Sinister ‘Monkey Experimenter’ Wearing Welding Mask to Haunt Harvard Alumni Event

For Immediate Release:
April 15, 2024

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Washington –

Harvard University alums arriving at the Four Seasons Hotel for an event headlined by Interim President Alan M. Garber will be greeted by a bone-chilling scene on Tuesday, when a PETA supporter wearing a welding mask and a “bloody” lab coat will sit eerily in a rocking chair just outside the entrance as a baby “monkey” lies screaming in a black-draped crib nearby. The creepy “concierge” will mimic the cruel tests of Harvard experimenter Margaret Livingstone, who rips newborn monkeys away from their mothers, cages them alone, and makes her staff wear welding masks so that the infants never see a face.

When: Tuesday, April 16, 6 p.m.

Where: In front of the Four Seasons Hotel, 2800 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C.

*A masked PETA supporter sits beside a motherless infant “monkey” during a previous demonstration at Harvard University.*
Credit: PETA

“While alums sip cocktails at the Four Seasons, fragile infant monkeys are being torn away from their mothers and kept trapped in a living hell inside Margaret Livingstone’s house of horrors,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on Harvard leaders to shut down these twisted tests and redirect the school’s resources toward animal-free research methods that can actually help humans.”

Livingstone’s experiments—which have been widely panned as unethical in the scientific community—have included blinding infant monkeys by sewing their eyelids shut. In other recent tests, she forced baby monkeys to wear goggles that simulate disorienting strobe lighting for 12 hours a day. After years of torment, she kills many of them and dissects their brains. She has conducted these types of curiosity-driven experiments for 40 years without producing a single treatment or cure for humans.

Last year, more than 380 experts—including primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall, conservationist Dr. Ian Redmond, and Harvard anthropologist Dr. Richard Wrangham—joined PETA and Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic to urge the National Institutes of Health to defund Livingstone’s experiments.

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 the group on X, Facebook, or Instagram.