For Immediate Release:
September 22, 2023
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Chicago – “Stop Tormenting Monkeys!” That’s the message that rang out earlier today as notorious National Institutes of Health (NIH) experimenter Elisabeth Murray delivered a speech at the Simian Collective conference—an event by and for monkey experimenters to promote the use of these animals in laboratories. Photos and video are available here.
Murray cuts into monkeys’ heads and intentionally induces brain damage in them before frightening them with realistic-looking fake spiders and snakes, along with performing other experiments on them. Monkeys in Murray’s laboratory are caged alone for years or even decades, causing profound psychological and physiological distress. Despite failing to produce a single treatment or cure for humans, she has received more than $50 million in taxpayer funding since 1998.
“The lonely brain-damaged monkeys used by Murray spin in circles inside steel cages day after day, and not a single treatment for humans has resulted from this torment,” says PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna. “PETA is calling on Murray to learn from her decades of research failures and modernize with human-relevant, animal-free test methods.”
PETA is calling on NIH to adopt the Research Modernization Deal (RMD) developed by PETA scientists. The RMD provides a strategic roadmap for replacing animal tests with modern, technologically advanced research methods.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.
