National Nonprofit Calls on National Institutes of Health, USDA to Investigate Federally Funded, Decades-Long Alcohol and Reproductive Experiments on Nonhuman Primates at Oregon Health & Science University

PORTLAND, Ore. — The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit medical ethics group, filed a complaint today, May 28, 2025, with the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare, along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare, requesting an investigation of—and corrective action and penalties associated with—decades-long alcohol- and reproductive-related experiments on nonhuman primates at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). On May 19, 2025, the national nonprofit reached out to OHSU asking for the studies to be shut down. The ongoing experiments, which receive funding from the National Institutes of Health, have cost more than $70 million.

“The cruel experiments that OHSU is spending tens of millions of dollars on—creating binge-drinking monkeys and intoxicating pregnant monkeys to study the effect on their fetuses—don’t provide insight into how alcohol consumption affects humans,” said Neal Barnard, MD, FACC, president of the Physicians Committee. “The alcohol experiments at the Oregon National Primate Research Center must be shut down and investigated immediately.”

The university has a policy that says alleged violations of applicable laws, such as the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA), and other policies regarding the use of animals in research will be investigated and acted upon. Despite the availability of well-established, human-relevant alternatives, the experiments at the primate research center have repeatedly exposed animals to prolonged psychological and physical suffering, in violation of the AWA, which requires that a study’s principal investigator consider alternatives to procedures that may cause more than momentary or slight pain or distress to any animal used for research.

The complaint cites seven experiments that involve inducing alcohol dependence, withdrawal, and repeated relapses; it also cites examples of human-based research that answers the studies’ questions without the use of animals.

In one study, adult male rhesus macaques were exposed to increasing amounts of alcohol over several months, were killed, and had their tibias removed to study alcohol consumption’s impact on bone health. Consistent evidence already shows that increased alcohol consumption is associated with higher risk of poor bone health.

In a study on the effects of alcohol during pregnancy, pregnant rhesus macaques were trained to self-administer alcohol every day for the first 60 days of pregnancy. Researchers then killed the fetuses and removed their organs to study their brains. Studies by MRI have already investigated the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on human fetal brain development.

In another study, rhesus macaques were given access to alcohol for 22 hours a day every day for a minimum of 12 months and then classified in categories ranging from low drinkers to binge drinkers. More than 1,000 human-relevant studies have already investigated alcohol use disorder.

The Physicians Committee complaints call on OHSU to immediately suspend all alcohol-related experiments at its primate research center, investigate how the experiments were approved, identify the members of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee who oversaw the experiments, and make public the results of these investigations and actions taken.