NASA Engineer Resigns Over Radiation Testing on Monkeys

April Evans has been with NASA's Human Spaceflight Program for nine years, and has received an excellence award for her work. But she recently walked away from her position as a space architect on the International Space Station program due to NASA's decision to start nuking monkeys again.

"After much deliberation, I resigned from NASA because I could not support the scientific justification for this monkey radiobiology experiment," wrote Evans in a letter to Samuel Aronson, director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the institution that was contracted by NASA to start blasting squirrel monkeys with radiation for the first time in decades. "Experiments on primates only take focus away from the critical need for shielding technology."

As NASA and other space programs around the world work on sending people to Mars, there are concerns about space radiation. But we already know how monkeys respond to radiation from previous bouts of testing and, of course, exposing squirrel monkeys to high doses of radiation doesn't tell us anything about how humans will respond to low levels of radiation. As Evans pointed out, the need isn't to know what happens with radiation exposure — we already know it's dangerous — but to prevent it.

And she's not the only who disagrees with NASA's giant leap backward into animal testing. Save the Primates reports that Animal Defenders International and the European Space Agency have both spoken out against NASA's planned primate experiments. ESA's director, Jean-Jacques Dordain, wrote that the ESA "declines any interest in monkey research and does not consider any need or use for such result."

NASA's space monkey experiments are pointless, irrelevant and inhumane. And the ethical black hole could end up jeopardizing the ability of international space agencies to work together on future space exploration projects.

So, if the experiments aren't telling us anything new, won't resolve the real problem of finding effective radiation shielding technology and are opposed internally and internationally, why is NASA sticking by their plan? It might have something to do with the $1.75 million taxpayer-funded price tag. This comes at a time when NASA has cut programs due to budget shortfalls and announced potential layoffs of up to 5,000 employees.

But animal cruelty is never the right way to try to balance a budget, and it's not helping NASA's credibility with their European partners or American taxpayers. Tell NASA to stop nuking monkeys. The new frontier should be a humane one.

Photo credit: Public Domain