9 Brain ‘Studies’ Proving Experimenters Need their brains Tested

2. Monkey Brain Experiments at the National Institutes of Health
The victims: Monkeys live in large family groups, playing, eating, exploring, and hanging out together. Female macaques stay with their mothers for their entire lives, and males do so for several years. They’re intelligent—they’ve learned to use iPhones to look at themselves—and empathetic, often risking their own lives to help others. In 2014, a rhesus monkey in Kanpur, India, was knocked unconscious by overhead power lines, and another rhesus was seen reviving him or her with resuscitative actions.
The experiment: Experimenter Elisabeth Murray cuts into monkeys’ heads, saws off a portion of their skulls, and then injects toxins into their brains to cause permanent and traumatic brain damage. In some monkeys, she suctions out or burns part of the brain. Then she locks the primates alone inside a cramped cage and deliberately frightens them with fake snakes and spiders until they’re eventually killed.

The excuse: Murray claims that her experiments shed light on human neuropsychiatric disorders. Yet after three decades of mutilating, tormenting, and killing monkeys, her laboratory hasn’t developed a single treatment or cure for humans. Still, she has received more than $36 million in the past 13 years alone to terrorize and kill animals.
3. Owl Brain Experiments at Johns Hopkins University
The victims: Owls eat at night, which means that extensive lighting disrupts their hunting patterns. Large, bare branches are prime spots for owls to perch on, and they often make hollow trees their home.
The experiment: Experimenter Shreesh Mysore keeps barn owls caged in a fluorescent-lit basement, where he cuts into their skulls; implants electrodes into their heads; cements a stainless steel bolt to the base of their skulls, which he uses to restrict their head movements; and restrains the fully conscious owls in plastic tubes or tight jackets for up to 12 hours at a time. He clamps their eyes open and bombards them with bursts of noise and light while poking around at neurons in the conscious birds’ brains. He then mutilates their brain tissue so severely by moving the electrodes around that the birds become “unusable” to him—at which point he kills them. He admits that his experiments are painful for the owls.

This owl is one of many imprisoned in Shreesh Mysore’s basement laboratory, where he cuts into their skulls and screws metal devices onto their heads in curiosity-driven experiments that have no relevance for human health.
The excuse: Mysore claims to be studying human attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), even though barn owls don’t suffer from the condition and have vastly different auditory and visual systems than humans. Moreover, the owls’ confinement to an unnatural environment and the use of artificial stimulation introduce additional confounding factors. Even so, he’s received more than $1 million in funding from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and $1.3 million of your tax dollars from the National Institutes of Health.