As the founding director of Western Massachusetts Animal Rights Advocates (WMARA) and an alumnus of the University of Massachusetts, I also welcome the invitation to meet with Dr. Lacreuse to have clarifying discussions while visiting her laboratory to witness active experimentation with the 13 remaining marmoset monkeys. I and thousands of residents, students and faculty would appreciate the opportunity to observe what Dr. Lacreuse shared in her interview with the reporters about the well-being of the marmosets in her laboratory, and to have the human relevant transferability of her science be proven true by her openly providing the facts to support them.
Because sadly, to date, the evidential facts do not support her claims.
UMass has refused to provide the document requested photos and videos of what transpires in Dr. Lacreuse’s experiments with the marmosets, and has forced a lawsuit for legal compliance with the federal requirement of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documentation requests. It is difficult to hear her claim she has been fully transparent and open to the interest in discussion that a neuroscientist and primatologist from PETA have welcomed and indeed arranged in 2020 when meetings were conducted with UMass on this matter.
The federally required FOIA documents that have been disclosed in the last four years show veterinary records as well as lab notes that the marmoset monkeys resist being restrained and have sustained numerous injuries from their attempts to escape confinement. These documents include illnesses resulting from her experimentation methods — chronic diarrhea to name but one. This evidence makes it challenging to believe Dr. Lacreuse’s statement that the marmosets sit on laps trustingly, to have heated apparatuses placed on their tiny bodies, supposedly mimicking biologically induced hot flashes that human women experience, and marmosets do not.
Over $6 million American taxpayer dollars have been granted to Dr. Lacreuse at UMass and her experiments have not provided reproducible or actual applicability regarding menopausal impacts on cognition in the human female species in over 10 years. This funding has enabled her to publish papers on necropsied marmoset brain splice results that are not transferable to human women. That these same experiments on cognition and menopause have already been done in actual human female participant studies and could easily be conducted with greater specificity in longitudinal studies on human female cohorts also begs the question of her experiments’ total value. Purchasing tiny marmoset monkeys from breeding operation pipelines via South Africa to Florida to UMass is quite costly — and according to Dr Lacreuse there is a shortage, driving up costs. Conducting a controlled longitudinal study of perimenopausal, menopausal and surgically induced menopausal human women could be a fraction of the cost to American taxpayers and produce actual applicable results for human benefit.
Dr. Lacreuse has substantiated her research at UMass as “..modeling menopausal symptoms in marmosets to understand how estrogen loss impacts sleep, thermoregulation and cognitive function and the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.” However, marmosets do not biologically experience peri/menopause or other hormone deregulation that human women do in the natural aging process. Marmoset hormonal and cognitive responsivity when force fed pharmaceutical compounds likely is not duplicated in human women’s brains. Mimicking menopausal symptoms by surgically removing marmoset ovaries is not an approximation of human peri/menopause at all. Marmosets brain size and morphology, rates of development, hormone production and responsivity, neurodevelopment, neuroanatomy and neurodegeneration are vastly different from human women.
Thus, Lacreuse’s own work does not indicate that marmosets exhibit human menopause-like symptoms, even after surgical and pharmaceutical intervention, yet she continues to claim that these animals are a good model for studying human menopause.