What Eastern Virginia Medical School Does to Pregnant Baboons

These are the disturbing details of the agony that Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) inflicts on baboons, torment so prolonged and egregious that it has violated federal law. Take action here to help us end these experiments and close this laboratory.

Hundreds of Corpses

Since the mid-1980s, EVMS’ Gerald Pepe and the University of Maryland–Baltimore’s (UMB) Eugene Albrecht have used olive baboons to purportedly study the role of hormones during pregnancy.

In the experiments, female baboons are impregnated and subjected to daily hormone injections for up to 70 days. Throughout their pregnancies, they’re repeatedly sedated for blood draws and subjected to muscle biopsies (previously including vaginal biopsies), cardiac tests, and metabolic tests. Their fetuses are cut out at different stages of pregnancy, some up to nine days before full development.

The present set of experiments at EVMS—funded through a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant given to Albrecht—uses 156 baboons, with 63 fetuses being cut out of their mothers, tested on, and killed. An additional 40 are being allowed to be born, only so they can be used in other experiments.

Pepe and Albrecht have admitted that the hormonal manipulations used in their experiments are “associated with a 20% loss due to spontaneous abortion or failure of neonates [newborn infants] to thrive.” They estimated that their studies would require “a total of 70 pregnancies” over a five-year period.

Both EVMS and UMB have been cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for conducting multiple major survival surgeries on pregnant baboons without scientific justification or approval from the agency.

Running Afoul of the Law

Under the federal Animal Welfare Act, it’s illegal for experimenters to subject an animal to more than one major, invasive surgery from which the animal is allowed to recover (called a “survival surgery”) without scientific justification or permission from federal authorities. But the USDA caught EVMS performing multiple surgeries on the baboons—all without permission. In 2021, the agency cited the school for it. EVMS then asked for an exemption so experimenters could continue to subject the baboons to “major survival surgeries” over and over again.

The USDA granted EVMS the exception, with two small, straightforward stipulations:

1. Surgeries must be performed in accordance with the experiment.
2. The school’s laboratory oversight committee must evaluate the animals’ well-being and the methods and procedures at least every six months.

The USDA, in another unusual move, also notified NIH of the school’s federal animal welfare violations, stating, “[T]he study in question raises concerns about animal health and well-being.”

EVMS proved that it could not or would not comply with the stipulations. The USDA again cited the school in May 2023, after a baboon named Jemma was administered a drug and was then found unresponsive in her cage—and EVMS staff failed to help her.

The USDA then withdrew its approval for the school’s surgery exception.

The following month, NIH issued the school a rare warning, saying the agency wouldn’t pay for any expenses from “these non-compliant activities.”