A Washington D.C.-based nonprofit is asking Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to immediately defund alcohol and cannabis experiments at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, a facility run by OHSU and funded by the National Institutes of Health.
The group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, advocates for alternatives to the use of animals in research and veganism.
About a dozen of the 175 Japanese macaque monkeys at the Oregon National Primate Center have been found to suffer from Batten disease.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OHSU
The organization has been running TV and radio advertisements in Oregon urging the closure of the research facility, one of seven across the country that receives funding from the National Institutes of Health for research conducted using monkeys.
The group notched a win last month when Gov. Tina Kotek reportedly came out in favor of closing the facility.
Now the group says it has a new strategy: asking DOGE to pull funding from some experiments it claims are unnecessary, and which they say constitute a misuse of government funds.
The research center received $56 million from the NIH in fiscal year 2024.
The Physicians Committee says it has emailed its complaint to Gavin Klinger, a tech company engineer and senior advisor at DOGE.
In the letter, Janine McCarthy, program manager with the advocacy group, argues that the Center’s research into alcohol and cannabis is “not scientifically valuable” and is inflicting unnecessary harm on animals.
That research includes experiments that conclude with monkeys being killed and dissected, or that subject live monkeys to uncomfortable and frightening procedures, McCarthy alleged.
“These funds are being misused to support studies that lack scientific merit and inflict avoidable pain and suffering on animals,” she wrote in the complaint. The group is also asking that DOGE do a full review of the animal research program at the Center.
An OHSU spokesperson said they have not yet received a copy of the complaint, but said in all cases the experiments performed on monkeys at the Center are reviewed to ensure they benefit science and human health.
“Animal studies at OHSU are only conducted when other nonanimal research methods — such as laboratory-based cell culture, simulation, gene chips or computer modeling — are scientifically inadequate,” OHSU spokesperson Sara Hottman wrote in a statement. “Or too dangerous for human participants.”
Scientists, she said, have to demonstrate that their proposed studies do not unnecessarily duplicate previous research, and detail steps they will take to minimize animal subjects’ pain and distress.
The physicians committee cites five experiments, published in 2023 and 2024, that they argue were duplicative or scientifically unnecessary, and harmed animals without adequate justification.
The complaint cites a 2024 study published in the journal Nature that investigated the effect of THC on the brain development of monkeys.
In that experiment, researchers fed THC edibles to five pregnant macaques, and periodically scanned the brains of their fetuses with MRIs. At the end of the experiment, the infant monkeys were delivered via C-section, killed, and dissected for analysis. The researchers found some subtle changes in small RNA molecules in the fetuses exposed to THC.
According to McCarthy, studies of humans render that research unnecessary. She cites an observational study that compared outcomes in human subjects who report using cannabis during pregnancy with those who do not, and a study that used fetal MRI to look for brain volume changes in fetuses whose mothers reported using alcohol during pregnancy.
“Numerous peer-reviewed studies demonstrate the equivalence or superiority of human-biology-based models to examine the relationship between maternal administration of THC and changes to the fetus,” McCarthy writes.
The scientists at the primate research center, though, described a gap in knowledge they say their study was helping to fill.
In the article, the authors note that observational studies in humans have suggested a possible link between THC use in pregnancy and neurological changes in children, including ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. But for many reasons, those studies aren’t conclusive. Using macaques, they wrote “permits control of confounding variables that limit human research.”
