Tell Harvard to End Torturous Experiments on Mothers and Baby Monkeys

Last fall People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) exposed the horrors that are taking place at Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of Margaret Livingstone, a woman who has spent the last 40 years of her life torturing mother monkeys and their babies without making any substantive contribution to science or modern medicine. The sensory deprivation experiments that this woman performs involve ripping baby monkeys away from their mothers shortly after birth and then preventing the babies from seeing faces for the first year or their lives. The newborn monkeys are in some cases raised by laboratory staff wearing welding masks to prevent them from seeing faces and in other cases the baby monkeys are blinded altogether. In 2016 Margaret Livingstone blinded newborn baby monkeys by sewing their eyes shut. These experiments are purportedly performed to determine the effects that visual impairment will have on developing brains, however the study findings have not changed in the decades that this research has been performed. It is very clear that sensory deprivation of this kind has a negative impact on developing brains and vision and there is no logical or medically relevant reason to keep performing the same cruel studies repeatedly.

Both the baby monkeys and their mothers live horrible, lonely lives after separation and a lack of appropriate safety standards in the laboratory makes them vulnerable to accidental injury and death. In 2019 a baby monkey died by strangulation when they bit a hole in a cloth “surrogate mother” device hanging in their cage and got their head stuck in the fabric. Instead of developing a safer comfort device Margaret Livingstone’s laboratory removed the “surrogate mother” figures from all the cages and left the babies with nothing to cling to. The bereft mothers are also occasionally given cloth dolls to replace their babies and their reactions are observed as a secondary form of “research”. Margaret Livingstone recently published findings explaining that monkey mothers feel very distressed when their children are taken from them and may cling to the cloth babies for comfort. These obvious observations offer nothing new in terms of scientific knowledge, the findings do not change year to year, and no humans experience any benefit from this so-called research. In October more than 250 scientists united to ask the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to retract the recent publication of these “findings” on the grounds that it did not advance scientific knowledge and promoted unethical practices and research standards.

Unfortunately, Margaret Livingstone has had $32 million of taxpayer money invested in her research by the National Institutes of Health since 1998 and she expressed in her autobiography that when it comes to performing cruel experiments on baby monkeys she “can’t imagine having more fun doing anything else” so there is very little chance she will ever stop this cycle of needless cruelty if Harvard Medical School fails to do the right thing.

Take Action Now

To save these helpless mothers and their babies from this unthinkable torment it is crucial that we keep up the momentum that PETA began when their investigation broke in October. Please sign your name and join us in telling Harvard that enough is enough. Shut down these cruel and unnecessary experiments.

To learn more about this issue please tune in to the first podcast episode of Species Unite’s 9th season. The episode features Dr. Katherine Roe a neuroscientist and research associate with the Laboratory Investigations Department of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals who has been instrumental in the fight to end these cruel and scientifically flawed experiments.