Other

More on PETA, Bolden, and ISDC

As previously reported here, NASA administrator Charles Bolden’s speech at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Chicago Friday night was interrupted briefly by a protestor, who took over the microphone to speak out against a study by NASA that would involve exposing monkeys to radiation as part of efforts to understand the effects of long-duration interplanetary spaceflight. The young woman got her comments in, was escorted from the stage, and Bolden continued his talk. End of story, right?

It was until yesterday, when PETA published on its web site a press release about the event, with this key paragraph:

A PETA supporter took the stage and microphone this weekend just before a speech by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference. As Bolden looked on, the protester asked that NASA halt plans to fund a cruel and wasteful radiation experiment on monkeys. She spoke uninterrupted by the crowd for a short time and received a few cheers from the audience before being escorted off the stage.

Interestingly, while this press release didn’t appear on its web site until Wednesday (both according to my checks and the Google News archive) a version was circulated by email late Tuesday, with one critical difference: in the original emailed version the protestor “spoke uninterrupted by the crowd for several minutes”. My own recording of the incident showed about 20 seconds elapsed from the time she started speaking to the time Bolden regained the microphone and urged calm from the audience. PETA spokesman Justin Goodman said in an email Tuesday evening that the original wording was a “typographical error”. (One can also question the claim that the protestor “received a few cheers”; if there were any, they were drowned out by boos and, later, applause and cheers for Bolden.)

Goodman also said that the still-unidentified protestor was not part of an organized protest by PETA. The woman, he said, “was a PETA member who was acting on her own volition and the action was done independent of the organization.”

Things, though, took a stranger turn with the publication late yesterday of a brief report on the web site Opposing Views that NSS executive director Gary Barnhard had called PETA and threatened to sue the organization if it didn’t withdraw its release about the incident. Goodman confirmed that “an angry caller” identifying himself as Barnhard had called PETA Wednesday afternoon “to say that he was going to prosecute PETA to the fullest extent of the law” if PETA released that statement.

Barnhard has a very different take on events. In a call last night, he confirmed that he called PETA’s offices about the release, but was unable to speak to anyone but a receptionist. He said he asked PETA in a “professional manner” to refrain from publicizing the event further to protect the young woman; he was concerned that further attention might lead to investigations that could have negative repercussions for her. (The woman was not charged Friday night, and at the time he said he considered the case closed.) There was, he said, no threat of a lawsuit. “The bottom line is that there is no story here,” Barnhard concluded last night.

14 comments to More on PETA, Bolden, and ISDC

  • PETA and reality have a tenuous connection at best.

    I love animals and don’t eat much meat, but every time a PETA member pulls a loony stunt like this I have an urge to go eat a steak.

  • Ferris Valyn

    Stephen – the irony is that Peta is at times, their own worst enemy – they do good works as it relates to animal cruelty, and then do stunts like this, which go nowhere, and just look bad

  • Ferris Valyn wrote:

    Stephen – the irony is that Peta is at times, their own worst enemy – they do good works as it relates to animal cruelty, and then do stunts like this, which go nowhere, and just look bad

    Decades ago, I was working for a police department in Southern California. PETA raided a biology lab on the university campus and took the primates that were being tested with various nasty stuff. The college professors warned us that anyone exposed to the bugs could become seriously ill.

    These PETA just don’t think through entirely what they’re doing.

  • Mr. Munson

    I think the real question here is, can we count radiation-saturated monkeys as “game-changing technology” to help us get to mars?

  • Ian

    It would be helpful if blog entries like this could provide some context to the incident that occurred at ISDC…namely, a few details about the experiment which prompted the interruption of Bolden’s speech.

    As it stands, NASA plans to spend close to $2 million to expose monkeys to debilitating radiation despite their being a long history of radiation experiments carried out specifically on primates which have not yielded any useful results. What we have learned from those experiments is that the animals will likely suffer a great deal. Potential harms include cancerous tumors, loss of motor control, blindness, skin damage, mental degradation, and premature death.

    With such high stakes, the polite and momentary interruption of a speech hardly seems to be a bold move.

  • Neil H.

    Ian, I’ve seen you post both here and at nasawatch. From my preliminary searching it looks like you’ve never posted to either site prior to the peta stories. I’m curious: Are you a PETA member/affiliate who’s been commenting on these stories to try to garner sympathy for PETA’s side?

    Also, you do realize how important experiments like this are to ensuring the safety of astronauts, particularly those on future BEO missions, right? Additionally, experiments like this must go through several layers of review to ensure that the experiments are scientifically important and carried out in a responsible fashion.

  • common sense

    I may be wrong but PETA’s concerns seem to be that such experiments already took place in the past and led to nothing. If such I am all with them but I will admit I did not do my due diligence.

    Oh well…

  • Robert Horning

    “As it stands, NASA plans to spend close to $2 million to expose monkeys to debilitating radiation”

    I would like to find a source for this information…. seriously! I was under the impression that experiments with monkeys ended with the cancellation of the Mercury program, but I am certainly willing to be surprised and be corrected on this point.

    Also, is this future spending (aka FY 2011 budget line items) or is this something that is in the more recent past?

  • Neil H.

    > I would like to find a source for this information…. seriously! I was under the impression that experiments with monkeys ended with the cancellation of the Mercury program, but I am certainly willing to be surprised and be corrected on this point.

    Sort of. If I understand correctly, from my reading of things so far, the half-dozen rhesus monkeys exposed to radiation back in the 1960s were studied as late as the 1990s in order to understand the persistent effects from radiation 20-30 years prior. Since the typical lifespan of a rhesus monkey is 15-25 years those monkeys have presumably all died of old age by now,

    > Also, is this future spending (aka FY 2011 budget line items) or is this something that is in the more recent past?

    I’m not sure exactly which part of NASA the primate studies fall under, but I remember PETA throwing a fuss about this back in November 2009, long before FY2011 was proposed:

    http://www.space.com/news/091119-nasa-peta-protest.html

  • Remember the story of Dan Goldin being scolded at dinner in his home by his PETA-inclined daughter after he’d agreed to participate in a Russian space experiment using monkeys? That’s a conversation I’d have loved to overhear!

  • […] but rather Monkey Girl. I really don’t have much to say in that regard, as I think too many electrons have been spilled on the topic already. I will just say that NSS invests a lot of time, money and […]

  • I always support the cause of PETA.`;*

  • […] protests of the work, including demonstrations outside NASA headquarters. In May, a young woman interrupted NASA administrator Charles Bolden’s speech at the International Space Development … in Chicago to protest the experiments; PETA said the unidentified woman was a […]

Leave a Reply

  

  

  

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>