If there’s anything the Trump administration has gotten unequivocally right (besides inadvertently helping Mark Carney become prime minister of Canada), it’s this: Modern science, for all its remarkable capabilities, still remains far too dependent on one of the most primitive research methods there is — harming and killing animals.

That was the message underlying a groundbreaking initiative unveiled in April by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the chief funder of university biomedical research in the US. The agency promised to reallocate funding away from animal experimentation and toward cutting-edge alternatives, with the aim of pushing American science toward a more technologically advanced, less bloody future.

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Viewed on its own merits, that plan makes all the sense in the world. Few Americans, I think, would say that their vision of scientific progress includes inflicting suffering on animals forever.

But there’s a catch. While the NIH’s initiative is, to my knowledge, being run by people genuinely invested in improving science by advancing animal-free methods, that mission is unfolding within an administration whose broader science policy has consisted mostly of laying waste to research funding across the board and attempting to destroy some of the country’s top research universities. These are objectives that one generally wouldn’t expect to be conducive to the flourishing of research on animal testing alternatives — or on any other topic.

For better and for worse

It was in this contradictory context that the NIH last month announced it had defunded a set of controversial studies on baby monkeys run by Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Margaret Livingstone.

To study the development of vision, Livingstone’s lab separates newborn rhesus macaques from their mothers and then uses various techniques to manipulate their vision while they’re growing up — in the most disturbing case in 2016, two baby monkeys had their eyelids sewn shut for their first year of life.

The animals’ skulls are later surgically opened, electrodes are implanted into their brains, and researchers show them visual stimuli........

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