September 7–14, 2000

cover story

Video Killed the Baboon Lab

How a break-in at a Penn lab led to "the most important event in the history of the American animal rights movement."

It’s stuff you might see anywhere: College students smoke, joke, laugh, drop their utensils, complain about the dust, the grime and the administration. But the setting is the Head Injury lab at the University of Pennsylvania in the early ’80s, and all of the above is going on while they’re holding and manipulating drugged and brain-damaged baboons. The baboons are being forcibly and exactly injured in the name of science, but the student research assistants act like they’re working at Burger King.

This footage is part of the 70 hours of videotapes which the experimenters took themselves and which were stolen from the lab on May 29, 1984.

Gary Francione was at work at his law firm in Manhattan at the time. There are diaries of billable hours that attest to it. "And it’s a good thing," observes Francione today, "‘cause if I hadn’t been there, I’d be in jail right now. There are people who will go to their graves believing I was behind that whole thing." It was just ironic timing that the break-in happened after Francione had accepted, but had not yet begun, a job as an assistant professor at Penn.

The Animal Liberation Front, which claimed credit for the break-in and "liberaton" of the tapes, got copies into the hands of Francione and PETA. After viewing them and conferring with Francione, PETA made a 26-minute compilation of some of the worst, and most illegal, conduct. It’s unsettling enough to see students holding traumatized baboons and making jokes about the baboons’ head wounds ("That’s some part you’ve got there. He has the punk look.") and generally mocking them. ("He says, ‘You’re gonna rescue me from this, aren’t you? Aren’t you?’") But what’s worse is the stuff that makes the whole enterprise unscientific: Non-sterile surgical conditions; constant smoking by the students (sometimes within a couple inches of incisions, and always in proximity of oxygen tanks); and the hammering of the metal plates off of the baboons’ heads (polluting the data, which was supposed to measure injuries caused by shaking, not blows to the head). In other words, it’s not just that animals were being abused, traumatized and taunted in the course of science — it’s in the course of bad science.

The university, however, defended the research and refused to discontinue the experiments. In October, 1984, PETA came to the University City Hilton to show their 26-minute compilation, Unnecessary Fuss (after a remark made by lab head Thomas Gennarelli). The showing was thronged by local media, and by law enforcement as well. The District Attorney’s Office, headed by Ed Rendell, was very eager to ferret out the actual criminals who had stolen the tapes. So at the showing, according to Francione, "Anyone who answered ‘yes’ to the question ‘Are you a member of PETA?’ was handed a John Doe or Jane Doe subpoena to testify before a grand jury."

The police also wanted to confiscate all copies of the video and went to the Holiday Inn where Ingrid Newkirk was staying. Francione reports, "There were at least 50 Philadelphia police officers looking for her." He found an internal stairwell that led to an unguarded exit, called her on the phone and described where it was. She left the room with the tapes and slipped into the stairwell just in time.

Newkirk says, "I remember being chased down the stairwell by people — I never found out if they were police or FBI or what — but they were people who were trying to seize the tape."

During the grand jury hearings, Francione represented many of the activists (including PETA head Alex Pacheco) who had been at the showing, over the District Attorney’s objections that Francione was "one of them," part of the conspiracy to steal the tapes. Those hearings ended without any arrests, and the case is still open.

Meanwhile, Francione collected internal Penn documents proving that the head injury lab had had other problems in the past, and submitted these to Congress, which led to congressional hearings on the lab in the spring of 1985.

PETA and their allies had followed the money to the National Institutes of Health. If Penn would not close the lab in the face of these and other clear violations (a summer 1984 USDA inspection cited 74 infractions), it was up to the NIH to cut off its funding. Instead, in the summer of 1985, the NIH increased the lab’s grant, as if in defiance. On July 15, 1985, while President Ronald Reagan recuperated from colon surgery across the street, 100 animal activists occupied Building 31-B of the NIH, taking up residence in the 8th-floor funding office and refusing to leave until the lab was shut down. They fully expected to be arrested, but the authorities were unprepared for this tactic, and weren’t sure how to proceed.

The sit-in stretched over four days. Francione, who represented the activists, and was allowed in and out of the building as a negotiator. Finally, on the fourth day, HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler, who had now seen the tape, ordered the NIH to withdraw funding and close the lab. The university was sanctioned, and Gennarelli was forbidden to do any more research with apes.

In sum, Francione says, the NIH occupation "was probably the most important event in the history of the American animal rights movement and best of all, it was peaceful, nonviolent civil disobedience. I became a complete believer in everything Gandhi and King ever said.

"It felt good to win by saying no to a system that was corrupt."

—Vance Lehmkuhl