A university official defended a professor today who was accused by an animal-activist blogger of “animal murder.”
Camille Marino, a Wildwood-based activist who runs the “Negotiation is Over!” website, cited a study in which researchers placed electrodes on the brains of Macaque monkeys. Mingzhou Ding, who teaches biomedical engineering at UF, authored a paper on the subject. A post on Marino’s blog called Ding a “Torture-Murderer” and described his tactics as “sociopathic sadism.”
But according to UF Public Affairs director Janine Sikes, the experiments were not done at UF and the data were public domain.
“Organizations such as this use mischaracterizations and inaccuracies to make an argument, and they falsely alleged things about this individual who just analyzed the data,” Sikes said.
Marino admitted she thought Ding did the experiments himself and that she’s now “willing to defer on this single issue.”
“I’ll take it as a given that he didn’t do the mutilation,” she said. “But that doesn’t mitigate culpability.”
Ding could not be reached for comment.
