Home » Harry Harlow and his monkeys: being cruel in order to be kind?

Comments

Harry Harlow and his monkeys: being cruel in order to be kind? — 19 Comments

  1. ” But there are times–especially in the relatively unfettered past–that research on animals can go too far.”

    I’m going to love the day — sure to come — when it is revealed that by failing “to go too far” some researcher somewhere missed the cure for pancreatic cancer.

  2. Vanderleun-
    Say, by failing to create a half-human hybrid they can tear appart? There is always a bridge too far that, if crossed, would give great rewards–but with a cost far too high.

    Isn’t the usual equation for anythat is has to have a goal, method, and the desired result must be worth the time and trouble?

  3. I think Harry Harlow was studying himself. I was at two universites where I heard him lecture and heard of him through his colleagues. I don’t think I’d have wanted to meet “the real thing.” The consensus seems to be that he was a monster.

  4. What was being done to monkeys was a more aggressive version of what was being done to human beings. Have a look at Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist (Hardcover)by Alston Chase, which deals with the experiments performed by Henry A. Murray, one of the top names in academic psychology around mid-century.

  5. sorry hit enter too fast.
    look up chimerics and transgenetic

    A new human-mouse hybrid is the first mammalian model that can develop the human AIDS virus. The scientists in Texas who developed the “humanized” animal are paving the way to a new generation of AIDS research that could significantly accelerate the quest for an AIDS vaccine and other therapies, scientists say.

    we have been doing things like this for years.

    oh and we do xenographic transplants too.

    and some are working on tuning pig stem cells to work as repair means for human heart stuff.

    most of the stuff that they crow about has ulterior motives.

    the stem cell fight is about abortion, not stem cells. the left wants fetal stem cell so that abortion is locked down by haveing a medical need to exist.

    but the invisablehand worked around this and we dont need fetal cells.

    that stopped them yelling at bush claiming he is killing science.

    but its gotten obama to now claim that fetal stem cells are better.

    they basically learned what i put in my other post. that the genome is played in a cell… so if you can get the cell environment to be right, you get stem cells.. thats WAY oversimplefied, but i was explaiing this a few years back to a geneticist i am now working with. he is constantly amazed by my insights way ahead of the curve.

    so these sciecne arguments today, are now seldome about the actual points of the arbumetns. those are the fake fight on the wrong feild where the winner gets the prize..

    the reason is that the real purpose cant be told and so they move this to a false feild and proxy fight.

    so the stem cell fight is about fetus.

    other fights are about stopping progress… the reason being “social justice”, which says that if i invent a cure for cancer today… the society has then incured a huge social justice cost as everyone who needs it dont instantly have it.

    this is a methods to make progress stall bevcause any new invention causes so much disruption to the planned utopia, and is so unfair since everyone doesnt get it its not equal… so its to be avoided.

    there are other parts in which the assault is on genetics so that genetics doesnt show that biology is destiny, after 40 years ago they declared the opposite.

    there is even parts like i was reading a day or two where you have sociali scientists trying to apply relativism and leftist dogma to the hard sciences to disconnect them from impiracism!

    the left doesnt want impiriacist thought… (goldberg went over this in liberal fascism). it would prove that their assertions from ideology were wrong, the ideology is vacant and we would start seeing things as what they are, not how they are labled.

    so planned parenthood would be revealed as the soft eugenics project it ALWAYS was… (12% of population black, 40% of abortions are black. do the math).

    so when you hear people arguing science today, its seldom on the merits of the science itself, and its now almost always about the hidden outcome that is in line with the argument outcome.

    so if they convinced us that bush was kiling science, we would use stem cells from fetus and abortionwould be protected. the abortion arbument is the hidden outcome that is in line with the alternative argument that delivers the same condition but is more acceptable

  6. Artfldgr:
    http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/2008/01/brave-new-britain-permitting.html
    (if you don’t know the site already, I think you’ll like it)

    I am fully aware that they are able to make humans with animal genes, and that there *are* animals with human genes.

    That does not mean that making someone who’s nearly human so that you can classify them as non-persons so as to do human experiments without *technically* having a human any less horrifying.

    You are correct on the source of the hype for fetal stem cells, mostly; I think that the ability to get yet more money from abortion has something to do with it. Given the massive failures, especially compared to adult stem cells, it’s not science-based.

  7. Neo,
    Just recently I was thinking about the treatment of animals in certain situations. My parents have chickens that stay in a pen about 20 feet by ten feet most of the time. 12 adult chickens at present in that pen. They have roost to climb on and a place to nest and lay eggs so they have vertical space as well. In addition to the regular chicken food they get some corn and crushed oyster shells to eat. (For stronger egg shells) In the summer months they get regular helpings of culled tomatoes, squash, etc that are not good enough for the farmers market. Occasionally they are let out to eat grass and grasshoppers, but this had to be cut back when a local carnivour became so brave it began killing chickens in the middle of the day if no humans were near the chickens. ( Probably the elusive bobcat my father and I have both seen- when unarmed- in the daytime near the chicken house.) I am suprised my father has not pronounced a fatawah on the bobcat and waited with loaded gun- he has disgused it. Right now he is too busy raging war on the gophers who plagues these parts- and his newly planted vegetables- from their subterranean abode. In previous years he waged jihad on the crows with his shotgun hanging in its holster on his tractor- just like the old cowboys with their rifles in the horse mounted holster. The holster leather dryrotted and now he is reduced to a hip mounted cellphone for weaponary-such is modern life.
    But back to the chickens. I have heard of chickens being kept in much tighter conditions and smaller than the ones I described above. They call them battery cages and the chickens are cramed in them -wing to wing-without hardly even room to turn around. PETA is right to protests this I believe. I say this as a meat eater who has killed animals while hunting and fishing.
    I know you were talking about research, but things can go to far-either way.
    I agree with you on this one.
    PS. : I am still not voting for John McAmnesty.

  8. J. B.- on chickens in the small cages– there have been studies that show they have the same stress levels as free-range chickens.

    I sounds wildly silly, but…well, they are chickens. We can’t project too much on them, not when we can do actual studies to find out what the facts are, first, instead of using emotional arguments.

  9. “There was something haunting about those photos.”

    You said it Neo, I got heartsick looking at those poor monkeys when I was a kid, and things haven’t changed much. Still, considering where psychology was going, it looks like the appropriate dope slaps got administered to the anti-cuddlers as a result of this work. Well, his early work…

  10. The main problem of psychology/social science is that these disciplines actually belong to philosophy domain, but pretending to be sciences and so attempt to apply scientific method to the fields where it is not really applicable.

  11. Bastard “White Coats” – torturing helpless animals because they can – disgusting that government and uncaring society supports this vile research, which goes on an on and on……at the deadly, agonizing expense of the creatures of our world.

  12. Zena,
    are you saying that animals have faculties like you?

    and you might not realize that vetrinarians will treat pets including pet rats, as well a sother animals… we have meds and treatments for them as a side adjunct to the research you are against.

    in fact prior to that kind of information, we just laid them low.

    living things are chaotic. and i mean that in the mathematical sense, not in the we act crazy sense.

    there is no way to determine the reaction of a system without testing it on a system.

    reality often behaves counterintuitively.

    if you really want to stop the testing, then get out there and lobby for the state to allow humans to sacrifice and become the tests.

    would you step up first? would you truly do the collective thing for animals and mankind and allow the medications that are to be used in cancer therapy? they would first have to give you the cancer, but i am sure you dont mind.

    or will you visit the childrens hospitals and tell the kids with leukemia and other conditions that they are going to die, and there is no hope because you wont let testing be done?

    are you willing to forgoe medical treatment in the future? are you willing to stand up and tell all the women hoping for more progress against breast cancer you shut down shop?

    then you never realize that these animals live very brutal lives on their own, and that literally millions of them are born and supported that would never exist otherwise. most research not being the kind you imagine.

    and if you found you had mice in your house or rats, would you leave food out for them or would you set traps or have someone else do it?

    the more we move away from reality, the more we can make up things that dont fit or work with reality and become harmful.

    without medicine and the kind of research done, we would still have things like small pox. your life expectancy before antibiotics and other nostrums was not much. prior to the modern era the average person lived to 25 or 30… with cleaner water and germ theory (proven with animals) we progressed till we live in a society so clean and so steril of the norms of life that we can detach from life and come up with all kinds of things that stem from thinking about things that in the past we wouldnt have had time to think of.

    today we have enough time to think of things but we dont have enough time to understand them in detail. so we are forced to take a side based on an argument that plays on our ability to relate.

    reality has something utopias dont. and thats no alternatives. reasearchers do try not to hurt animals, they try to be humane. they try to limit the numbers, and they have boards that review and go over the reasons for the research. usually much prior work in vitro has been done, and even on larger cell clusters. but nothing will replace a systemic test in reality.

    either its done on the animals or the products are allowed to be sold without testing and we find out over the first few years of their usage.

    but then you would be yelling at the horrible corporate people that cause misery by not testing their products.

    not alternatives… you cant have it both ways, and the latter way is decidedly less good. it would require people to be tested on, or volunteer for it. hence my question above.

    this is why so many policies on the left are touted as progressive but they are nothing but stagnation or regressive.

    you cant rail wanting the poor and the sick and infirm to be healthier on one side… and have good medical care…

    and then also say we have to stop the process that provides those things. you think medicine is expensive today, but in truth its not. economically speaking these new expensive devices over time become lower in price till tey are ubiquitous. just compare MRI in its first days to today. and the new research brings cheaper better functioning machines.

    much of what is around you is actually a product of medicine, in that extending lives from an average of 25 years to 77 years, allows our average level of intellgence to be a lot higher. it allows experts to work for decades longer doing what they are good at.

    if it werent for the meds, we would die around 25 – 30 on average, and thats it… thanks to them, you can contemplate their end. without them, you wouldnt have had a nice life at all.

  13. Well, I generally try not to get too sentimental about animals but the photo of that monkey is heartbreaking and the idea of a “black isolation chamber” is beyond belief. Truly malevolent.

  14. yeah maguro,

    but lets look at the real outcome. these few monkeys taught us that there is a real biological link between social individuals and that link has to be healthy, and its key to producing healthy functional individuals.

    what many might not realize, and expecially zena, is that after those tests, there came the knowlege that profoundly changed how we treat animals.

    it also quashed the fascist socialist idea of raising kids by the state like farming. because the link between child and presumptive parent is a loop that if not satisified creates sick individuals.

    its not malevolent… what color would you pick for a sensory deprivation experiment? the point was to show that that environment WAS harmful. now we know they are, we can now claim that putting a person into such would result in illness. its part of the arguments against solitary confinment of people. its part of the argument against certain acts because they are known not presumed to be harmful.

    before the work, there was no actual way to know if it mattered. it might not. if the monkey were a lizard, or a chicken, it wouldnt have been malevolent and cruel.

    you and i are part of the history AFTER the knowlege. its part of the reason why we have the idea that this isnt a good thing!!! as mentioned above, this was presented in school, and no one heard the teachers teaching that this should be ignroed.

    without this there would still be an argument as to what constituted sufficient environment, and whether attachment is critical to good health.

    and then there is the fact that there is no alternatives… no way to know other than to find out. if we didnt find out, i think suffering would have been much more as the issue would never be resolved, but be forbidden. and which way it went would have owed more to fashion than fact.

  15. In my life I personally killed thousands of animals in laboratory and got desensitized to this. Most of them were mice, but also some rats, hamsters, rabbits, and what was especially hard for me, guinea pigs. I was lucky that I never had to use cats, dogs or primates in experiments, and I do not know if I have stomach to it. But in some fields of biomedical research such experiments are absolutely inavoidable. No new drug or even cosmetic formula can be tested for safety without it. This is the golden standard in pharmaceutics, and it is impossible to dump it.

  16. Ah, that baby monkey clinging to the cloth surrogate is what I remember from my Psych 101 class over thirty years ago!

    Artfldgr makes many excellent points in his/her posts. But I wonder about the “its part of the arguments against solitary confinment of people” defense for the isolation experiment.

    Was it really necessary to suspend the monkeys upside down for months, years, at a time to learn the effects of “isolation”? What was the purpose of that little twist? To tell us what might happen to a human being hung upside down in total darkness for months/years at a time?

    And I wonder how the scientists evaluated the devastating effects on the monkeys. To what degree were the effects caused by mere isolation? What was the effect of darkness? What was the effect of being suspended upside down for months or years at a time? How could they determine which of those circumstances broke the monkeys?

    How DID they separate those various “causes” and their “effects”?

  17. I read a footnote about Harlow and then I googled him. A week ago. Now I have no time for PETA loonies; I believe it’s increadibly frivolous to compare anything done to an animal to any aspect of the holocaust. I’m not an hysteric. If an animal needs to be infected with a disease to test out a potential cure – treated as humanley as possible – so be it. But I can’t shake this. This godawful lab was a private, university funded torture chamber for this evil, wretched sadist. Imagine him, every day for two years, going about his life – bonding with the kids, drinking too much, getting a good night’s sleep, accepting rewards and applause, grading papers, whatever he did – knowing every damn day that some utterly helpless, sentient creature was being broken beyond hope or repair in nearly unending incomprehension and misery. Two years! And over and over again. Why use one monkey when you can use dozens? These pontifications about how it never occurred to anybody that animals could feel anything before the 1950s. This is flatly not true, it’s a joke. Just because B.F. Skinner – another headcase – asserted it doesn’t make it recieved wisdom. And hell, if it ever had been recieved wisdom, Harlow wasn’t taken in by it. So refreshingly free of euphamism, wasn’t he? “Well of Despair”! “Rape Rack”! Ethics 101 covers this; an animal cannot be raped because it cannot give or withhold consent (an animal can be tortured). But Harlow liked the idea of a “Rape Rack”. He called his contaption a “Rape Rack” rather than, say, a “Restraint Device” because it gave him a kick to get away with this sh*t in broad daylight. Has anyone hear seen “American Psycho”? “I’m into murders and executions” the protagonist loudly informs everyone (nobody listens). These hateful experiments (which weren’t very likely to cure cancer), and especially this lovely “Well of Despair” perversion, are predicated on the assumption that a rhesus monkey responds to torture as a human would, that it has comparable faculties.
    Okay. I’m not given to rants and I’m done this one. I’m sorry if I took up too much space. Piss on Harlow. I hope he can’t sue me for calling him names from beyond the grave. He seems like the type.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>