Petition: Stop Harvard’s Cruel Monkey Experiments Now

Margaret Livingstone, a Harvard University experimenter, has spent her entire 40-year career tormenting animals, including by tearing baby monkeys away from their mothers and sewing their eyes shut—or making sure they never see a human or monkey face in other ways—just to see how badly it damages their brain and visual development.

Livingstone calls it science. We call it torture. Harvard must shut down her lab permanently and have her head examined.

Livingstone has stolen perfectly healthy babies from their loving mothers at birth and deprived them of normal visual input by stitching their eyes closed, condemning them to a world of complete darkness.

In some of Livingstone’s experiments, she sewed the baby monkeys’ eyes shut and left them that way for up to a year. In others, the motherless monkeys are reared by laboratory staff who wear welding masks.

These fragile and terrified infants don’t see any face, monkey or human, for a year. Livingston then tests their face-processing abilities to see how badly they’ve been damaged.

To do this, Livingstone immobilizes her helpless victims by surgically implanting a steel post in their head, strapping their chin tightly, or forcing them to bite down on a bar. Sometimes, she surgically implants electrodes into their brain in order to record how their deprived brain cells respond to visual cues.

After years of this torment, she kills many of the monkeys and dissects their brains.

Take a minute to urge Harvard’s administration to close Livingstone’s laboratory, get her a psych evaluation, and release the remaining monkeys to a sanctuary immediately.

This article by Nicholas Vincent was first published by One Green Planet on 13 March 2025. Lead Image: Image Credit :tlorna/Shutterstock.

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