2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumOur National Institute of Health has to stop 'child abuse' studies on baby monkeys.
Traumatic psychological experiments on baby monkeys in taxpayer-funded NIH laboratories.
Harry Harlows psychological experiments on monkeys in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s were infamous for their cruelty. Harlow tore newborns away from their mothers, gave some infants surrogate mothers made of wire and wood, and kept other traumatized babies in isolation in tiny metal boxes, sometimes for up to a year. Realizing that such horrific conditions resulted in long-term, debilitating psychological trauma for the infants, Harlow began expanding his project. He and his then-student Stephen Suomi created the pit of despair, a dark metal box designed to isolate the monkeys from everything in the outside world. Within days, the monkeys kept inside the pit were driven insane, incessantly rocking and clutching at themselves, tearing and biting their own skin and ripping out their hair. When finally removed from isolation, they were too traumatized to interact with other monkeys, and some were so shocked and depressed that they starved themselves to death. To see what would happen when tormented monkeys became mothers themselves, Suomi and Harlow created what they called a rape rack in order to restrain and impregnate female monkeys, then they would later watch and photograph the mentally ill mothers physically abusing and killing their own babies.
Harlow died in 1981 and, though most people believe his experiments are a thing of the past, his protégé, Stephen Suomi, has continued to conduct similar maternal deprivation and depression experiments on infant monkeys for more than 30 years in taxpayer-funded laboratories at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) facility in Poolesville, Maryland.
Each year, 40 to 60 monkeys are born at this NIH facility, many intentionally bred to be genetically predisposed to mental illness. Half of the monkeys born each year are separated from their mothers within hours of birth and never returned. Some infants are given a cloth-covered water bottle as a surrogate mother. As in Harlow and Suomis earlier experiments, these motherless infants are more likely to suffer from severe anxiety, aggression, depression, diarrhea, hair loss, and other physical and mental illnesses, as well as engaging in self-destructive behavior such as biting themselves and pulling out their own hair.
Heres the video of todays experiments, see what todays taxpayer millions are used for.
raging moderate
(4,306 posts)Execrable!
Mnemosyne
(21,363 posts)d_r
(6,907 posts)I've always thought that Harlow's original experiments with the wire mesh and terry cloth surrogates were cruel, but I concede that they helped to move science away from drive theories towards attachment theory.
But as a society we are at a point where we should be able to recognize the ethical concerns out weight the value of this current research.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)research harms the employees mental health.
d_r
(6,907 posts)is mainly on the biological underpinnings of maternal-offspring behavior and maternal deprivation. They are looking at things like the expression of specific genes, and neuro-chemical functioning such as serotonin.
The rub to me is that the monkeys are not a perfect biological model for human behavior, and the conditions that they are exposed to are not analogous to those humans are exposed to. So the benefit seems questionable and imho does not outweigh the cost.
And yes, I agree with you that it seems to have desensitized the experimenters.
Tl/dr: it is cruel and not necessary.
greymattermom
(5,754 posts)if you did something like this to a mouse?
If you took a mouse pup away from its mother for one hour a day?
Is this cruel?http://www.victorpest.com/store/mouse-control/glue-traps?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Bing%2B-%2BMouse%2B-%2BGlue%2BTraps&utm_term=mouse%20trap%20sticky%20pad