PCRM Brings Lawsuit against Ohio State’s
“Cruelty 101”
PCRM has stepped up its campaign against one of the cruelest laboratory
courses ever devised—the Spinal Cord Injury Techniques course at
Ohio State University, sometimes called “Cruelty 101.” The
course requires students to expose the spinal cords of mice and
rats and then drop heavy weights on them in a futile attempt to
imitate human spinal cord injuries. Some animals have been in so
much pain afterwards that they’ve tried to chew through their own
muscles. The students then take these “skills” home
to their own labs to use on other animals.
What You Can Do
Please write OSU president Karen Holbrook
and ask her to cancel “Cruelty 101.”
Karen
A. Holbrook, President
The
Ohio State University
205
Bricker Hall
190
North Oval Mall
Columbus,
OH 43210-1357
Fax:
614-292-1231
holbrook.79@osu.edu
If
you are an OSU alumnus, please postpone your donations until “Cruelty
101” is stopped. Sign on to the campaign by contacting Kristie
Stoick, M.P.H., at kstoick@pcrm.org or
202-686-2210, ext. 335.
Check pcrm.org/osu for more information,
as well as campaign updates. |
Since learning of the course last year from Protect Our Earth’s
Treasures (POET), a Columbus animal protection group, PCRM’s
Kristie Stoick, M.P.H., has been campaigning for an end to it.
This Summer, PCRM filed a lawsuit against OSU in Ohio State Supreme
Court to obtain videos of the class procedures. At a PCRM press
conference on May 23, Carrie Walters, M.D., a neurosurgeon specializing
in acute head injury and spinal cord care, elaborated on the failure
of animal experiments to advance human spinal cord research. “Decades
of attempts to model spinal cord injury using a reproducible animal
model have left us disappointed time and again,” she said.
Richard Sorgen, M.D., a bioethicist and radiologist, spoke of
the ethical imperative to replace old, outmoded research practices.
Stoick described some of the humane alternatives, such as clinical
or post-mortem human studies, neural cell imaging, and in vitro cell
biology.
As a result, the university is facing increased public scrutiny.
All the local TV stations and the Columbus Dispatch have
covered the controversy, and neurologists from around the country
are getting involved with the campaign. The Lantern, OSU’s
paper, even editorialized against the school for concealing footage
of the class.
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