Victory! Funding Cut for Harvard’s Torturous Experiments on Baby Monkeys
After decades of horrific and profoundly cruel experiments on baby monkeys at Harvard University, funding for Margaret Livingstone’s barbaric research has finally been terminated.
Since the 1980s, Livingstone received millions of dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health to conduct maternal and visual deprivation experiments on infant rhesus macaques. Her experiments involved ripping baby monkeys away from their mothers shortly after birth, leaving both mothers and babies traumatized, before the infant monkeys were subjected to unthinkable tortures.
Livingstone attempted to study visual recognition by preventing the baby monkeys from seeing faces, her methods involved sewing their eyes shut or requiring staff to wear welders’ masks around them. Monkeys were also made to wear goggles that simulated disorienting strobe lights for the first 18 months of their lives, and in some cases, electrode arrays were implanted into the monkeys’ brains. When the tests were finished, the animals were typically killed and dissected.
These experiments produced no significant breakthroughs and offered no benefit to human health. Yet for decades, Livingstone’s work continued—not because it saved lives or prevented disease, but because the NIH kept writing checks. Her legacy is not one of scientific progress, but of repeated, senseless torment inflicted on innocent beings for profit. At best, she is shockingly cruel. At worst, a sociopath.
Thankfully, she will no longer be able to carry out her sadistic experiments with taxpayer money.
We are deeply grateful to the more than 5,000 members of this community who spoke out against these sick experiments. We will be closing this petition and submitting the final list of signatures to Harvard President Alan Garber, along with a letter urging him to send any surviving monkeys to sanctuary, and to ensure nothing like this is ever allowed to happen at Harvard again.
What You Fought Against
Photo credit left: PETA. Right: Figure 3 in Triggers for Mother Love/ Margaret S. Livingstone / CC-BY-NC-ND
In 2022, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) exposed the horrors that were taking place at Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of Margaret Livingstone, a woman who spent 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 performed involve ripping baby monkeys away from their mothers shortly after birth and then preventing the babies from seeing faces for the first year of their lives. The newborn monkeys were in some cases raised by laboratory staff wearing welding masks to prevent them from seeing faces and in other cases the baby monkeys were blinded altogether. In 2016 Margaret Livingstone blinded newborn baby monkeys by sewing their eyes shut. These experiments were purportedly performed to determine the effect that visual impairment has on developing brains, however the study findings did not changed in the decades that this research was conducted. 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 lived horrible, lonely lives after separation, and a lack of appropriate safety standards in the laboratory made 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 received $32 million in taxpayer funding for her research from 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.
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.