By KATHERINE ROE PETA
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Abombshell media report recently exposed an official-unofficial policy at the National Institutes of Health under former director Francis Collins: Top officials conducted public business in private, including by using personal e-mail accounts, to skirt public records law and to keep their scheming hidden from the people who pay their salaries. That’s you, taxpayers.

PETA was on to them from the beginning. We requested records and pieced together the scheme, in which Collins’ officials discussed, off the books, the uselessness and grievous cruelty of experiments on baby monkeys. But rather than admit these experiments were wrong, Collins’ cabal let them continue.

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It would be easy to write off this episode as an aberration, a symptom of a rogue director.

But it’s not. NIH has a systemic problem that continues today.

It’s common knowledge on the part of NIH officials, regardless of who’s at the top, that the agency wastes more than $20 billion in taxpayer money annually on ineffective and cruel experiments on animals. But they do nothing to change it. Worse, NIH continues to conceal the truth and deceive the public about the flawed science and lack of relevance of animal experimentation.

Take cancer research, for instance, an area of scientific inquiry that has been blessed with $140 billion taxpayer dollars since the Nixon administration first launched the “War on Cancer” more than 50 years ago. Cancer is still the number two killer in the U.S. The reason? Cancer drugs tested on animals fail in human clinical trials 96.6% of the time.

Another example: Every vaccine for HIV developed using animals has failed to eradicate infection from the virus. Add treatments for sepsis and stroke to the list of failures. Nearly all — 99.6% — of Alzheimer’s disease treatments that have appeared promising in mice have failed in humans.

The U.S. is expected to spend $1.1 trillion on research for Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia by 2050. That’s a lot of dead animals and a lot of patients who will continue suffering while science dawdles.

It’s been proven repeatedly that there is no straight line from experiments on animals to human treatments, conventional wisdom be damned. Other animals are not miniature humans, full stop. NIH knows this, but rather than choose sound science, they fund failure.

And then there is the violence and cruelty heaped upon animals for pointless experiments. Harvard experimenter Margaret Livingstone, for instance, tears baby monkeys away from their mothers and has sewn their eyes shut just to see how badly it damages their brain and visual development. The tests are so egregiously cruel that nearly 400 scientists and experts — including renowned primatologist Jane Goodall — have called on Harvard to shut them down. But NIH keeps the money rolling in.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Superior alternatives to animal experimentation exist.

PETA scientists have developed Research Modernization NOW — a pathway that can be implemented today to move away from pointless animal experimentation to compassionate and effective research methods that actually have a chance to help humans.

Dr. Katherine Roe is a former NIH clinical researcher and chief scientist with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.