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Imagine being cruel enough to ask for $400,000 to conduct a pointless sleep deprivation experiment on monkeys who were ripped away from their moms and isolated in barren cages. University of Massachusetts–Amherst experimenter Agnès Lacreuse doesn’t need to imagine—she asked the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for this money and got it. 🤯
Her experiment was turned over to the University of Wisconsin–Madison at the last sec and then delayed for years after pressure from PETA. The experiment should never have been approved in the first place, and after PETA and our supporters bombarded the university with complaints, it was shut down after only one night.
But Lacreuse kept most of the dough anyway. 😒
Bait and Switch
The original design of the experiment involved blasting up to a dozen monkeys with sounds as loud as a lawn mower, preventing them from sleeping for up to 24 nights. 😨
But records that PETA got show that, ultimately, only six monkeys were used and the test—which had no relevance to human health—ended after just one night of torment.
Even though Lacreuse’s experiment was stopped, she somehow still burned through hundreds of thousands of dollars. She accepted $438,625 from NIH but didn’t complete any of the goals listed in her proposal—yet she returned only $98,660, or about 22%, of the cash. 😠
Balancing the Books
PETA is now asking three gov agencies—the National Institute on Aging, the Center for Scientific Review, and the Office of Research Integrity—to do the following:
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Investigate Lacreuse for misuse of funding and research misconduct.
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Force her to return the remaining $340,000.
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Ban her from receiving any more funding in the future.
Please join us by taking action to urge the National Institute on Aging to demand this money back from Lacreuse and ban her from receiving any more funds that the gov should instead use to fund animal-free research methods, which are more reliable and relevant to human health: