AMHERST — Marmosets used to study aging and menopause at a University of Massachusetts laboratory were euthanized two months before the facility’s closing at the end of July, according to People for Ethical Treatment of Animals.
The organization, which has led a campaign against the Lacreuse Laboratory for several years, announced this week that the 13 marmoset monkeys were put down in May.
UMass confirmed this in a statement from its news office, observing that this was part of the National Institutes of Health requirements.
“To accomplish the NIH-funded and approved research protocol, the nonhuman primates were humanely euthanized as planned to examine neural tissue toward understanding Alzheimer’s disease and complete the study. The funded experiments ended as planned, within the scheduled end of the grant.”
While PETA claims its April 2025 win in a three-year-old lawsuit, requiring UMass to turn over all documents associated with the lab and pay $50,000 for legal fees, may have expedited the shuttering, UMass officials and Agnes Lacreuse, the researcher, have cited federal funding ending for the research, and a move to other research projects, as reasons behind closing the lab where “age-related cognitive decline in a nonhuman primate with a short lifespan” was studied.
“It’s suspiciously coincidental that UMass closed this awful laboratory just after a court forced it to give PETA damning public documents showing that Lacreuse attempted to collude to keep the public in the dark about her experiments,” PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo said in a statement.
PETA is now sharing many of the records, such as an August 2021 email in which Lacreuse suggests that photos and records be deleted because “PETA has started to harass the lab. Quite stressful and disgusting, they spread lies left and right.”
That October, she asked administrators at the university, “is there a way to push back on these requests? It is a total waste of our time, and PETA exploits this to bully us.”
PETA has not yet received any of the videos that were requested, but those are expected later this year.
PETA says it has discovered multiple examples of Lacreuse directing others to delete photos, videos and other files and she and other workers also discussed how “to circumvent records requests,” such as in correspondence with a student and former laboratory worker suggesting staging new photos to share with colleagues and deleting anything too realistic.
“Since PETA is an issue and I want the photos to be very sensitive to this, I was thinking of a … photo of us holding the marmoset (pretending to do thermal imaging?) and getting a portrait photo of them looking calm. Agnès said any photos that don’t look good will need to be deleted so I will make sure to do this.”
UMass issued a statement upon the lab closing.
“The lab, whose work has been dedicated to studies that advance the knowledge of the aging process with a focus on Alzheimer’s disease and women’s health, including breast cancer treatments, recently completed NIH grant-funded research using non-human primates.”
But PETA has raised concerns with menopause studies involving marmosets, claiming their ovaries are removed and hormones manipulated, and that hand warmers are used on them to mimic hot flashes. Additionally, PETA has alleged the marmosets have had electrodes screwed into their skulls, they have been deprived of water and sleep and been shoved into small cylinders.
Still, UMass observes that animal studies can be necessary: “Studies using animal models continue to play a crucial part in medical, veterinary, and scientific research that benefits both animals and humans. In the last few years alone, studies involving animal models made it possible to develop mRNA and viral vector vaccines for COVID-19. They also enabled the design of cancer immunotherapies. Nearly every Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine has relied on animal data for their research.”
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
