For Immediate Release
Los Angeles: Notorious UCLA primate vivisector Arthur Rosenbaum has finally died, at age 69. Although he claimed to only kill the occasional non-human primate, Rosenbaum was well known for torturing his subjects in order to publish still more useless papers on strabisimus, an eye movement disorder that has been effectively treated for decades. For his 36 years at UCLA, Rosenbaum, who served as chief of pediatric ophthalmology and strabismus at the Jules Stein Eye Institute since 1980 and had been vice chairman of ophthalmology at the David Geffen School of Medicine since 1990, continued to annually obtain grants by promising the NIH he was going to deliver innovative clinical data “any day now”. Institutions such as UCLA depend on such grant money to fund their expansion, and will not continue to employ researchers who do not obtain funding from outside the university.
Three years ago, animal advocates began targeting Rosenberg and his cruel and unnecessary research, saying that “Arthur Rosenbaum purports to simulate strabismus (“crossed” eye) by immobilizing primates in draconian head and body restraining devices, injecting the paralytic drug Botox into their ocular musculature and affixing metal coils (electronic force transducers) to their sclerae when a simple corrective procedure for the defect has been known and performed for at least the past six decades.”
Rosenbaum’s response was that he claimed he was primarily a surgeon with ties to only one animal-research project. In mid-2007, an unexploded firebomb was found under Rosenbaum’s car at his home near UCLA; the Animal Liberation Brigade claimed responsibility for the incident.
Over subsequent months, activists staged many protests in Rosenbaum’s neighborhood, using bullhorns and educational pamphlets to let his neighbor’s and other members of the public know about the atrocities he was committing behind the tightly locked doors of his vivisection laboratory. At one point, unable to defend his work on ethical grounds, Rosenbaum told Science Magazine he “had not been involved in that research for a couple of years.” Soon after the attempted firebombing of his luxury car and continued protests, Rosenbaum failed to renew his grants and retired from animal research.
On his office wall, Rosenbaum kept a framed golf ball and score card, a tribute to a hole-in-one he made in 2007 at Brentwood Country Club.
Besides Sandra, his wife of 25 years, Rosenbaum is survived by son Steven Burick and a sister, Jane Sitrin. A public memorial at UCLA is pending; activists will use the occasion to mourn the wasted lives and immeasurable suffering of Rosenbaum’s non-human primate victims.
Express condolences to Rosenbaum’s non-human primate victims here.