PETA has uncovered yet another University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School (UMass Chan) experimenter whose career of animal torment burrows beyond the bottom of the university’s ethically barren barrel.
Meet Heather Gray-Edwards: an experimenter who breeds sheep, calves, and more to develop neurodegenerative diseases. The animals suffer seizures and swollen brains, among other distressing symptoms, sometimes without pain relief. They have needles jammed into their spines and brains before they die or are killed—supposedly to test gene therapies for human diseases.
Sheep are subjected to invasive and cruel experimentation at UMass Chan, an institution with a documented record of animal welfare violations.
Gray-Edwards is the latest experimenter PETA has found lurking inside UMass Chan’s den of depravity, where others starve dogs, give pigs heart attacks, and botch surgeries in laboratories rife with animal welfare violations.
We’re now urging the National Institutes of Health to yank funding for her appalling experiments, which have received more than $10 million since 2013, with current grants totaling nearly $3 million.
Destroying Baby Cows’ Brains
Gray-Edwards’ current experiments include breeding calves to have Maple Syrup Urine Disease, causing them to suffer weakness, tremors, seizures, difficulty standing, confusion, and other debilitating symptoms as toxic molecules build up in their brains. Within their first days of life, experimenters subject the babies to repeated sedation, injections, blood draws, and spinal taps.
Some calves receive no treatment for the disease at all. Within three days of birth, the disease causes brain damage so severe they can no longer stand, at which point they are killed. The remaining animals endure months to years of invasive procedures so experimenters can record the long-term effects of the disease, all while intentionally withholding any pain relief that could relieve their suffering.
Injecting the Spines of Sheep
In another current experiment, Gray-Edwards induces a genetic disease in mice and sheep—like the one pictured below—that causes them to suffer motor dysfunction, coordination problems, tremors, seizures, visual impairment, and organ degeneration.
Rather than mitigate their suffering, experimenters watch as the disease escalates and subject the animals to brain injections. The sheep endure repeated invasive surgeries, including spinal injections, brain surgeries, and organ biopsies. As their condition deteriorates, experimenters separate them from their herd and force them through maze tests to track their decline. The sick sheep are left lost, unsteady, and afraid. If any survive, experimenters kill and dissect them.
Carving Open Cats’ Skulls
Gray-Edwards co-authored a 2025 paper in which she describes breeding cats to suffer genetic mutations known to cause progressive muscle deterioration, seizures, motor weakness, and early death. Experimenters then jammed needles into the cats’ skulls to collect spinal fluid and subjected them to numerous procedures before killing them.
In other experiments in which she was involved, cats were bred to suffer a neurodegenerative brain disease that causes tremors and other motor problems. She sliced open their skulls, injected liquid into their brains, and injected their spines, before killing them all.
What You Can Do
UMass Chan has a well-documented history of failing to follow bare minimum animal care standards. Its atrocities include critical understaffing and delay in treating suffering animals, failing to provide pain management, and intentionally starving the animals it imprisons, jeopardizing both animal welfare and scientific reliability.
Please TAKE ACTION today and urge UMass to get out of the cruel and pointless animal experimentation business and switch to human-relevant, non-animal research methods.
The post Baby Cows, Sheep, Others Endure Diseases Without Pain Relief in UMass Chan Laboratory appeared first on PETA.