Actress Mena Suvari, Medical Ethics Group Offer Brown University $25,000 to Stop Killing Animals

PROVIDENCE, R.I.—Actress and Newport native Mena Suvari is partnering with a national medical ethics group to offer Brown University a helping hand. In a letter sent June 18 to school leaders, Suvari, of American Beauty and American Pie fame, said that the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine would provide Brown with a $25,000 grant to replace live pigs in its emergency medicine training program with “devices that simulate human anatomy.” The practice, part of a joint exercise with Rhode Island Hospital, has come under scrutiny for years and has been the target of numerous bills in the General Assembly.

In a corresponding offer letter sent today to Brown faculty, doctors from the Physicians Committee point out that Harvard, Yale, Mass General, and 264 other emergency medicine programs across the United States and Canada have replaced animals or never used them in the first place. The letter was signed by Dr. Margaret Peppercorn of Portsmouth and retired emergency medicine physician Dr. Kerry Foley, who have testified in support of state legislation on the issue. They emphasize that methods like “living” human cadavers can “improve patient outcomes, enhance health care provider readiness, and replace animals in medical training.”

Suvari writes that it “pains me to learn that Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital oversee one of the last emergency medicine residency programs in the nation still killing animals.”

While Brown’s emergency medicine program uses pigs in a deadly exercise designed to teach a single procedure known as a surgical airway, most other medical centers routinely use human cadavers, 3D-printed models, and/or whole-body simulators for that and other procedures. Kent Hospital in Warwick, the University of Connecticut, and Johns Hopkins University have not used animals to train emergency medicine physicians for more than a decade.

“Considering ongoing financial cuts to Brown by the federal government, we hope this offer is welcome news,” says Dr. Peppercorn. “We look forward to working together to improve training and save lives.”

To see a copy of the letters or to speak with Dr. Peppercorn or Dr. Foley, please contact Reina Pohl at 202-527-7326 or rpohl [at] pcrm.org (rpohl[at]pcrm[dot]org).