In the middle of the Caribbean Sea, over 1,000 rhesus macaques live on an island that measures less than a tenth of a mile across. Descendants of a monkey colony imported from India 86 years ago sunbathe, climb trees, and wade in the ocean on Puerto Rico’s Isla de los Monos.

The island serves as a 38-acre open-air laboratory, with these semi-wild macaques as subjects. The monkeys offer a tantalizing opportunity for scientists hoping to observe animal behavior as close to the wild as they can get, while also having ready access to the monkeys’ brains, bodies, and genes. That often means killing them.

One morning in 2021, researchers transported a monkey, like thousands before him, to a laboratory at the Caribbean Primate Research Center (CPRC) at the University of Puerto Rico less than 50 miles away. “We watched him die,” former research assistant Alyssa told me in a video call last summer. “And then we did what we always do, which is take him apart.” (Vox has changed her name to protect her from retaliation.) Killing and dissecting monkeys — up to seven per day, she remembers — was part of the lab’s standard protocol. 

During the culling season in the fall, hundreds of monkeys are killed to control the population of the tiny island. Rather than let their bodies go to waste, Alyssa’s team dissected them, meticulously preserving their muscles, organs, and brains for studies attempting to connect the monkeys’ social lives to their anatomy and genetics. 

Alyssa joined the lab in 2021, after graduating college. Before accepting the job, the lab’s principal investigator called her, asking whether she was comfortable with blood. She said yes — she wasn’t squeamish, and had no trouble dissecting frogs and lamb hearts in school. “It didn’t raise any flags for me at all,” she said. 

Alyssa’s soon-to-be boss then described perfusion, a euthanasia procedure where, in their lab, a deeply anesthetized monkey is strapped to a table and pumped with saline and preservatives while their blood is pumped out. This preserves the animal’s tissue for study after death. But, Alyssa said, he left out that the researchers would be witnessing living animals die in front of them, “no matter whether it was old, whether it was an infant…” She paused. “We dissected infants.” 

Every day, Alyssa watched at least one monkey die on an operating table, before she would immediately start cutting into it. Her job was to carefully separate all of the organs and tissues and store them in a freezer, preserving them until other scientists could analyze them. She wore a specially fitted mask to avoid breathing in bone dust while sawing through skulls. 

As she settled into her new routine, she realized just how difficult her day-to-day life would be to explain to outsiders. “The thing that was so crazy to me,” Alyssa said, “was no one else will know what has happened here.” 

She vented about the monkeys on her daily calls to her boyfriend some 1,600 miles away back home. But he couldn’t handle story after story of relentless, visceral gore, so Alyssa turned to her therapist. After crying over the phone, she waited for the calm reassurance she’d come to expect. Instead, her therapist told Alyssa that she was really worried for her mental health. “I surprised myself with how alone I was feeling,” she remembered.

The night terrors began when she came back home. Culling season was over, but Alyssa woke up to panic attacks for months. She’d flinch whenever someone approached her from behind at work or surprised her in public. Symptoms piled up for months before a psychiatrist named what she was experiencing: post-traumatic stress disorder. 

A multimedia artist as well as a scientist, Alyssa started creating art inspired by the necropsies seared into her memory — anything to make the images visible to the outside world. During our video call, she reached out of frame and pulled out a life-sized crochet replica of a macaque’s gastrointestinal system. 

In the necropsy lab, Alyssa cut each monkey’s gastrointestinal tract from rectum to esophagus, picked it up with triple-gloved hands, and weighed it — part of their standard protocol for collecting and preserving tissues after dissection. An adult macaque’s intestines can be over a dozen feet long, and weigh a good deal more than a ball of yarn. To make the plush guts feel as hefty as she remembered, “I put beads inside them,” she said, “so when you lift it up, it would feel like what you would do every day.” 

“I made three: a big, a medium, and an infant-sized.” Alyssa said, holding the tiniest replica, a fuzzy marble-filled snake, to the camera. “I was obsessed with describing to other people what we had seen in that place.”

Alyssa’s experience is anything but rare. Animal research, while largely hidden from public view, is widespread across the life sciences. Animals are used in everything from safety testing for medicines, cosmetics, and pesticides to exploring open-ended questions about how the mind and body work. The drugs we take, the products we use, and the medical breakthroughs we celebrate have been made possible in large part by lab animals and the people who, in the name of science, kill them. 

While it’s difficult to find the exact number of scientists, veterinarians, and animal caretakers working in research facilities, we know that somewhere around 100 million animals — mice, rats, dogs, cats, rabbits, monkeys, fish, and birds, among others — are used for research and testing worldwide each year. Between 2011 and 2021, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided $2.2 billion in grants for an estimated 4,000 research projects involving animals.

Animal research is traumatic — obviously for the animals unlucky enough to be involved, but also for many of the humans tasked with harming them. Yet from day one, institutions teach animal researchers that expressing discomfort is akin to weakness, or tantamount to dismissing the value of science altogether. To compete for increasingly rare tenure-track jobs, graduate students and postdocs have no choice but to learn to suppress their emotions and get the work done. Principal investigators, senior scientists who direct animal research labs, often don’t care whether inserting electrodes into a conscious, chronically ill monkey’s brain makes you squeamish. If you can’t handle the heat, they say, get out of the kitchen. 

“The costs have always been out there,” bioethicist and former animal researcher John Gluck said. “They’ve just been completely ignored.” 

I would know. I spent thousands of hours immersed in the world of researching monkeys (known in the scientific community as NHPs, or nonhuman primates), attempting to study how the brain weighs options during decision-making. In 2023, I graduated from the University of California Berkeley with a PhD in neuroscience, questionable data, zero academic publications, and an intense combination of guilt, rage, and burnout that I’m only just beginning to process. 

It’s not clear exactly how many researchers suffer mental health consequences from their work, and it’s impossible to disentangle the psychological side effects of harming animals from those of trying to survive in an unforgiving, underpaid, and poorly regulated workplace. I do know that many people I know who worked in an animal research facility, myself included, left feeling broken. “Everybody that I know has horror stories,” Alyssa agreed.

In an emailed statement, CPRC told Vox that it is “deeply committed to supporting our researchers’ mental health and well-being,” and that its researchers are encouraged to seek mental health resources. “As an organization, we remain steadfast in our commitment to upholding the highest ethical, safety, and compliance standards. Our operations align with all applicable federal and institutional guidelines. We actively foster a professional, respectful, and collaborative environment where researchers can openly discuss challenges and seek support,” the statement said. 

Academic institutions have long avoided talking openly about the trauma of animal research. In part, they’re afraid that acknowledging it might invite scrutiny from animal rights activists and undermine the public’s already damaged trust in science. The reality is that it’s easier to downplay the emotional toll of animal testing than to confront the ethical and logistical challenges of dealing with it, given just how central it is to biomedical research. 

Now, as the Trump administration wages an unprecedented war on scientific institutions, this might feel like a particularly sensitive time to air uncomfortable conversations about painful aspects of science out in the open. But the scientific community can no longer avoid hard conversations about the psychological costs borne by young scientists. If universities and funding agencies admit that there’s a problem, they can take meaningful steps — like providing better mental health resources and investing in non-animal research methods — to improve conditions for everyone.

But if young researchers are left to suffer in silence, it is science itself that will suffer, as bright, empathetic minds turn away from some of the most important questions in research — or worse, leave the field altogether.

Why do we still experiment on animals?

The practice of experimenting on animals is as old as biological science itself. To understand a machine, you have to take it apart and figure out how the pieces fit together. Living bodies are biological machines — to understand how bodies grow, get sick, and recover, scientists have to take them apart.

In the earliest days of Western science, dissection of both animals and human cadavers laid the groundwork for modern surgery and medicine. Today, scientists have many more tools at their disposal, enabling them to make specific cells in a mouse’s brain glow under a microscope or to remote-control a living fruit fly. What hasn’t changed is that most of the time, animals are killed when an experiment ends — whether by relatively hands-off methods like gas chambers, or wincingly hands-on methods like snapping their necks, which goes by the more clinical term “cervical dislocation.”

For all its ethical problems, animal research has yielded medical breakthroughs that we take for granted today. Without lab animals, we wouldn’t have polio vaccines, PrEP (an HIV-prevention medication that slashes sexual transmission risk by 99 percent), or deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease. 

But animals often make poor substitutes for humans. Much of biomedical science ends up stranded in what researchers call the “valley of death”: the huge divide between promising preclinical studies, many of which involve testing on animals, and genuine breakthroughs in human medicine. Over 90 percent of preclinical trials for cancer drugs, for example, don’t translate to successful clinical trials, because treatments that seem to work in mice fail in humans. 

Complex socio-psychological conditions like depression are especially challenging to model in caged animals that can’t have natural — much less human-like — experiences. Even monkeys, our close genetic relatives, are stressed and often behave abnormally when caged in a lab, making them poor proxies for uncaged humans.

Some newer tools, like AI models and 3D-printed human tissues, are beginning to replace animals in some studies, But not all animal-based methods have alternatives. AI, for example, has to be trained on real-world data to accurately reflect real-world biology. If that data doesn’t exist yet, scientists need to collect it — usually from the body of a lab animal. And many of medicine’s most urgent, complex problems, like cancer, affect the whole body in ways that are hard to predict without invasively experimenting on a living organism.

New initiatives like NIH’s Complement Animal Research in Experimentation Program, which has funded the development of new human-based biomedical tools, may encourage some researchers to pivot away from animal testing. But funding agencies in the US and elsewhere are only just beginning to incentivize scientists to develop alternatives. 

Meanwhile, funding agencies and research institutions are striving to prove the legitimacy of animal research to the public even as the Trump administration seeks to defund science. Animal researchers know that their work is heavily scrutinized by animal rights activists, who are looking for vulnerabilities to galvanize the public around. Americans are divided on animal research, but the vast majority say it should be phased out in favor of non-animal methods. 

One postdoctoral researcher I spoke with, who works with mice, told me that a lab on her campus lost NIH funding following a PETA campaign, which also drove hate mail and threats against the scientists who worked there. These experiences breed defensiveness and close researchers off from engaging with critics. “Our interactions with [animal rights] groups are often at conferences, with people protesting outside and yelling at you,” she said. “It just propagates that negative interaction.” 

So young animal researchers with misgivings are told to keep quiet. When I was in grad school, senior scientists told me that publicly expressing discomfort — or even sharing day-to-day details of my work — would only enrage animal rights activists and potentially fuel further distrust in science. But this silence comes at a cost, stifling innovation and entrenching outdated methods. 

“We’re highly leveraged by the system to keep doing what we’ve always done,” said Garet Lahvis, former graduate program director of behavioral neuroscience at Oregon Health and Science University. (Lahvis previously wrote about experimenting on caged primates for Vox.) Turning against a tried-and-true method would require a scientist to invalidate their existing body of work, or at least acknowledge that it was unethical, ineffective, or inefficient. So, many don’t.

Over the past few decades, meanwhile, the grant application process has become increasingly competitive, driving scientists to do whatever it takes to make their project proposals sound appealing to potential funders. A 2023 survey of biomedical researchers found that reviewers of grants and peer-reviewed publications generally remain biased in favor of projects with animal-based methods, creating an incentive for scientists to use animals. 

Lisa Jones-Engel, a former senior scientist at the University of Washington National Primate Research Center (WaNPRC) and current senior science adviser at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), recalled serving on the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, an ethics oversight panel responsible for reviewing and approving the university’s animal research proposals. She went line by line through each protocol to find ethical breaches worth addressing, but was constantly shut down by her colleagues, who she suspected were more interested in quickly pushing proposals through the pipeline than protecting animal welfare. 

“We encourage responsibility and accountability for ensuring ethical and responsible animal care, science, and human welfare,” WaNPRC told Vox in an email. The university did not comment on Jones-Engel’s experience, but emphasized that researchers are encouraged to report ethical concerns to their principal adviser, department chair, or anonymously, if necessary. 

“I spent 17 years at the university, and it nearly killed me,” Jones-Engel told me. “I thought that I could single-handedly bring about change just by laying the science out in front of my scientific colleagues. It turns out that I wasn’t able to do that.”

Why would anyone sign up for this?

Madeline Krasno grew up loving animals, and hoped to follow in Jane Goodall’s footsteps as a primatologist. In 2011, the then-20-year-old applied to be a student caretaker at the Harlow Primate Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There, she and one other undergraduate were responsible for weekend feeding, medication, and cleaning the rooms of over 500 monkeys. She believed what she was told: Those monkeys were contributing to important biomedical studies, helping scientists make necessary public health breakthroughs. At least, she recalled, “That’s what you tell yourself to make this okay.” 

To boost their chances of getting into competitive graduate programs, many undergrads and recent college graduates eagerly accept entry-level, relatively low-paid jobs like these.

Day one at a primate research center in the US can shock even the most hardened scientist. As a neuroscience PhD student, I spent a lot of time in my lab’s monkey housing room, which always smelled like stale urine and honey. Netflix shows played for a few hours a day on a wall-mounted TV as veterinarian-approved “enrichment” for the animals, who lived in pairs in metal cages smaller than my full-size bed.

Some research groups, like mine, introduce new trainees to these spaces right away to gauge whether they have the stomach for it. Others don’t expose trainees to the most disturbing aspects of their work until they’ve proven themselves trustworthy. 

“Don’t mess with us. We will ruin your career.”

Former research assistant Mayo Asada wasn’t invited into her neurobiology lab’s back rooms, where surgeries take place, for the first month that she worked at the California National Primate Research Center at UC Davis (CNPRC) in 2021. The first time Asada saw her lab’s monkeys, it was necropsy day. She watched a handler bring a young male monkey into a sterile examination room, “holding his hand to keep him calm.” The monkey was anesthetized and pumped with saline, like the monkeys in Alyssa’s lab. As blood left the unconscious monkey, Asada watched as people began removing parts of his body. “We know that you weren’t expecting to see this,” Asada was told.

“I wasn’t sure if he was conscious, or how aware he was of what was happening,” Asada remembers, referring to the monkey. “I was hoping by then that he was in an altered state.” Asada paused. “I honestly don’t remember the rest. I just remember the pieces being separated onto different tables.”

Despite her shock and discomfort, Asada stuck around. Biomedical careers, especially in academia, often hinge on your superiors’ opinions. If your well-connected adviser likes you, their glowing letter of recommendation can open doors to prestigious jobs. If they don’t, those doors slam shut. The vibe she remembered from superiors in her lab, Asada said, was: “Don’t mess with us. We will ruin your career.”

UC Davis told Vox in a statement that it offers free mental health counseling services to employees and students, and that “harassment, discrimination, bullying, and other abusive conduct violates university policy. Anyone experiencing or witnessing such conduct is encouraged to report it: we take such reports very seriously and reports are investigated and addressed according to applicable policies and procedures.” 

Many early-career researchers believe that the knowledge they gain from their experiments will justify the harm they will cause. After all, breakthrough treatments like gene therapy and organ transplantation were refined in lab animals before humans. I spent years convincing myself that by recording the brain activity of monkeys, I could uncover crucial information about mental health that would someday revolutionize how we treat depression. Eventually, the emotional labor of justifying the work outweighed my belief in its purpose. 

Monkey research makes up a small share of all animal research — but working with much more widely used rodent species can still be harrowing, if to a lesser degree than for scientists experimenting on our primate cousins. On the subreddit r/labrats, an anonymous forum for over 650,000 biologists, many posts feature variations on the same existential crisis: reckoning with the intense pressure to harm animals, whether for the sake of public health or professional advancement.

One recent post asked how people “get past the initial ick” of killing mice. Many users replied, quite simply, that you don’t. In the comments, researchers describe a wide range of coping mechanisms: Sing to the animals. Thank each mouse before putting them in the carbon dioxide chamber. Practice until you can perform injections as painlessly as possible. Or, one user wrote, “just do it until you’re numb to it.”

While hosing down cages, Krasno blasted Adele’s then-new album 21 through noise-canceling headphones to drown out the screeching monkeys around her. Now, she can’t listen to “Rolling in the Deep” without being transported back to those rooms, and the guilt she felt in her complacency. “I’m just trying to do what I can for them,” she remembered, “but also to, like, get the fuck out.”

In an email statement, UW-Madison shared that it offers confidential counseling and crisis support to students and employees, and leads workshops on identifying and responding to stress related to caring for people and animals. 

How academia creates a culture of silence 

As an animal researcher, my life was dictated by animal care. 

Several times a week, I performed a standard procedure to keep the window into each monkey’s brain — a small hole cut through their skull — open and infection-free. While listening to an episode of This American Life or All Songs Considered, I’d fix a monkey’s head in place, lift a plastic covering off his exposed skull opening, and gently swab and suction new wisps of tissue growth from the leathery membrane covering his brain. 

Picture a gloved dental hygienist, sticking a metal pick and a suction doodad in your mouth, casually chitchatting while you’re stuck staring at the ceiling. Over time, I learned to dissociate enough to pretend I was just one of those hygienists. 

But intentionally separating your mind and body is exhausting work. After five years of drowning out screeches and whirring medical tools with podcasts and noise-canceling headphones, I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I spent those years lying about my job on dates, omitting details from my closest friends, and filtering myself in calls with my therapist. At first, I told myself that they wouldn’t understand. Eventually, as my experiments failed over and over, it stopped making sense to me, too.

“We are the mad scientists. We are like the people in horror films, torturing them. It’s crazy what we do to handle it.”

Almost every researcher I spoke with had a similar experience. Andrew — a former graduate student, whose name has been changed to protect him from harassment — left his position at a major US primate research center in 2022, after spending two years studying infectious diseases in juvenile monkeys. A long-time animal lover, he was initially horrified by the deaths and dissections required to investigate the effects of viral infections on developing brains and bodies. To get through his master’s degree, he dissociated. 

“We are the mad scientists. We are like the people in horror films, torturing them. It’s crazy what we do to handle it,” he told me last summer. In the end, the forced apathy crushed what enthusiasm he once had for academic research. “It felt like I was chewed up and spit out.”

For some researchers, the numbness, anxiety, and distress linger long after the work is done. At CNPRC, Asada turned to alcohol to self-medicate. “I don’t like drinking, but I would drink myself to sleep every night,” she said. “What prompted me to leave was realizing that no one that worked there was okay.” (UC Davis, in a statement, said students can access support through Student Health and Counseling Services, and employees through the Academic and Staff Assistance Program.)

Academic science has a well-documented mental health problem. A 2018 survey of about 2,300 early-career science researchers across 26 countries reported that 41 percent had moderate to severe anxiety, and 39 percent had moderate to severe depression — often correlated with reports of poor work-life balance and bad relationships with advisers. One study of about 200 Korean scientists found that animal researchers had significantly higher anxiety scores than non-animal researchers. 

Since then, the problem has only gotten worse — depression is so common in academia that researchers across fields accept it as part of the job. In Sweden — where the population ranks far above that of the US in overall happiness — researchers followed over 20,000 PhD students in the course of their studies, and found that for students in the natural sciences, use of psychiatric medication steadily climbed year after year, nearly doubling by the time they graduated. In other words, if 13 out of 100 people started their biology PhD program with a prescription for antidepressants, 26 were likely to graduate with one.

Nor does it help that the scientific enterprise runs a bit like a feudal system, with powerful professors at the top, and postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and research assistants at the bottom. The only real way to advance is through having a well-connected mentor at a prestigious, highly-resourced university. But that means anything that might alienate that senior scientist — like questioning the lab’s animal care protocols or experimental techniques — could place your job or even your scientific future at risk. 

“So much of science relies on senior research leaders, who don’t have to get their hands dirty anymore, convincing their junior colleagues they have no other options than to do work so violent and disturbing that it makes many of them suicidal,” a pseudonymous X account, run by a graduate student in the sciences who works with non-animal models, posted last August.

The limits of “compassion fatigue”

What limited peer-reviewed research has been done on the mental health effects of lab animal care — usually surveys of veterinarians and animal care technicians — focuses on the concept of “compassion fatigue,” a form of burnout brought on by providing care in exhausting, traumatic environments. Institutions know that early-career scientists struggling with their mental health, even brilliant ones, are likely to leave academia. Academic departments with doctoral training programs also know that losing students looks bad on grant applications, leading reviewers to question their stability and leadership. 

Some universities are trying to respond to the crisis. Dare 2 Care, a program at the University of Washington, aims to remedy compassion fatigue by suggesting that workers do things like connect with peers, place heart-shaped stickers indicating planned euthanasia dates on mouse cages, and express gratitude to lab animals for their sacrifice. Giving workers the chance to emotionally prepare for the end of a study — when animals like mice are usually killed — “fosters a sense of closure and reduces emotional distress,” WaNPRC told Vox in an email. 

But “these animals are not choosing to be sacrificed,” said Krasno. Compassion fatigue training, she suspects, is more of a Band-Aid than a solution, with the primary goal of boosting staff retention by reframing an employee’s unease as a personal issue to be managed, rather than an inevitable consequence of their work.

Compassion fatigue is a common experience for lab veterinarians and animal care technicians — the workers who are tasked with day-to-day maintenance work, like cleaning cages, prepping food, and physically examining lab animals. But one study reported that over three-quarters of animal care workers surveyed felt that institutional compassion fatigue programs didn’t help them manage their symptoms. WaNPRC pointed me to another report, which found that only 24 percent of surveyed animal care workers said compassion fatigue support programming helped improve their symptoms.

What institutions ask of tech staff “is hurting these people,” said Jones-Engel, who worked with lab primates for 17 years before becoming a scientist at PETA. “They’re the ones that have to look in the eyes of the monkeys every day. They have to pull that mouse box out and see there were three cannibalized pups in there.” 

Compared to care staff, none of the young scientists — grad students, postdocs, and research assistants — I spoke with felt that compassion fatigue was the best way to characterize their experience. It’s a subtle but crucial difference: While care workers face burnout from tending to unhappy animals in bleak spaces, researchers have to view the animals as tools to be used — and the researchers are the ones using them. 

Researchers are worn down by the pressure to treat animals as data points. A sick or uncooperative animal can derail months of work, jeopardizing their ability to graduate, publish papers, or compete for scarce academic jobs. Killing living things that you’ve intentionally distanced yourself from — while convincing yourself that it serves some greater utilitarian purpose — is part of the job. 

“And then you’re just supposed to go home and eat dinner and exist in your life, and not feel the impact of repeatedly taking someone’s life,” said Krasno. “It’s a highly traumatic field, but somehow, animal researchers get forgotten.”

How do we fix this? 

However entrenched animal research feels right now, the world of biomedical research is on the brink of massive change. Within decades, invasive research on lab animals could be obsolete, as new technology allows scientists to test cancer treatments on tissues grown from a patient’s own cells, or create detailed maps of Alzheimer’s disease in human brains. 

“Everyone recognizes that the goal is to eventually try to replace animals,” Naomi Charalambakis, the then-associate director of science policy at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the largest biomedical coalition in the US, told Scientific American last year. 

The financial incentive to replace animal testing, too, is clear and compelling. Like keeping humans alive in prison, keeping animals alive in labs is incredibly expensive. Lab monkeys, which are in short supply, are especially costly, now selling for tens of thousands of dollars each. 

At this point, Jones-Engel believes it’s all but inevitable that animal testing will be phased out. It’s just a matter of when. 

“It’s not just that the writing’s on the wall,” she said. “The writing is like, plastered. It’s a giant neon sign saying ‘We’re done.’”

But the push to phase out animal testing depends on more than just greater efficiency — it calls for a reckoning with a legacy of harm. For the scientific community to truly evolve, it will need to confront its history and acknowledge the possibility of change. Helping animal researchers understand and grapple with their own experiences is a crucial first step.

It may be tempting to dismiss people who experiment on animals as villains who don’t deserve empathy or institutional support. Considering the well-being of those who cause harm for a living might feel incongruous, like imagining a peer support group for executioners. But new animal researchers often don’t know what they’re getting themselves into, and sometimes even choose to work in these labs because they love animals. 

Many institutions know this, so they require first-year grad students to complete several lab rotations, or trial runs where trainees typically spend two to three months in a handful of research groups, before committing to the team they’ll work with for the next few years. But not all programs offer such rotations, including programs where students could end up working with animals. They should. 

It is also crucial that institutions have trustworthy systems in place for reporting workplace safety and animal welfare violations without fear of punishment, and with the option of anonymity. 

And lab workers also need to have faith that when they report violations,  their campus’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), an internal body that oversees each university’s animal research,  will take them seriously. Right now, though, these panels are strongly biased toward approving animal experiments. To signal a genuine commitment to animal welfare, institutions should rebalance IACUCs to include a greater percentage of members who aren’t affiliated with the university’s scientific research.

At bare minimum, institutions need to acknowledge the trauma they expose workers to and provide adequate mental health care for researchers. Simple measures like furnishing warm, naturally lit spaces for personal time and conversation during breaks — and protecting that break time — can make room for vulnerability in an otherwise sterile environment. 

University counselors should be trained to help animal researchers navigate complex feelings of guilt, grief, and anxiety, without pressure to reconcile those feelings with any particular ethical stance. In parallel, senior scientists — many of whom were hired for their science chops, not their empathetic leadership — should be taught compassionate mentorship, and how to respond to challenging situations with empathy and tact. Principal investigators “don’t get enough training as it is on how to mentor and train others,” said Jocelyn Breton, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University and soon-to-be neuroscience professor at Smith College. 

Breton has mentored many first-time animal researchers in the decade since she started working with mice and rats. “It’s really hard,” she tells her students, “and it doesn’t get easier.” Her current lab has a dedicated meeting every semester to discuss animal ethics and hold space for people to bring up concerns, and she checks in with her trainees frequently. Before exposing new students to animal death, she briefs them on what to expect. Afterward, she checks in, shares her own emotional experience, and gives students the freedom to set their own boundaries. Students have passed out watching perfusions, she told me, and some trainees quit. Creating a space where trainees feel comfortable choosing to leave is the point. 

“You have to strive to have an ethical identity” 

John Gluck, a research professor at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University who built his career on animal research, credits this kind of openness to dialogue with changing his mind about the use of animals in science. As a graduate student in the 1960s, before animal welfare laws were established in the US, he worked in psychologist Harry Harlow’s infamous monkey lab at UW Madison, where Madeline Krasno cleaned cages decades later. Gluck remembers researchers performing brain surgery with their bare hands and relatively limited experience. Animal welfare was an afterthought. 

With Harlow’s help, Gluck landed a tenure-track faculty job at the University of New Mexico, where he launched a monkey lab in Harlow’s image — exactly as he was expected to. In 1977, two years after philosopher Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation was published, his lab was attacked by animal rights activists, who released all of the monkeys living there. Gluck was incensed.

“For years, my fury blocked the self-reflection that is expected of any scientist who harms vulnerable animals for presumed human benefit,” Gluck wrote in a 2011 letter to the scientific journal Nature. “I dismissed even reasonable ethical questions directed at me and my work.”

But over time, Gluck told me, conversations with students and veterinarians slowly opened his mind. Gluck took leave from his faculty job to immerse himself in a bioethics fellowship that ultimately convinced him to leave animal research behind. “What can I say? You just can’t keep publishing mistakes,” he said.

Scientists, including a younger Gluck, often dismiss animal welfare activists. He remembers one major scientist responding to protests by saying, “I’d have them all put in a psychiatric facility.” In conversations I’ve had with supporters of animal research, I’ve sensed a similar disdain, even fear, toward people working for organizations like PETA. 

But Gluck says that animal researchers need to give them more credit, or at least actually talk to them: “We’re not listening.”

I asked him what advice he would give to other scientists considering shifting their research model. “You have to strive to have an ethical identity,” he said. “Otherwise, what are you doing? You might as well be working in a bowling alley.”

Not every scientist will, or needs to, make the same radical shift as Gluck did. But there is power in openness, and in loosening one’s grip on the way things have always been. And soon, scientists may be forced to confront the consequences of both the status quo and the sudden upheaval of their institutions by the Trump administration. 

The future of biomedical research will depend on rebuilding and sustaining a thoughtful, empathetic workforce — and on our ability to ensure that discovery doesn’t come at the expense of those who make it possible. 

This post was originally published on this site