Ongoing Cruelty at Columbia University

David Stern
Commissioner of the NBA
Chair of the Board of Trustees, Columbia University
Olympic Tower New York, NY 10022
212-407-8000
212-826-6197 (fax)
dstern@nba.com

The Honorable Ed Whitfield
Chair of the Energy & Commerce Subcommittee
on Oversight & Investigations
2125 Rayburn House Office Bldg.
Washington, DC 20515-3808
202-225-2927
202-225-1919 (fax)
commerce@mail.house.gov

Dear Madams and Sirs,

I write to convey my shock over decades of animal abuse inside Columbia University laboratories. Animal experiments deflect focus and funding from cost-effective research that fosters knowledge pertinent to humans.

I am calling on Columbia to end the following cruel experiments, which have no practical value:

- strokes artificially induced in baboons by removing their left eyeballs to reach and clamp a critical blood vessel to their brains and administer experimental drugs.- monkeys with metal pipes surgically implanted in their skulls for the sole purpose of inducing stress in order to study the connection between stress and women’s menstrual cycles. One monkey, left alone to recover from the hideous implant surgery, was photographed with blood running down her face long after she had come out of anesthesia.- twenty years of pumping nicotine and morphine into pregnant baboons who are strapped into backpacks full of instrumentation and tethered inside their metal cages. Their babies undergo surgery while still in utero.

Animal experiments deflect focus and funding from cost-effective research that fosters knowledge pertinent to humans. Each species is so diverse in terms of its anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and genetics that animal models are unlikely to yield important results.

Over 80% of U.S. medical schools have already replaced animal experiments with human-applied teaching methods in undergraduate medical training. It is time for your university to join them.

Thank you very much for your valuable time and consideration.