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June 1999 A Site For Sore Eyes: An Embarrassed NYU Gets the Spotlight By Barbara Stagno and Joyce Friedman

On Tuesday April 27, at approximately 1:20 pm, two men climbed out of an eighth floor window of New York University’s Main Building, overlooking Washington Square Park. Carefully and deliberately, they went about their work, maneuvering ropes and other equipment. Below them, the afternoon bustle of pedestrians scarcely regarded them and an NYU security guard informed some people standing near the building to step aside and beware the “workmen” above.

But soon suspicions were aroused. Several security guards began talking into their radios, calling out “100 Washington Square East. No, they are not workmen.” People in the park left their benches or got up from the grass to watch the activity overhead.

Suspended on ropes from the side of Main Building, the two men began to scale down the side of the building, slowly unfurling a 20-by-30-foot banner that read “NYU’s Labs are Making a Killing.” The word “killing” was highlighted in red with “blood” dripping from it. Below the words was a huge painting of a monkey, his head restrained with screw clamps while an electrode pierced his brain. Most disturbing was the powerful expression of pain and terror on the monkey’s face. When the banner was completely unfurled, the growing crowd erupted into cheers. The sight of these two men rappelling down the side of the building while displaying the banner they had worked so hard to anchor safely along with themselves was something to admire and cheer about.

Police and fire trucks arrived from all directions and NYU administrators came running to the scene, ashen-faced and neckties flying. Yet all the commotion was no match for the sound of irate voices, rising in unison: “Vivisection is a Lie! How many animals have to die?!” “No more lab lies! No more compromise!” Activists assembled on Washington Square East to greet the banner’s descent, chanted loudly and energetically. In the midst of this quiet Tuesday afternoon in April, animals in the laboratories at NYU suddenly had a loud and compelling voice.

The banner drop was planned by In Defense of Animals (IDA) as a surprise to follow the annual World Week rally. Though a valuable event, World Week for Animals in Laboratories (WWAL) has also become a time of predictable uprising from the animal advocacy camp. IDA wanted to send the message to NYU and the public that it will expose vivisection practices all year long. The banner drop, organized in conjunction with The Ruckus Society, which provided the skilled activist-climbers, was a perfect way to call attention to IDA’s new anti-vivisection campaign at NYU. Not surprisingly, it also created a buzz on campus as the student newspaper ran several articles and editorials in the ensuing days, including a defensive statement from the university.

Along with the banner, dropped only two stories from a recently expanded animal laboratory, IDA unfurled its new campaign focusing on the vision research conducted in the laboratory of Lynne Kiorpes at NYU. Kiorpes is a psychologist who conducts experiments mostly on young and infant macaque monkeys, in which she damages their eyes supposedly to examine the process of visual development.

Kiorpes and her associates attempt to artificially cause eye disorders which are naturally occurring in humans but rarely seen in monkeys. Abnormalities such as crossed eyes are created in young monkeys by cutting apart and rearranging the eye muscles, or injecting them with a paralyzing neurotoxin. In fact, vivisectors have devised a whole variety of procedures to inflict damage on the monkeys’ eyes. Some experiments blur the monkeys’ vision by instilling drugs which constrict the eyes’ blood vessels. Still others “defocus” the vision of infant monkeys by inserting hard plastic contact lenses that remain in the eye for seven to ten months. All these experiments have one goal in mind: to damage the developing eye. Once that’s done, the monkeys will have electrodes embedded in their skulls for brain-wave recordings. When the experiments are finished, the monkeys are killed for a post-mortem analysis of brain tissue.

Perhaps the most heartless and arrogant aspect of these experiments involves the separation of infants from their mothers. Macaque mothers, like humans, are profoundly attached to their babies. Infants can only be separated if the mothers are first drugged unconscious. All the guidelines in the world to regulate animal suffering don’t mean a thing when such basic comforts as the infant-mother bond can be so disregarded.

Shortly after the banner drop, IDA sent a letter to NYU asking for full disclosure of Dr. Kiorpes’ experiments. The letter requested that NYU allow IDA officials—or other animal care experts agreed upon by IDA and NYU—to view experiments in progress at Kiorpes’ NYU laboratory. A response is currently pending. IDA is also calling upon the NYU Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) to discontinue its approval of the Kiorpes experiments. These experiments should be replaced by non-invasive brain imaging techniques, an emerging technology that allows scientists to view the human brain in action. The IACUC is mandated to ensure a reduction in the use of animals, and no experiment should be approved when there are non-animal methods that can replace it.

Please join IDA in challenging the NYU IACUC to uphold its mandate and speak out to bring this issue into the spotlight. Kiorpes’ research is one of approximately 800 current projects–conducted nationwide–that use animals to study vision, all of which are being funded by the National Institutes of Health. Exposing these experiments as the shoddy and inhumane science they are will eventually erode the funding for others as well. Write: Dr. T. James Matthews; Chairperson, IACUC; New York University; 6 Washington Place, Room 1172; New York, NY 10003.

Also write your U.S. Senators and urge them to closely scrutinize the use of federal money in archaic and hideously cruel research, typified by the Kiorpes experiments. Call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 if you want the names of your Senators. Write: The Honorable ________, United States Senate, Washington, D.C. 20510.

Barbara Stagno and Joyce Friedman work for In Defense of Animals. Brochures, postcards and additional information on this campaign are available from IDA by calling 212-462-3068. Please leave your name and address along with your request. Or visit IDA’s website at www.idausa.org.

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