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You Paid For It by Brenda Shoss At the University of California, Davis, Dr. Kenneth Britten annually receives $220,000 to anchor restraining devices to the heads of rhesus monkeys and graft coils into their eyes. In 2001, Emory University acquired about $118,185,010 for researchers such as Garret Alexander to route electrodes into the brains of macaque monkeys. Locked in restraint chairs, the fluid-deprived monkeys execute behavioral drills to earn juice rewards and are later embalmed alive. Dr. Madeleine Schlag-Rey of UCLA and Dr. Richard Andersen of the California Institute of Technology also install devices into primates' brains. Since 1985 Dr. William Newsome has steadily replicated Dr. Britten's primate tests, in one of many ongoing studies that earned Stanford University around $107,272,736 in 2001 alone. At Yale University Charles Bruce has collected a near $3.4 million in endowments, to perform remarkably similar primate tests. Guess who pays for these duplicative projects? Your tax dollars are funneled into the federal agencies that subsidize vivisection. During fiscal 2001 you helped the National Institutes of Health (NIH) bankroll roughly 29,441 separate tests on primates, dogs, cats, rats, mice, hamsters, and guinea pigs for an estimated $8.5 billion. Animal research is an extravagantly unregulated business more often in search of a profit than a cure. As the nation's major funding apparatus, NIH awards each university or private lab over $100,000,000 in any given year, asserts Michael Budkie, founder of the Ohio-based Stop Animal Exploitation NOW! (SAEN). Budkie obsessively tracks federal databases to expose an industry "shrouded in secrecy. We cannot just walk into most laboratories and start asking questions." The list of carbon-copy experiments is endless. Presently, over 60 NIH grants repeat drug addiction studies in primates; 70 grants finance eyesight tests in macaque monkeys; 170 projects examine neural data in macaque monkeys and 90 others rehash the same study in cats. In 2000 the USDA's Animal Welfare Enforcement Report listed 1,416,643 animals as research subjects. This tally doesn't include rats, mice, birds and other non-mammals currently omitted from the Animal Welfare Act. It also doesn't itemize animals confined for breeding or offset under-reported facilities. Budkie compares CRISP (Computer Retrieved Information on Scientific Projects) numbers with other records and undeclared-animal estimates to up the yearly toll to 20,000,000 animals in laboratories. The animals caught in this thicket of bureaucratic apathy are invariably dosed with toxic substances, radiation, and addictive drugs. They endure electric shock, food/water deprivation, bone destruction, invasive surgeries, and intensive confinement for often immaterial studies. For example, Arizona State University cut funds for Michael Berens' brain cancer experiments after 470 dog deaths and a 95% failure rate. Berens relocated to new environs, where he continues to inject cancer cells into beagle fetuses and replant the tumors into the brains of puppies. Blind and collapsing dogs suffer unremitting cycles of radiation and chemotherapy. "When it can't take it anymore," Berens' has claimed, one puppy is killed to move on to the next. Pain is warranted as long as animals fulfill the intent of the research grant. "The goal is to insure that the experiment proceeds--at any cost," Budkie says. Humans lose more than cash when they pay for futile science. Behaviorist psychologist Dr. Roger E. Ulrich attests to the long history long history of animal-to-human error: "We create false data which, combined with the differences among species, make our efforts to apply the results to man, useless."
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