Clearing of UC Riverside in Animal Case Expected

After a 10-month investigation sparked by allegations of cruelty to research animals, UC Riverside is expected to be cleared by a federal panel, it was learned Thursday.

The advisory committee of top National Institutes of Health officials is expected to recommend that the university continue to receive federal research funds.

“The situation at Riverside is satisfactory on all counts,” said Dr. George Galasso, associate director for extramural affairs at the national institutes.

National attention focused on the university when animal rights activists, calling themselves the Animal Liberation Front, broke into the university’s research laboratories last April 21, releasing 467 animals and causing more than $680,000 in damage to equipment and experiments.

Allegations of animal mistreatment surfaced after videotapes were circulated to the news media of monkeys with eyes sewn shut and bandaged for a “sight deprivation experiment.”

The National Institutes of Health launched an investigation and put the sight experiment on “minimal funding” of $10,000 a month. Because the laboratory animals were stolen, other experiments came to a standstill, including a sickle-cell anemia project for which a special strain of mice had been bred for 15 years.

University of California, Riverside, received more than $4 million in National Institutes of Health grants in 1985 to support 47 projects that involved 5,000 animals in studies on malaria, infertility, birth defects and other subjects.