Glee's Lea Michele: Free the Chimps!

Actress writes the National Institutes of Health begging them to help 14 chimpanzees from use in experiments

By Marianne Garvey May 24, 2011 8:30 PMTags
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Lea Michele wants this monkey business stopped.

The Glee star has taken up a cause, fighting for the rights of 14 chimpanzees that were shipped to an Texas lab in order to undergo experiments that she says could could harm and kill them.

The actress has written the National Institutes of Health in order to protest the chimps being used and has asked that they be moved to a sanctuary.

See what she's written here...

The actress, calling herself an "animal protection advocate," writes to the institute's director, Francis S. Collins, stating her case.

"I implore you to help 14 chimpanzees who were recently moved to a notorious Texas laboratory, where they are being used in harmful experiments," she writes.

Michele writes that this group of chimps had already been subjected to invasive research previously for decades before they got a break from testing in 2001. They were then moved to safety in a facility in New Mexico, but claims the government made the decision to return the creatures back to the lab.

"We've learned so much about chimpanzees in recent years," she writes. "We know that chimpanzee mothers mourn terribly if their infant dies, much like a human mom does. Chimpanzee infants in the wild stay with their moms for years. But in labs, infants are usually taken away from their mothers just a few hours after birth."

The actress specifically mentions one chimp in particular named Cammy, who was taken from her mom the day she was born and shipped to the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio, TX.

"She was first traumatically sedated with powerful chemicals when she was 6 months old, according to medical records," she writes. "Since then she's been 'chemically immobilized' more than 100 times. Cammy and her 13 companions have been infected with hepatitis C and subjected to liver biopsies and many other traumatic procedures."

As well as raising questions about the ethics of such research, Michele ends the letter by requesting that they be returned to the Alamogordo Primate Facility, where they are not used for invasive experiments.

The San Antonio lab where the chimps currently reside did not return requests for comment, but makes the case for its primate research to help combat infectious diseases on its website.