PETA to Columbia Board of Trustees: Help the Animals!

PETA’s senior vice president of research & investigations, Mary Beth Sweetland, has fired off a letter to the 24 members of Columbia University’s Board of Trustees, calling on the trustees to use their influence to help bring a permanent end to the experiments of Connolly, Stark, and Ferin.

In referring to the stroke experiments of E. Sander Connolly—in which Connolly cut out the left eyes of baboons and used the empty eye sockets to access and clamp off major blood vessels to the brain, inducing a stroke—Sweetland exposes not only Connolly’s depraved cruelty, but also his dishonesty.

After inducing strokes in the incarcerated baboons, Connolly administered a test stroke drug, dehydroascorbic acid (DHA), supplied by Progenics Pharmaceuticals. The DHA failed to alleviate the suffering of the animals who were slouched over in their cages, unable to eat, drink, or even lift their heads. Connolly noted this failure in a letter to Columbia’s Animal Care and Use Committee: “We completed a trial of a novel anti-oxidant compound (DHA) and were able to show that its efficacy in lower rodent models is not mirrored in primates.” Yet, three months later, Connolly is quoted in a news release issued by Progenics as saying: “The positive outcome of this study underscores the potential of DHA to protect patients against the debilitating consequences of stroke.” This “unconscionable failure to disclose critical information” sinks Connolly’s academic credibility and Columbia University’s integrity.

While Connolly has voluntarily stopped his cruel experiments, PETA is calling on Columbia to permanently stop his stroke experiments and two others.

Click here to read PETA’s letter to members of Columbia’s Board of Trustees

Click here to read Dr. Robert Hoffman’s critique on the use of animals in stroke experiments.

Click here to find out what you can do to help end these crude, painful, traumatic, and wasteful experiments.