Published June 16, 2026 by PETA Staff.

To be considered one of the most incompetent experimenters at the University of Washington National Primate Research Center is no small feat. But we may have a new contender.

Meet Kristina Adams Waldorf, the center’s associate director for research. Waldorf’s calling card is killing infant monkeys in pointless tests. She built her career on it, sticking taxpayers with the bill for her experiments to the tune of $26 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) money over the past decade.

More recently, however, her tests have taken an even darker turn, killing monkeys as fetuses instead of waiting through all that tedious gestation. Waldorf injects pathogens such as the Zika virus into pregnant macaques and forces the moms to carry the fetus, sometimes all the way to the third trimester. She then c-sections the mothers and yanks brain tissue from the fetuses.

We haven’t even gotten to the incompetence yet.

A ‘Rare Instance’

PETA representatives attended the May 21 meeting of the university’s animal care committee—the supposed last line of defense for the safety of animals in laboratories. The panel decides which experiments get approved, which do not, and what happens to experimenters who have gone rogue. There, PETA learned that Waldorf, who was running the latest ghoulish experiment in a career rife with them, injected pregnant monkeys with the wrong dose of a lab-created version of protein the body usually produces.

The committee and the attending veterinarian circled the wagons, tried their best to cover for Waldorf, proclaiming that it was a terminal experiment, the monkey didn’t endure any additional suffering, and Waldorf could “account” for the wrong dose during her data analysis. The committee reasoned that this colossal mistake, this abject failure to follow the most basic of scientific procedures—READ THE LABEL!—was, mind you, a “rare instance.”

Was it, though?

For Two Years

PETA did some digging. It didn’t take long to find that Waldorf’s laboratory has been loosey-goosey with the rules before.

PETA found that in November 2024, Waldorf’s laboratory killed 10 monkeys, flushed nearly $4 million in federal money, and blew up a swine flu experiment with unusable data. How? She used the wrong drug, continually, for two years.

For. Two. Years. No one checked the bottle. No one checked the syringe. No one checked what was in the monkey.

Despite this, Waldorf was not suspended and her project wasn’t halted immediately. There was, as far as PETA found, no repercussion for this enormous blunder.

That’s why PETA is forcing the issue this time. We’ve reported Waldorf’s previous incident to the University of Washington’s Board of Regents and NIH. We’re now calling for an investigation by NIH’s policy enforcement arm, the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare.

Up Is Down

It’s important to remember that Waldorf is not some kid fresh from grad school. She’s a leader at the primate center, an institution entrusted with tens of millions of federal dollars annually. Waldorf is supposed to set the standard. But the standard she’s set is the floor.

Waldorf’s incompetence is almost as likely to earn her a promotion as it is to earn her a pink slip. This is the same institution, after all, that hired Michele Basso, despite her pockmarked track record.

What You Can Do

The University of Washington’s National Primate Research Center is rife with misery and incompetence, hoarding millions in federal dollars for failed and deadly experiments. Please TAKE ACTION to shut it down:

And if you’re in the U.S., please take an additional step by supporting PETA’s Research Modernization Deal, which outlines a comprehensive strategy for replacing all experiments on animals with more effective, human-relevant, non-animal methods.