On April 1, the Trump administration’s effort to slash government funding arrived in Morgantown, W.Va., where federal scientists spent their days studying health and safety threats to American workers. That morning, hundreds of employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health were notified that they were being terminated and would lose access to the building.
Left behind were more than 900 lab animals. The institute ultimately managed to relocate about two-thirds of them — primarily mice, as well as a handful of rats — sending them to university labs, according to two facility employees who were recently terminated. The remaining 300 animals, however, were euthanized last week.
Over the last few months, the Trump administration has taken aim at the American research enterprise, firing scores of federal scientists, rescinding active research grants and proposing drastic cuts to the funding that helps labs keep their lights on.
These moves, which have left many of scientists out of work and disrupted clinical research, have profound ramifications for the lab animals that serve as the basis for much of the nation’s biomedical research.
“There are going to be a lot of animals that are going to end up being sacrificed — killed,” said Paul Locke, an expert in laboratory animal law and the use of non-animal alternatives in research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The ultimate toll is difficult to predict, experts said, in part because many of the administration’s actions are embroiled in legal battles. Animal research is also shrouded in secrecy; there are no definitive numbers on how many animals live in U.S. laboratories.
Many scientists were reluctant to speak openly about what might become of their lab animals, fearing backlash from animal rights activists or retaliation from their employers or the Trump administration. Dozens of interview requests to animal research facilities and researchers went unanswered.
“I think they’re not talking about it because it’s a situation that, for them, is just a parade of horribles,” Dr. Locke said. “If they are going to keep the animals up, it’s going to be massively expensive. If they’re going to sacrifice the animals, it’s going to cause public outrage.”
Some animal rights activists are cheering the disruption, even if it means euthanizing animals. But many researchers said they were devastated by what they considered to be the worst of both worlds: the deaths of a lot of animals without any gain in scientific knowledge.
“We don’t take using animals lightly,” said Kyle Mandler, a pulmonary toxicologist who was among the scientists recently terminated from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the time, he was in the middle of a study on the hazardous dusts produced in the manufacturing of certain construction materials. About two dozen of his mice were euthanized last week — the study unfinished, the data uncollected.
“The fact that their lives and sacrifice will just be a complete waste is equal parts depressing and infuriating,” he said.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not directly answer questions about the fate of the Morgantown animals. But in an emailed statement, an unnamed H.H.S. official said that the changes at NIOSH were part of a “broader realignment,” in which multiple programs were being consolidated into the new Administration for a Healthy America.
“Staffing and operational adjustments are occurring in phases,” the statement said. “Animal care operations remain active, and H.H.S. is committed to maintaining compliance with all federal animal welfare standards throughout this transition.”
Sudden stops
In recent years, many countries, including the United States, have begun to move away from animal research, which is expensive, ethically fraught and not always a good predictor of what might happen in humans. This month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it planned to “phase out” animal testing for certain kinds of drugs and promote the use of alternatives, such as organoids or “organs on chips,” three-dimensional models of human organs made from lab-grown cells.
Experts agree that these emerging technologies hold enormous promise. But some say that, for now at least, lab animals remain a critical part of biomedical research and that certain kinds of data can’t be gathered any other way.
“We want to drive ourselves out of this work,” said Naomi Charalambakis, the director of science policy and communications at Americans for Medical Progress, a nonprofit that advocates the continued use of animals in biomedical research. “But we’re not quite there yet.”
Lab animal research, which often takes years to plan and conduct, requires steady, predictable funding and experienced veterinarians and technicians to provide day-to-day care. Moves by the Trump administration have thrown all of that into question.
At the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Morgantown facility, for instance, the abrupt terminations initially included the animal care staff. “But they fought back and said they were not leaving while animals were in the facility,” said a former lab technician, who asked not to be identified to preserve future employment options.
After the Trump administration began freezing funding to Harvard this month, researchers developing a new tuberculosis vaccine faced the prospect of having to euthanize their rhesus macaques. The study, and the monkeys, were spared only after a private donor stepped in to provide funding.
Some animals on shuttered projects could be moved to other labs or institutions, but others may have already received experimental treatments or been exposed to pathogens or toxins. Lab animals, many of which are bred to display certain behaviors or health vulnerabilities, are not wild and cannot simply be released. And the sudden surge of surplus lab animals may be more than the nation’s animal sanctuaries can absorb, experts said.
Ann Linder, an associate director at the animal law and policy program at Harvard Law School, worries that the fate of many lab animals will come down to the “whims and temperaments” of individual researchers and lab employees.
“Without oversight, some of those decisions will be poor ones, and many will be made out of callous necessity, without regard for the welfare of the animals in question,” she said in an email.
Cost cutting
Many researchers said that they also worried about the National Institutes of Health’s effort to sharply limit funding for “indirect costs” associated with scientific research, including those related to maintaining animal care facilities.
A federal judge has barred the N.I.H. from putting these funding caps into place, but the agency has appealed. If the policy goes through, it could be devastating for institutions that do research with nonhuman primates, which are long-lived and expensive to care for.
The Washington National Primate Research Center, based at the University of Washington, has more than 800 nonhuman primates. A cap on indirect funding would cost the center roughly $5 million a year, forcing it to downsize its colony, said Deborah Fuller, the center’s director.
It “could destroy the entire infrastructure that we have built,” she said.
If that happened, the center would make every effort to find new homes for its animals, she added. But other research centers would be facing the same challenges, and primate sanctuaries may not be able to absorb the influx.
As a last resort, primates may need to be euthanized. “It’s a worst-case scenario,” said Sally Thompson-Iritani, an assistant vice provost at the university’s office of research. “Even though none of us likes to think about it or have to talk about it, it could happen.”
For some animal rights activists, downsizing the federal animal research enterprise is something to celebrate. “For a lot of these animals, being euthanized before being experimented on is probably a best-case scenario,” said Justin Goodman, a senior vice president at the White Coat Waste Project, a nonprofit that advocates the end of federally funded animal research. (The organization would prefer to see lab animals placed in new homes, he noted.)
Delcianna Winders, who directs the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said she hoped these cuts would spell the end of the national primate centers. But she said she was concerned that cuts and layoffs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which enforces the federal Animal Welfare Act, would weaken the nation’s “already extremely lax oversight” of lab animal welfare.
Dr. Locke hopes that this crisis might be a “wake up call” for the nation to move further toward alternatives to animal research. But that transition should happen in a thoughtful way, he said.
“I don’t think it’s OK to cull millions of animals from research,” Dr. Locke said. “I don’t think that’s societally acceptable. I don’t think it’s scientifically acceptable, and I think we need to recognize that that is a likely outcome.”
Source: nytimes.com
