PETA today is urging former President Barack Obama to condemn twisted experiments on infant macaques conducted by Harvard University experimenter Margaret Livingstone, who is collecting $2 million in taxpayer funds from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) BRAIN Initiative in the process. The initiative was launched during the Obama administration.

PETA has uncovered that in her latest experiment, Livingstone permanently separates baby monkeys from their mothers and forces them to wear helmets with shuttered goggles that rapidly open and close, creating a strobe-light effect. The infants are made to wear the devices for a year and a half, effectively forcing them to live in perpetual and disorienting strobe lighting all day long for 18 months.

“Livingstone’s latest experiment raises an already unacceptably high bar for cruelty to stratospheric levels,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is urging former President Obama to condemn this pointless cruelty that has done nothing to provide treatments or cures for humans.”

Livingstone’s experiments—which have been widely panned as unethical in the scientific community—have included ripping baby monkeys away from their mothers and sewing their eyes shut for an entire year. In another experiment, infant monkeys are reared by humans wearing welding masks so they never see a monkey or human face. She also surgically implants electrodes in monkeys’ brains to record how their deprived brain cells respond to visual stimuli. After years of torment, Livingstone kills many of them and dissects their brains.

PETA members call for an end to animal experimentation outside the Society for Neuroscience annual conference in Washington, D.C. Credit: PETA

Livingstone has conducted violent experiments on monkeys and other animals for 40 years and collected $32 million in taxpayer funds from NIH to bankroll them, despite never producing a single treatment or cure for humans.

PETA’s action comes ahead of a planned demonstration Wednesday, at which supporters wearing monkey masks will flood Harvard’s campus as “experimenters” in lab coats torment them with strobe lights in a bizarre scene meant to mimic Livingstone’s latest cruel test.