Although the first rule of fight club is usually to not talk about fight club, an open records request compelled Georgia State University to release details of a study that turned hamsters into aggressive combat machines.
“First, they genetically engineered hamsters, then they drilled into their skulls, and finally, they pitted the hamsters against one another in staged, scored fights,” White Coat Waste revealed on Friday.
The nonprofit claimed that files obtained through the Georgia Open Records Act revealed the university received $1.5 million in taxpayer dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) for the research.
Using CRISPR gene-editing technology, the scientists created “knockout” hamsters to observe changes in social behaviors. The rodents were then administered neuroactive agents through a surgery that involved boring holes into their skulls. In addition to giving scores for “aggressive behavior” — such as “chasing, biting, and pinning” their opponents during competitions in an “arena” — the researchers tracked the frequency of hamsters marking their territory.
“Hacking hamsters’ brains to turn them into hyper-aggressive bullies and watching them violently beat up docile hamsters in scored cage matches is deeply disturbing, irrelevant to human health, and a complete waste of taxpayer dollars,” Justin Goodman, senior vice president of White Coat Waste, told The Daily Wire.
Throughout the process, the hamsters were denied access to pain relief, as indicated by a federal filing from Georgia State University. According to the researchers, pain relief would “alter the natural responses” to social stressors and “defeat the purpose of the research.”
The NIH, however, has enabled animal experiments in far more insidious ways. According to a White Coat Waste analysis of the human fetal tissue industry obtained last year by The Daily Wire, 89% of NIH-funded research on preborn babies also incorporate animal testing. Indeed, 80% of the human fetal tissue research arising from the NIH last year was financed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Dr. Anthony Fauci leads.
One such experiment involved University of Pittsburgh researchers obtaining the remains of aborted babies from nearby hospitals, removing pieces of their scalps, and grafting them to rodents, Campus Reform reported last year.
The researchers tried to cause “successful co-engraftment of human skin, autologous lymphoid tissues, and autologous immune cells” with mice and rats in the interest of providing “a means of studying the human immune response to infection in the human skin.” The children used in the experiment were between 18 and 20 weeks gestation — a stage at which they could stretch, make faces, suck their thumbs, and yawn.
The NIAID and Dr. Fauci drew criticism last year for directing $424,455 in taxpayer funds to the University of Georgia for the purpose of infecting beagles with disease-inducing parasites in order to test an experimental drug.
More recently, a report indicated that Fauci, former NIH Director Francis Collins, and other government scientists reaped more than $350 million in secretive royalty payments from drug companies and other third parties over the course of a decade. According to the report, the officials received the payments for being credited as “co-inventors” of multiple treatments and pharmaceutical products.
