Aug.

12, 2014
By John J. Pippin, M.D., F.A.C.C., director of academic affairs. The details of Lavernes life and
death were obtained from medical records acquired via the Michigan Freedom of Information
Act from Wayne State University.

The Life and Death of Laverne

This is the story of Laverne, a medium-sized brown-and-white hound mix. Lavernes story is
unique but is representative of the experiences of many of the dogs used in heart failure and
hypertension experiments at Wayne State University (WSU) in Detroit, Mich. Experimenters at
WSU have spent more than 20 years causing heart failure in dogs to try to understand human
heart failure. Their experiments have been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
dating at least as far back as 1996. During the current fiscal year, the experiments are receiving
$383,572 from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, part of NIH.
The dog who was given the number 3023 and named Laverne first arrived at WSU on May 31,
2013 with three other dogs, including two who staff named Squiggy and Joanie. (On May 8,
2013 Wayne State acquired a dog who staff named Shirley.) Less than a month after her arrival,
Laverne would be dead.
Dogs in the WSU heart failure experiments are typically subjected to multiple surgeries over a
period of six to eight weeks, followed by weeks to months of running on a treadmill. The first
surgery involves making a large incision between the ribs and into the chest to expose the heart.
Probes are then placed around the aorta and a coronary artery to measure blood flow. Another
probe is stabbed directly into the heart to measure blood pressure. A second major surgery
usually follows about two weeks after the first, and in some experiments as many as four
additional surgeries are performed. If the dogs survive surgery, multiple devices will have been
inserted in or around fragile blood vessels in the chest, abdomen, neck, and limbs, with wires and
cables tunneled through the skin to be attached to monitors.
On June 6, a physical exam of Laverne noted that she was Active + playful. On at least two
occasions she was trained to walk on a treadmill, likely in preparation for the experiments.
However, instead of being used in the experiments described above, Laverne was used for a
practice surgery to train experimenters. On June 25, 2013, WSU staff cut open her left side near
her back leg and exposed the nerve leading to her left kidney. They then attached electrodes to
the nerve to obtain readings. After three hours of collecting readings, experimenters killed her
presumably because they decided they had collected enough information.