperly conducted experiments, excessive imaging, and suffered from seizures that were never reported to the attending veterinarian, among other violations. Four monkeys who were too elderly and ill for transport were trucked nearly 3,000 miles. One had to be euthanized immediately upon arrival.
“Michele Basso refused to follow her own experimental protocols and should never be allowed near an animal again, let alone use tax dollars to torment them,” says PETA Senior Science Advisor on Primate Issues Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “But the University of Washington bears equal blame—it knowingly hired Basso despite her history of violations and pocketed millions in taxpayer-funded overhead while she broke the rules.”
Basso was hired to direct the federally funded Washington National Primate Research Center in 2021. She was removed from that position in 2024 following a letter from PETA to UW’s Board of Regents outlining serious problems, including botched surgical implants in monkeys’ skulls, multiple violations of federal animal welfare laws, and a decades-long record of conflicts with the veterinary staff at two other universities where she worked.
Following UW’s recent suspension of Basso’s experiments, PETA asked the university to block her access to all rooms confining animals, terminate the suspended experiments, and retire the surviving animals to sanctuaries.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
