For better and for worse
It was in this contradictory context that the NIH last month announced it had defunded a set of controversial studies on baby monkeys run by Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Margaret Livingstone.
To study the development of vision, Livingstone’s lab separates newborn rhesus macaques from their mothers and then uses various techniques to manipulate their vision while they’re growing up — in the most disturbing case in 2016, two baby monkeys had their eyelids sewn shut for their first year of life.
The animals’ skulls are later surgically opened, electrodes are implanted into their brains, and researchers show them visual stimuli (images of faces, for example) to examine how the sensory deprivation or other visual manipulations affected their neurodevelopment.
To put my own cards on the table, I think these experiments are pretty much impossible to justify. They’re emblematic of an archaic paradigm of primate experimentation that is untroubled by the ethical implications of causing extreme suffering, and overly presumptuous that its contributions to human knowledge will outweigh whatever costs are borne by animals. It’s exactly the kind of work that the federal government — whoever controls it — ought to stop funding as part of an effort to change American science for the better.
It’s an immense shame, then, that what could be a genuinely game-changing, science-based initiative to reduce animal experimentation is taking place during a wholesale war on science in general, and on Harvard in particular.
The timing of Livingstone’s grant termination suggests the decision had less to do with ethics than it did with simply defunding Harvard, which was happening simultaneously (neither the NIH nor Livingstone granted my requests for an interview). And included among the more than $2 billion in grants to Harvard that the Trump administration has cut or frozen is the work of one of the world’s pioneers in scientific alternatives to animal models.
From an animal ethics perspective, the defunding of Livingstone’s monkey research looks as close as it gets to an unambiguous win. It’s hard to conclude, though, whether it signals a real reconsideration of the use of animals in science, given that it’s coming from impatient administration that seems more interested in shredding institutions than actually directing them.
Meaningfully rethinking the role of animal experimentation requires the ability to, well, think. Sound judgment about what kind of research actually deserves public funding requires institutional capacity to reason clearly about both science and ethics. And under the Trump administration, that capacity is being systematically dismantled.
The long fight over primate research — and Livingstone’s lab
Humans have been using our primate cousins as experimental material for over a century. European colonialism made monkeys native to South and Southeast Asia and Africa readily available to Western scientists, who in the early- to mid-20th century began to use them in a wide range of biomedical and psychological research.
In the postcolonial period, that became more complicated: By 1978, India banned the export of rhesus macaques for research after public concern over their use in military and radiation experiments. The US responded in part by investing in breeding programs that rear the animals in captivity (as opposed to plucking them from the wild, although wild-caught monkeys are still used in American labs).
Today’s lab monkeys still tend to be housed in small metal cages — the size of telephone booths, as neuroscientist Garet Lahvis has put it for Vox — with little opportunity for free movement. They often show signs of psychological distress, engaging in strange, self-harming behaviors. Many of them, born in captivity, have never seen the outdoors.
Beyond the undeniable ethical issues, some scientists have called into question whether experiments on monkeys driven insane by extreme confinement and social deprivation can even produce knowledge transferable to humans.
Livingstone’s experiments in particular have provoked a storm of condemnation, not just from the groups like PETA, which has campaigned to get her research shut down, but also from fellow scientists.
In 2022, over 250 primatologists, animal behaviorists, and other academics, appalled by Livingstone’s separation of macaque mothers from their newborns — which is known to cause intense distress in both animals and abnormal social and cognitive development in the infants — signed a letter urging the retraction of one of her articles from the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Even Livingstone’s Harvard colleagues at the university’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic called on the NIH to defund her research.
The Livingstone lab’s work constitutes what’s known in the scientific community as “basic science” — research whose purpose is to advance our knowledge of how the world works in general, without necessarily having a direct medical application. “These are not experiments designed to develop a new treatment or cure for humans. These are not experiments that are ever going to develop a new treatment,” Katherine Roe, a neuroscientist and the chief scientist for PETA’s laboratory investigations department, told me. “They're curiosity-driven.”
Of course, exploratory basic science research can lay the foundation for practical applications in the future, and federal funding certainly ought to have a role in funding it. Basic science involving invasive experimentation on animals derives its social license to operate, at least in theory, from its ability to articulate concrete benefits to humans — Livingstone, for example, has argued that her work on monkeys offers insights into the organization of the brain that could prove useful in helping people with autism or other conditions.
The problem is that these benefits are highly theoretical, and hardly begin to make up for either the ethical problems of experimenting on animals or the scientific problems of treating them as viable proxies for humans. As Lahvis, who used to study mice, argued in Vox in 2023, the same cramped, psychologically damaging conditions that make animal research ethically problematic can also undermine its translatability to humans.
This research carries on not because anyone is doing a rational weighing of its costs and benefits, but because in the eyes of the law and of biomedical science, animals are morally invisible and thoroughly disposable.
The case for a tiny bit of optimism
There’s no single way to make meaning out of the whirlwind of garbage that is the Trump administration’s science policy. But biomedical science is overdue for a paradigm shift on animal research. Even former NIH director Francis Collins has referenced “the pointlessness of much of the research being conducted on non-human primates” in a private email sent in 2014. The current NIH, unencumbered by loyalty to scientific or institutional tradition, now offers a rare opportunity to speed up that transition.
Still, the breadth of the administration's attacks on science may make it impossible for career NIH officials to reach independent judgments about which research is worth public support. “Everyone admits that animal models are suboptimal at best, and highly inaccurate more commonly,” Harvard bioengineer Don Ingber told me.
Yet Ingber’s own research funding for his work on organs-on-chips, a leading alternative to animal models, was frozen by the Trump administration in April. Harvard is now suing the administration to restore its science funding, and the indiscriminate, politically motivated nature of the cuts will be harder for Trump officials to defend than if the NIH had simply made narrowly targeted reductions to animal studies.
For animal advocates, this moment poses an exceptionally hard challenge: advocating intelligently for a transition away from animal research, and holding the Trump administration accountable for its promises, without allowing themselves to be recruited into a nihilistic war on universities. But scientists, too, ought to be honest with themselves about why the cruelty of animal experimentation has been so effectively weaponized for anti-science populism.
Ending sensory deprivation research on our social, curious, intelligent monkey relatives, if it holds, represents one meaningful, if tainted, shard of justice. As for American science as a whole, “I’m worried. And maybe hopeful,” psychologist John Gluck, who built his career on primate research and later repudiated it, told me. And if the NIH really is serious about moving away from the mass sacrifice of animals, he said, “It’s about goddamn time.”
—Marina Bolotnikova, deputy editor
