Animal Rights Activitsts Target HMS Professors

Six Harvard Medical School (HMS) researchers have received threats in the last two days from an animal rights activist group, condemning their non-human, primate-based research.

The medical school affiliates received letters--each with a razor blade enclosed--in which the group, known as Justice Department, threatened to take further action if the researchers did not stop their experiments.

According to the group's Web site, Justice Department plans to send more than 80 similar envelopes to other researchers across the country who they say use vivisection--surgical experimentation on living animals--in their work.

The group included a note in its letter to the targeted researchers, warning them that they have "until autumn of 2000 to quit [the] vivisection industry, or be subjected to violence which is uncomparable [sic] to booby trapped letters."

Among those listed on the group's Web site as potential letter recipients are 11 Harvard affiliates:

Assistant Professor of Neurobiology Richard T. Born; Assistant Professor of Medicine Zheng W. Chen; Professor of Psychology Marc D. Hauser; Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Jae U. Jung; Associate Professor of Pathology Andrew A. Lackner; Instructor in Veterinary Medicine David E. Lee-Parritz; Associate Professor of Psychobiology Bertha K. Madras; Professors of Psychobiology William H. Morse and Roger D. Spealman; James T. Wortham, associate director of the New England Regional Primate Research Center; and Associate Professor of Medicine Frederick C. Wang.

HMS officials yesterday would not release the names of those researchers who have already received letters, so it was not known if those six included any of the 11 researchers listed on the Web site.

The medical school's director of public affairs Donald L. Gibbons said yesterday that the investigation will be handled by the FBI. Yesterday, an FBI spokesperson in the Boston office refused to comment on the status of the investigation.

According to Richard Mederos, detective sergeant of the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD), the letters were sent in white, business-size envelopes postmarked from Las Vegas. They did not have a return address.

Only one of the letters was opened and no one was injured, Mederos said.

Mederos said that all letters have been passed on to the FBI, which will oversee a national investigation of this case.

Mederos said he believes this is the first time the University has been targeted by Justice Department, a group that has long employed violent measures.

The group's Web site explains their violent means by saying, "Animals had suffered long enough--the time has come for abusers to have but a taste of the fear and anguish their victims suffer on a daily basis."

In June 1994, Justice Department sent six letter bombs to companies involved in live exports of animals from North America to Europe.

In 1996, 65 envelopes with rat poison-covered razor blades were sent to hunting guides in Canada. Justice Department followed this threat by sending 87 envelopes containing razor blades allegedly tainted with AIDS-infected blood to Canadian fur retailers.

Yesterday, other animal-rights activist groups distanced themselves from Justice Department's most recent activities.

David Barbarash, a member of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), said he neither "condones these activities [nor]believes in violence."

"I do, however, understand the frustration that motivates them, that frustration being based in the slow pace of animal liberation movements," Barbarash added.

Steven M. Wise, who will be teaching a course on animal rights law in the spring at Harvard Law School, also condemned the group's acts.

"The actions taken by Justice Department are not something that any responsible animal rights activist groups should have taken," Wise said. "They are counter-productive to the objectives of animal activists group, and not mainstream of animal rights groups."

This is not the first time that animal rights groups have campaigned at Harvard's facilities.

This past summer, six different HMS research facilities were included on the 1999 Freedom Primate Tour, an event sponsored by several animal-rights organizations to raise awareness on the use of primates in experimentation.