I would like to comment on Sheryl Becker’s recent guest column “Cruel and pointless experiments on animals worsen gender inequality” (Gazette, Oct. 20) on animal experiments at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I was appalled at the description of the experimental procedures inflicted on tiny marmoset monkeys, in the name of studying female menopause. Marmosets are primates, and primates are our closest relatives among the non-human animals. As such, they can experience pain, fear, and extreme stress, all of which, in my opinion, are inflicted on them by the procedures described.
As the writer points out, marmosets do not experience menopause. The procedures used include manipulating their hormones with drugs, painful surgery, keeping their heads immobile, implanting electrodes in their scalps and necks, with leads to their abdomens, social isolation and sleep disruption, depriving them of water so they will cooperate in stressful behavioral and cognitive to get water as a reward – need I go on?
In the wild, marmosets are very active, living in the upper canopy of trees and feeding on sap, insects, fruit, leaves and gum. They are very social, living in groups and exhibiting a high degree of social cooperation. The pain, fear and extreme stress of the experiments described must be nearly intolerable for them.
And for this, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have given the University of Massachusetts experimenters more than $4 million. The writer goes on to describe other appalling animal experiments funded by NIH, none of which seem likely to produce any useful information on women’s health issues.
As a woman who has experienced both painful menses and menopause, I believe these experiments should be stopped, the funding returned to NIH, the study animals humanely euthanized, and effective research designed to address these health problems, in, as the writer points out, half the human population. Such research should study women, (without, it need hardly be said, inflicting on them the same kinds of painful procedures described by Becker), not animals who cannot even experience the conditions being studied.
Jennifer Lewis
Westhampton