Wake Forest: Foreign Monkey Torture Scandal

An experimenter at Wake Forest University (WFU) appears to be channeling your tax dollars to China to conduct obscenely unethical experiments on monkeys that amount to outright CIA-style animal torture from black sites, and the school appears to be breaking US rules. Public health service requirements.

What do we know

The article, co-authored by Carol A. Shively of the Pathology Department of Wake Forest School of Medicine and published in January, describes experiments conducted at Chongqing Medical University in China that are so extreme that they will probably never be allowed a place in the United States. experiments to induce depression in adolescent macaques were reportedly funded in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), funded by taxpayers, although the Chinese school is not authorized to receive money from the NIH. …

Simple and simple torture

Laboratory staff kept the macaques in a cage for 80 days. For 55 consecutive days, the experimenters blew them with a sound of 100 decibels – about the volume of a jackhammer – for 12 hours in a row. They deprived animals of water or other fluids for 12 hours at a time and food for 24 hours. They put monkeys in cages slightly larger than their bodies, strictly limiting their movements for four hours; sprayed them with cold (50-degree) water for 10 minutes; forced to withstand the stroboscope for 12 hours; and subjected them to inevitable and repeated electric shocks to their legs for 90 seconds.

The deprivation of food and water, restriction of movement, sound waves and electric shocks and electric shocks are torture by any standard. Such behavior towards people is prohibited by international law and is punishable by strict sanctions. The authors also subjected monkeys to the Human Intruder Test, a wildly brutal experiment devised by notorious monkey tormentor Ned Kalin to “induce anxiety behavior.”

FMRI analysis of MCP-1-induced neuronal dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex in depressed cynomolgus macaques. Weixin Yan et al., Preprint downloaded from Research Square, published Feb 5, 2021.

At the end of the torture, the monkeys showed signs of depression, such as assuming a “heap pose” with their heads wrapped around their shoulders or lower while awake. They spent less time moving around and were not interested in items like apples, which they used to like.

Ethical dumping as a ‘promising model’

These egregious experiments appear to be cases of “ethical dumping” or transfer of experiments to a country with weak ethical and legal protection. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this case is that these grotesque experiments have been proposed as a “paradigm” for creating a “promising model” for the study of depression. Shivli and others are actually encouraging others to repeat the torture described in the document as the starting point from which additional experiments can be carried out on these suffering animals.

Garbology

Sexual and physical abuse, substance use disorders, interpersonal problems, economic stress, and chronic illness or injury are more common life traumas associated with mental illness in humans. Shooting monkeys with water cannons, bombarding them with jackhammer-like sounds and blinding them with strobe lights are not the same from a great distance. Add that to the fundamental differences in gene expression, brain anatomy, physiology and development in humans and other primates, and you have experiments that are doomed to failure from the start.

Teng, T., Shively, CA, Li, X. et al. Chronic, unpredictable mild stress causes depressive behavior, hypercortisolemia, and metabolic dysfunction in adolescent cynomolgus macaques. Translational Psychiatry 11, 9 (2021). Creative Commons – Attribution 4.0 International – CC BY4.0

Who cares about the store?

The WFU has a committee in charge of overseeing animal experiments called the Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). However, the seal of approval is missing from the published article. This is problematic.

If the IACUC did review and approve these experiments, it would suggest that the committee is unable to do its job, and is involved in an apparent case of ethical dumping. If the commission knew that Shiveley used some of her NIH grants to fund the experiments, but did not validate or approve them, that also suggests that she cannot fulfill her statutory responsibilities. Anyway, the IACUC WFU should explain something.

Stop tormenting monkeys here and abroad

PETA filed a complaint with the NIH and demanded that Wake Forest promptly and thoroughly investigate the possible misappropriation of NIH money and the possible failure of the IACUC school.

You don’t have to travel to China to find the National Institutes of Health-funded monkey horrors. The Elizabeth Murray Monkey Fear Festival is an outrageous experiment in which experimenters inflict irreversible and debilitating brain damage on monkeys, deprive them of food and water, hold them for extended periods, and lock them in darkened cages where they are deliberately frightened by fake spiders. and the serpent – happens right here at the NIH lab in Bethesda, Maryland.

Take Action to End Monkey Torment Everywhere