“If there had been one incident, you say, ‘Okay, this could possibly be an accident,’” Budkie said. “But when someone starts to show a pattern of repeated incidents, that’s when you start seeing major consequences.”
‘IT’S A BUSINESS’
Budkie and others focused on research ethics have said that the Medical School’s research license should be revoked in order to save the animals and taxpayer dollars.
John J. Pippin ’71, the director of academic affairs for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, wrote a letter asking the USDA to “consider suspending research activities at both Harvard Medical School and Harvard University.”
“Harvard continues to put animals at risk and even kill them while benefitting from hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding,” Pippin wrote.
His organization scored Ivy League institutions on the number and severity of violation of the Animal Welfare Act in their laboratories since 2008. It ranked the University of Pennsylvania as the worst offender, followed by Princeton and Yale, then Harvard.
Over the past three years, according to Pippin, Harvard has received $1.3 billion in funding for scientific research from the National Institutes of Health, a separate government agency.
In contrast, the USDA can issue a maximum fine of $10,000 per institution, according to Sacks, the USDA spokesperson.
“If the USDA did everything they could possibly do, they couldn’t really hurt Harvard,” Budkie said. “The entities that they are regulating have become so large and so wealthy…it’s a business.”
NEXT STEPS
On its website, the NEPRC states that the animal research it conducts serves a variety of purposes, including creating drugs to treat cocaine addiction and developing gene therapy to further AIDS research.
But a December report released by the Institute of Medicine, a nonprofit organization, said that recent scientific advances should make it possible to partially eliminate the use of chimpanzees, which are closely related to humans, as research subjects. The report recommended that NIH-funded experiments use chimpanzees only under “stringent conditions”—including an inability to ethically perform the research on people instead.
Pippin said that in light of the report, “We are on the cusp of a changing viewpoint of animal research. If it isn’t necessary to use chimpanzees, it isn’t necessary to use other non-human primates.”
The protesters that took to the streets on Sunday said they believed that scientific trends are on their side.
“If the University complex has had this many negligent deaths in this amount of time, there is clearly something very, very wrong,” Budkie said. “The public needs to be skeptical of what’s going on here.”
Pippin said that technology is paving a new path for research that does not include animals. Tissue engineering, stem cell research, and the administration of “micro-doses” of drugs to humans can all serve as alternatives to animal research, he said.
“I’ve been an animal researcher. I know the deal,” Pippin said. “These people who have been arguing against the use of chimpanzees all these years were right.”
—Staff writer Nathalie R. Miraval can be reached at nmiraval@college.harvard.edu.