Lisa Jones-Engel: She experimented on primates for decades, now she wants to shut down the labs
In 2019, the last year for which research is available, more than 108,000 monkeys were held and/or used in experiments in US labs, along with nearly 200,000 guinea pigs, 58,000 dogs, 18,000 cats and millions of mice and rats.
HARRIET BROWN: “Right here! Beneath our feet! Are 300 monkeys! They haven’t seen sunshine! In years!” Lisa Jones-Engel stands outside the entrance to the Washington National Primate Research Center along with two dozen other protesters – most 30 years younger than she. Her long gray-blond ponytail tucked over one shoulder, she yells into a megaphone. As she shouts, another part of her brain is thinking: “God, you sound like a fucking activist. You sound like one of them.”
If you had told Jones-Engel she’d be doing this two years earlier, she would have been horrified. She was a PhD, a primatologist – a scientist, for God’s sake, not some silly monkey-hugger who reduced sophisticated issues to summer-camp chants… But now here she was wearing a garish monkey mask on a sidewalk in Seattle, feeling both energized and profoundly uncomfortable to be part of this spectacle. She told herself to buck up…
In late 2019 she took a drastic and irrevocable step: she said yes to a job at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) as a senior science adviser, a move she never would have predicted when she started her career… She made herself a promise: she would shut down the country’s seven remaining primate centers within the next 10 years. She just might do it, too…
She had worked at NYU’s Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates, and then at the University of Washington’s primate research center, one of eight national primate centers created in the 1960s. She’d spent decades in the field, trapping and sampling macaques and other primates across Asia on prestigious grants, publishing her research in top journals, co-authoring a book on monkey diseases, building expertise and credibility…
She had been trying so hard for so long to make things better for the animals in her care, the monkeys used in biomedical research. She’d made the calm, reasoned arguments; she’d sat on her university’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). But every time she questioned a protocol or requested information, even simple questions like whether animals in a study were age- and sex-matched, she was stonewalled and disrespected, painted as a troublemaker rather than as a concerned researcher…
These days, the horrible place is mostly a memory. Jones-Engel looks forward to work, to opening her email in-box to see if one of her many Freedom of Information Act requests has come through. She knows what other scientists think of Peta – that it’s at best naive and at worst propagates lies – and actually, she sometimes agrees. At the protest, for example, she heard other activists talking about storming in and releasing the monkeys, and thought, no, no, that’s a really bad idea! A few minutes later she heard someone chanting “We’re here today! At UW! Where they’re killing babies!” The hyperbole made her want to curl up and die.
But she also believes the hyperbole forces people to pay attention in ways they otherwise would not. The organization has taken heat for running media campaigns juxtaposing images of animal abuse with images of slavery, or comparing the pain of Jews during the Holocaust with the suffering of factory-farmed animals. “We’re all animals,” Jones-Engel explains. “We all suffer. And Peta doesn’t shy away from putting that right out there in your face. It can be shocking, and I believe that’s Peta’s intent”…
In 2019, the last year for which research is available, more than 108,000 monkeys were held and/or used in experiments in US labs, along with nearly 200,000 guinea pigs, 58,000 dogs, 18,000 cats and millions of mice and rats. The Environmental Protection Agency hopes to eliminate the use of vertebrates in animal testing by 2035. (Few people care what researchers do to insects or other invertebrates). SOURCE…
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