For Immediate Release
October 24, 2010
Activists Visit California Institute of Technology
Vivisectors No Longer Able to Torture Primate Prisoners With Impunity
Pasadena, CA: In an anonymous communique received by the Press Office today, animal rights activists claim to have broken into the laboratories at California Institute of Technology (CalTech). The sparsley-worded message states only that various documents were taken along with the codes for security doors at the facility.
CalTech is the home of the David Anderson Research Group, a lab that studies fear and pain in fruit flies and mice. From their web site: "We are interested in the relationship between the neural circuits mediating learned and innate fear. We have defined behavioral assays [frightened mice] to compare these two types of fear..."
CalTech is also home to Richard A. Andersen (pictured above), a researcher who received over $2 million in 2010 to experiment on living monkeys' brains. Anderson explains a small part of one of his experiments: "Experiments were performed with two behaving, male rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Each was chronically fitted with a stainless steel head post for head immobilization and two recording chambers over small craniotomies for electrode insertions." Separate Representations of Target and Timing Cue Locations in the Supplementary Eye Fields. J Neurophysiol. 2009.
Press Officer Rick Bogle said that he isn't surprised that the labs were broken into."The public is kept in the dark about these labs
and the money being poured into them during these tough economic times. When people learn for themselves the truth that there is so little hope of effecting meaningful change through lawful means, it's no surprise that some will occasionally act outside the law. The only sure way for researchers to stop these unlawful intrusions is open honest disclosure and an invitation to the public to watch their animal experiments and decide for themselves whether the animal abuse should continue, or be voluntarily halted and more expedient and efficient methods of research entertained."
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