In July of this year, three vehicles belonging to University of California researcher Michael Selsted were vandalized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) as they sat parked in front of his home. As often happens after an ALF action, this led to renewed media interest in the controversy surrounding animal experimentation. However, some of the articles have been run containing false, misleading, and deceptive statements from UC-Irvine administrators. Anyone who has been involved in the fight to expose and stop the cruel use of primates in laboratories should not be the least bit surprised that the abusers are again lying to the media and the public to hide their cruelty. It fits a pattern that goes back to at least the Silver Spring monkeys case.

We want to take the time here to correct these lies. Let’s look at the claims made by UCI officials that appeared in an article in the University of California’s student newspaper.

According to Fabian [Melanie Fabian, member of UCI's IACUC], the reason for the recent actions may have been a Web site called Primatelabs.com. On the Web site, which is an anti-primate-vivisection awareness site, anyone can look up a research facility such as UCI and see which researchers are doing testing on non-human primates.

The site currently lists not only Selsted, but also UCI researchers Jogesh Mukherjee and Andre Ouellette. The problem with the information given is that according to the IACUC, UCI does not do testing on non-human primates.

This is a highly misleading statement coming from UCI. The reader is left with the impression that we here at PrimateLabs.com are bumbling fools that have passed on completely false information. This is not the case.

While it does indeed appear that University of California Irvine doesn’t house any monkeys at their own facilities, these three researchers still listed UC-Irvine as their affiliated institution when they applied for grant money. Thus, like all NIH-grants, UC-Irvine will get to skim off a sizable chunk of that grant money, typically approaching 50%, for their own general budget. So while UC-Irvine is eager to wash their hands clean of the moral blight that is primate vivisection, they don’t seem too eager to reject money off the backs of monkeys abused elsewhere at the behest of their faculty. To make their statement more accurate, a sentence should have been added at the end of the second paragraph: “We only profit from it.”

It is particularly misleading that Fabian, as administrator of the UCI IACUC, would make this statement. Typically, even if the researcher’s research proposal uses animals housed elsewhere, their institution’s IACUC must still look at the grant and approve it. This is supported by the fact that the UCI IACUC protocol application has an “Appendix H” that reads “Non-UCI Research/Housing Locations,” which a researcher must fill out if any live-animal procedures will take place at a non-UCI site. When she made this statement to the media, Fabian likely knew that Selsted and Mukherjee use primates, and even knew where their victims are housed. But she lied through omission by carefully crafting her words to leave the reader with the impression that no UCI faculty member uses primates. Even the reporter was left with this impression, as she introduced her sentence by saying “the problem with the information given is that…” There was and is no problem with the information given.

To be clear, Selsted, despite numerous assertions to the contrary here and elsewhere, is clearly a primate vivisector by any definition of the word. Selsted is researching why saliva in older monkeys is able to prevent SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) infection but not in neonates. Much of his research does involve the use of cell cultures rather than living animals. However, his research is carried out with the ultimate aim of trying out experimental microbicides containing defensin in the oral cavities of baby monkeys. His grant listed on this site, “Molecular Ontogeny of Oral Mucosal Resistance to SIV” (NIH grant number 5R01DE015517), states that its last aim is to “determine whether exogenous, topically administered defensin can alter the susceptibility to infection of neonatal rhesus macaques.”

In addition to this, as recently as three months ago, Selsted was involved in a related project at the Southwest National Primate Research Center that not only used primates, but actually harmed humans’ closest living relatives, chimpanzees. This project was funded with money from SNPRC’s base grant (grant number 2P51RR013986-10) so it is fair to say that UCI had nothing to do with this study. Nevertheless, remember Selsted’s personal vehicles were the ones damaged, and he clearly has individual responsibility for this study that was carried out in San Antonio. This subproject uses chimpanzees as test tubes in order determine the toxicity of an experimental theta defensin. The sub project’s abstract (ID# 6273) reads:

“Theta defensins are host defense peptides produced in the white blood cells of Old World monkeys (but not in chimpanzees or humans; see references below). In experiments performed in mice and rats, theta defensins facilitate clearance of bacteria in experimental infections, and also profoundly reduce the lethal effects of systemic inflammation (severe sepsis). Our long term goal is to determine the suitability of theta defensins as human therapeutics. Two adult chimpanzees will receive graded (increasing), intravenously administered doses of a naturally occurring theta-defensin RTD-1). The goal of these experiments are 1) to determine if there is any acute or subacute toxicity associated with the treatment, 2) to determine whether the administered protein elicits an antibody response in the chimpanzees, and 3) to determine whether other immunologic mediators (cytokines) are affected by the treatments.”

In 2008, this sub project was funded by the National Center for Research Resources in the amount of $306,788 and lists Selsted as the lead researcher. All of this information can be verified with the NIH’s new RePORTER tool.

There is something very odd about Selsted trying to deny that he is a primate vivisector. It seems that Selsted himself knows that the use of primates in experimentation is ethically dubious and he is trying to either internally rationalize his own participation in cruelty or hide it so that others can’t know the suffering he causes. If the moral and scientific case for experimenting on primates can be presented, why not simply do so instead of denying one’s role in it? Selsted is clearly acting like someone who is ashamed of his actions.

Let’s continue with the article:

The IACUC committee that Fabian works for was created to prevent this torture. When a researcher wants to use animals in a project, they must fill out an application or “protocol” which contains an extremely detailed description of what they plan to use the animals for. In the protocol they must justify the number of animals needed using statistics and state what their plans are from beginning to end.

While it’s good to see the article use the word “torture” used in the context of animal experimentation, even to deny it in a roundabout way, this statement on the whole is not very good reporting.
At a bare minimum, there is substantial controversy surrounding the effectiveness of IACUCs to prevent animal suffering. The only truly independent and scientific surveys of the system have shown substantial deficiencies. Speaking with any experienced anti-vivisection activist will also surely uncover several anecdotes where the IACUC system has failed to protect animals and has instead worked to protect the interests of the researchers. None of this was mentioned by the article. (For more information on the problems with IACUCs, see our Fact vs. Myth on this subject).

“It is really frustrating,” Fabian said, “because I know how well cared for these animals are and I’m an animal lover myself with two dogs and two cats at home. Everybody involved in the use of animals in science cares about the welfare of those animals.”

The fact that Fabian shares her home with animals, animals that she probably does genuinely care for and love, says nothing about how she views the animals trapped in UCI’s laboratories. To mention both in the same breath is a misleading attempt to subtly conflate the two in the public mind – to give the impression that animals in labs are treated as well as those in our homes.

Fairly recently, UCI has infected the eyes of 20 rabbits with the Herpes virus and intentionally left them untreated. They admit that this will cause extreme pain to the animal but they did not apply available topical drugs because this would “interfere with the experimental infection and adversely affect the study results…In particular, the ability to accurately measure the amount of virus in the eye at different time points after infection would be compromised by standard medical therapies.” (See related USDA documents). Hopefully, Ms. Fabian would not leave eye sores untreated in her dogs/cats at home out of a curiosity to see how the virus develops. But I don’t think she would. Fabian’s ethical beliefs surrounding treatment of animals are probably marked by a great deal of cognitive dissonance that allow her to condone one treatment of animals in labs and another treatment of pets at home.

It is a plain matter of fact that people are perfectly capable of horribly mistreating one group of individuals and caring a great deal for another group. The prison guards at Abu Ghraib and the CIA torture prisons likely came from homes in the U.S. where they expressed a great deal of compassion and care for their family members or larger community. The same Nazi doctors who used child prisoners at Auschwitz in harmful experiments often had children themselves that were loved at home. In Fabian’s case, she is approving research projects on dogs and cats at UCI that if someone were to treat her own animals in such a way, she would likely call the police and request that animal cruelty charges be filed.

“A lot of the information that those anti-animal research sites put on their websites is so out of date. It’s from around the mid-1970s. Sure these animals go through some pain but it’s minimized as much as possible. Nobody wants to hurt animals and it’s frustrating to see scientists singled out when they are working toward cures for diseases that we could die from someday.”

Fabian’s claim that anti-vivisection activists use information from around the mid-1970s is absolutely false. I’m not even sure how she arrived at that date. PETA, the largest animal rights organization in the world and the U.S., wasn’t even founded until the early 1980s. The first undercover investigations/raids on vivisection labs in the U.S. began around the early 1980s as well. Perhaps she chose this date because Peter Singer’s first edition of Animal Liberation was published in 1975. Who knows. Anyone’s guess is as good as ours.

Regardless, the claim is false. You will find no grant for any vivisector on our website older than 2007. The vast majority of our photos in our photo gallery were taken from undercover investigations that occurred in this decade, and most in the past few years. And this site is no exception – there are plenty of excellent animal rights websites that have continually updated information on the use of primates in laboratories. Stop Animal Exploitation Now, for example, has thousands and thousands of pages of documents from inside animal labs – none of which are from the mid-1970s. Animal activists continually seek out the newest information and photos possible. This is evidenced by the fact that animal protection organizations, including PETA and HSUS, make continual efforts to conduct new undercover investigations inside primate laboratories. HSUS’ investigation into New Iberia, which garnered substantial media attention, was less than a year ago. Surely Fabian is aware of this, and I suspect her lab still checks potential new hires for any connections to animal rights groups for fear of an undercover investigation in their own facilities. That doesn’t sound like a movement that is comfortable using information from the mid-1970s. (And, of course, if Fabian or anyone else would like to provide us with up-to-date photos or documents from inside UC-Irvine, we’d be happy to post them here. Just email us your pictures and information at info@primatelabs.com. No matter what lab you work at, even if you have only a few pics you quickly took with your cell phone camera, we’d love to have ‘em).

Filed under: Animal LIberation Front (ALF), California, IACUC by PrimateLabs.com