Aside from the faint smell of monkeys, the large building with an “Authorized Personnel Only” sign on the outskirts of University of Wisconsin-Madison betrays few signs of life. A passerby would have little reason to suspect that inside its brick walls, hundreds of researchers in white lab coats, facemasks and goggles are busy experimenting on more than 1,500 primates. Or that some of the experiments involve injecting the animals with the monkey equivalent of human immunodeficiency virus, better known as HIV. And that others require syringe needles to be pushed through the animals’ skulls. But what happens inside the National Primate Research Center and a university lab next door that also uses monkeys may soon become much more public.
Office of Strategic Communication