Whistleblowers fight back
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:
Jan Moor-Jankowski, M.D., founder and director for 30 years of the
Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates at New York University,
raised $1.2 million to retire the 225 LEMSIP chimps, coincidental with his own
retirement––but NYU last year froze the funds, closed LEMSIP, and ousted both MoorJankowski
and his lieutenant, James Mahoney, after they resigned from the NYU Institutional
Animal Care and Use Committee, and filed complaints of primate care negligence with the
USDA that obliged the suspension of the NYU addiction research unit run by Ronald Wood.
The USDA probe of the Wood case is reportedly now complete; whether charges will be filed
or Wood will resume his work is yet to be seen. NYU president Jay Oliva and NYU Medical
Center associate dean David Scotch meanwhile sold the LEMSIP chimps to the Coulston
Foundation, a New Mexico-based research supplier, which is to take possession of the chimps
on March 15. Moor-Jankowski in 1991 won a landmark Supreme Court verdict for press freedom
against the Austrian pharmaceutical giant Immuno AG, which sued him for libel, as editor
of the International Journal of Primatology, after he published a letter-to-the-editor by
International Primate Protection League founder Shirley McGreal. Coulston filed a brief backing
Immuno. Investigating whether Moor-Jankowski was illegally punished for whistleblowing,
the USDA on December 22 subpoenaed Oliva, Scotch, and all related records.
General Counsel Robert Seldon of the Government Accountability Project
Working Group on Animal Welfare and Whistleblower Rights, formed to assist Jan MoorJankowski,
on January 18 advised the USDA that GAP has also taken on the case of USDA
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service senior regulatory enforcement and animal care
investigator Marshall Smith, who has been “stripped of all meaningful assignments” since
May 15, 1995, and was denied a promotion after complaining about lax response by colleagues
in Animal Welfare Act enforcement in the South Central Sector, including Arkansas
and Missouri, during a national crackdown on pet theft that began with the 1993 implementation
of the 1991 anti-pet theft amendments to the Animal Welfare Act.
