Harvard Talks of Killing Its Lab Animals

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Donald Trump, an elderly politician who is clearly not a fan of higher education and academic freedom, issued an a ultimatum to our nation's oldest an most distinguished university a week ago last Friday demanding that Harvard turn over admissions and hiring data to the federal government, abolish diversity programs, and comply with federal orders regarding foreign students.  Columbia University had already agreed to most of those bigotry-based demands, and the dominoes were beginning to fall.

But Harvard proved to be a tougher nut to crack than Columbia had been.  The President of Harvard, Alan Garber, responded to Trump in an open letter on Monday.  In that missive, President Garber wrote:

"No government - regardless of which party is in power - should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of studies and inquiries they can pursue."

That terse response did not sit well with the man in the White House who is used to demanding and getting his own way.   Monday night Trump announced a decision to freeze $2.2 billion in funding intended for research at Harvard, and the next day, Tuesday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued a "stop-work" order on government-funded medical research at Harvard.

All of that is, of course, headed into court, as is much of what Trump has tried to implement in the early months of his second term in office.

While the President of Harvard has given Trump a distinct "no thank-you" on his efforts to take over the school, medical research funded by the NIH has stopped, at least for the time being.   The projects that have been abruptly suspended include those studying radiation exposure, ALS diagnostics, and tuberculosis treatment.   Some of the research will be difficult to restart due to incomplete procedures needing to be re-initiated and researchers who will left in the interim in order to make a living elsewhere.

And there is also the question of what to do with the research animals.  A tuberculosis researcher at Harvard has been in the news this week saying that she fears some of the many animals involved in the medical research may have to be euthanized.   The animals in that project are macaque monkeys, and some of them have already started a treatment process.  The researcher feels that those monkeys, in particular, may have to be put down.

Harvard is currently seeking funds from outside of the federal government to keep its research programs functioning, and a few private donors have committed funds to help save the monkeys, but billions of dollars will not be generated by passing the hat, and the few Americans who do have the means to make a difference are busy snooping through government records and making things more efficient,  flying celebrities into space, and/or channeling their excess cash to Donald Trump and other right-wing politicians in the hopes of lessening their taxes and receiving other breaks and business opportunities from the government.

It's an ugly business all the way around:  trying to revive racist, homophobic, and misogynistic standards on American campuses, intentionally impeding research that could result in eliminating suffering and saving countless lives, and using innocent and sentient animals for medical research.  

The bad guy is obvious, and the good guys, the innocent monkeys, are, too.  It's the ones who are in the middle of this mess who are problematic.