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Research funded by Fauci

Never underestimate a university’s ability to disgust you even more than it already has.

The University of Pittsburgh’s affiliated hospital fired a professor from an administrative position last year for arguing that affirmative action has harmed black and Hispanic medical students. It defamed Norman Wang in order to convince the science journal that published his paper to retract it. (Pitt is currently under federal investigation for these actions.)

Now courtesy of Campus Reform, we learn the taxpayer-funded institution signed off on an immunology study that sowed the “scalp and dorsum” of late-term aborted human fetuses – sourced from its own hospital – to mice and rats.

Several Pitt researchers and students in the Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology and Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics conducted the study. It was published in Scientific Reports in September, titled “Development of humanized mouse and rat models with full-thickness human skin and autologous immune cells.”

It was funded by the National Institutes of Health and its National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, which has been led by celebrity scientist Anthony Fauci for 36 years.

The human beings were 18 to 20 weeks old, approaching the age of viability outside the womb. Campus Reform notes that at this age, they become increasingly recognizable as persons, developing facial features and attaining “the ability to suck their thumbs, yawn, stretch, and make faces.”

Here’s what Pitt scientists did to these marginalized human beings, who are further dehumanized as “donors” in the paper:

We processed human fetal spleen, thymus, and liver organs into ~ 1 mm3 pieces and isolated autologous human CD34+ hematopoietic stem cells from the fetal liver, then transplanted the tissues and hematopoietic stem cells into irradiated NSG mice. Human skin tissues were obtained from the scalp and dorsum of donors and were used in developing human skin engraftments with and without hair in the mouse model, respectively. Full-thickness human fetal skin was processed via removal of excess fat tissues attached to the subcutaneous layer of the skin, then engrafted over the rib cage, where the mouse skin was previously excised.

MORE: UChicago scholar proves biologists believe life begins at conception

The “Ethical Approval” section of the paper specifies that these fetuses came from “medically or elective indicated termination” at Magee-Womens Hospital at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Their mothers gave consent for their use “under a protocol reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board” at Pitt.

Several units at Pitt were involved in approving this study:

The use of de-identified human fetal tissues to construct humanized rodents was reviewed and approved by the University of Pittsburgh IRB Office. The use of de-identified human fetal tissues did not constitute human subjects research as defined under federal regulations … The use of human fetal liver-derived hematopoietic stem cells was reviewed and approved by the Human Stem Cell Research Oversight (hSCRO) at the University of Pittsburgh. The use of a biological agent (CA-MRSA), recombinant DNA, and transgenic animals were reviewed and approved by the Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) at the University of Pittsburgh.

A Pitt spokesperson told Campus Reform the research was intended to save lives, even as it dehumanized the most marginalized human victims of violence. It will supposedly help in the development of “new treatments for infections that cause illness and death for more than 100,000 people every year.”

To be clear, Pitt’s stamp of approval on research that relies on violence and dehumanization is probably not unusual among research scientists. Scientific research has always been plagued by experimentation on those whose humanity has been reduced or denied entirely, used without their effectual consent.

But it’s especially outrageous that these human beings – most of whom were probably killed because they were inconvenient to someone, including a boyfriend, husband or mother’s parents – are not even given the dignity of being recognized as “human subjects.”

Recall that Portland State University found that a philosophy professor violated “human subjects research” rules by conning prestigious academic journals into accepting ludicrous research papers on “rape culture” at dog parks and a feminist version of Mein Kampf.

Exposing the credulity of woke academic publishers? Forbidden. Sewing marginalized human victims of violence to rats? Progress.

MORE: PSU rules ‘grievance studies’ prof violated ‘human subjects’ rules

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