Watchdog: No more monkey business Group says animal testing by MIT, others is cruel, wastes public funds
A national watchdog group is calling out experiments on monkeys — including some by MIT — that it says are a waste of taxpayer money and painful to the primates by drilling into their skulls, among other things, and trying to get them to say, “Will you marry me?” in English.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology spokeswoman said in an email Friday that the university expects “that all researchers carry out their work according to the highest ethical and professional standards, and institutional review protocols are in place to oversee and approve studies … to ensure the humane and ethical use of laboratory animals.”
However, she refused to say why MIT would not disclose the cost of the experiments nor would the National Institutes of Health, which funds many of the experiments, explain why its press releases did not.
In a letter Thursday to Deborah Kearse, director of NIH’s Division of Program Integrity, the White Coat Waste Project said that an analysis of 100 press releases about taxpayer-funded projects costing nearly $250 million found that not one complied with the Stevens Amendment, a law requiring disclosure of federal and non-governmental funding.
The letter cites as one example an allegedly noncompliant press release promoting a $3.75 million, taxpayer-funded experiment to, among other things, simulate what it would sound like for a monkey to say, “Will you marry me?” in English.
The White Coat Waste Project also charges that a press release issued by NIH and posted on MIT’s website violated federal law by failing to report the amount of taxpayer funding spent on experiments in which researchers allegedly drilled into monkeys’ skulls, screwed in experimental equipment and locked them in restraint chairs inside a brain scanner to compare monkeys’ brain responses to musical and nonmusical sounds to those of humans.
“Based on what they found … the researchers suspect that macaques experience music and other sounds differently than humans,” NIH Director Francis Collins wrote in his blog.
“Animal experimenters are flouting this disclosure law because they know taxpayers don’t want their money wasted on cruel and useless studies,” said Justin Goodman, vice president of advocacy and public policy for the White Coat Waste Project in Washington, D.C. “This is precisely why these transparency laws were put in place: to ensure that taxpayers can hold government accountable for how it spends their money.”
NIH’s press release about the sound experiment does not disclose its cost but does say it began with a “friendly bet” between researchers.
In a statement Friday, Josh McDermott, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, said: “The purpose of the study … was to test whether a certain species of monkey would be a clinically valuable model for future studies aimed at understanding and treating serious hearing disorders in humans.”
In an email Friday, an NIH spokeswoman said the institutes or its umbrella organization, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, would respond directly to Goodman.
“If there are inaccuracies in the letter, then the response will address those,” she said.
“The NIH Grants Policy Statement includes the requirements of the Stevens Amendment,” she said. “Upon receiving NIH funding, all grantees are subject to the terms and conditions of award, of which the Grants Policy Statement is a part.”
A March 2019 Government Accountability Office audit that followed a White Coat Waste Project report on compliance with the Stevens Amendment at Ivy League schools said: “NIH officials stated that they do not specifically monitor for Stevens Amendment compliance.”
The GAO recommended that the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes NIH, begin enforcing the law, and HHS stated that it “would direct all operating divisions to design a process for implementing and monitoring the Stevens Amendment and would update HHS grants policy to reflect this new process.” HHS also said that it “would address any noncompliance issues if they were raised.”
In March, U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) introduced the Cost Openness and Spending Transparency Act to require all federal-funding recipients to comply with the Stevens Amendment. The bill also would give the Office of Management and Budget the authority to withhold funding for noncompliance.
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed language in the fiscal year 2020 HHS spending bill instructing NIH to submit a report on its primate-experimentation program, including the costs of its projects.