Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

by Deborah Blum

  In her exploration of the psychology and science of parenting, Mother Nature, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy makes one reference to Harry’s work. She describes it simply as “bizarre.” The recent A General Theory of Love argues, as Harry did, that love in childhood shapes our brains—and therefore our futures. In outlining their theory, California psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon acknowledge the power and importance of the Harlow experiments. They also acknowledge them as destined for “perpetual notoriety.”

  Robert Sapolsky, the primate researcher known for his explorations of behavior and social connection, expresses the paradox in his 1994 book on the biology of stress, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: “These were brutal studies,” he wrote of the Wisconsin experiments. The legacy of the research still resonates with tension. Animal activists ask why Harry’s research was necessary. Or, as Sapolsky paraphrased their question, “Why torture baby monkeys to prove the obvious?”

  The first answer is that the importance of love and connection wasn’t obvious at the time. When Harry first began investigating the idea that babies need to be touched, he was going directly against the standard teaching of his time. The mainstream position was that babies get nothing from touch and everything from the hands that feed them. Yes, evidence from orphanages and foundling homes and hospitals suggested that these ideas were wrong. But scientists who based their arguments on those human examples, such as Bowlby and Spitz, were frequently dismissed as lacking valid data. When Harry Harlow began his mother love studies, it was as if psychology was poised to wake up into a world where intimate relationships mattered. To push the field forward, some hardheaded data was needed.

  “It was a set of ideas just waiting for confirmation,” says Bob Zimmermann, who worked with Harry Harlow on the first cloth-mother experiments. “The results of the project implied that mother love was critical for normal development. Of course, Freud said that, but in a different sense. Now the mother love did not have a sexual connotation.” And, Zimmermann points out, outside the psychology community, the Wisconsin experiments dovetailed beautifully into real experience and basic common sense. “My daughter, who is a nurse, made a good remark when we were talking about the surrogate project. She said that probably every nurse who worked in a preemie unit was nodding their heads when they read about Harry’s work, and saying ‘See, I told you so, cuddling and rocking pays off.’”

  Zimmermann believes that “the surrogate project opened up areas of research in human development that normally would not have been funded in the 1960s and 1970s. What government group would have approved a grant to test whether the cuddling, stroking, and rocking of premature infants would enhance their development?” In the insular world of psychology, it did take the animal research and the neatly designed experiments, the graphs and the charts, and the coolly ordered data, to turn the argument. The answers we call obvious today seem so, in real measure, because Harry Harlow conducted exactly those studies that some people now condemn.

  Sapolsky acknowledges the power of the lessons from the Wisconsin laboratory under Harry Harlow. And yet, and still, he confesses to being dismayed by the later, grimmer studies: “To animal rights activists who would ban all animal experimentation, I unapologetically say that I am in favor of the use of animals in research and that much good has come of this particular type of research. To the scientist who would deny the brutality of some types of animal research, I unapologetically say things can go too far.”

  Harry’s acidic public persona adds a particularly sharp edge to this discussion. If scientists perform such ethically troubling work, we like them to behave as if they were ethically troubled. We’ll forgive them some of the hurt if they acknowledge it. We’ll soften our accusations toward those who appear to see our point. Harry didn’t do any of that. Perhaps he didn’t see the need—or perhaps he didn’t see the issue, either. He had, of course, that tin ear for political change. That was obvious in the ways he baited feminists. As the animal rights movement took shape toward the end of his career, he baited those activists, too—without a thought to the consequences. The following is from a newspaper interview with Professor Harry Harlow:

  “I certainly don’t like monkeys. Sure I’ve known a few who were very adept at tests. Sure, I kinda liked them, more or less. But, by and large, I just have no feeling for them—at all. I spent a summer taming monkeys, eight in large cages. I would go out and sit beside them. This is where I learned about monkeys. I got to the point where they were not afraid of me.” There was one female monkey, Harry recalled, who escaped into the runway connecting the outdoor cages with those inside and refused to budge. “So finally I did one of the most incredibly stupid things. I smacked her right across the face. Now, if she hadn’t been a friend of mine, she would have bitten me all to hell. Instead, she smacked me right back—the last time I was smacked by a woman.”

  The above quote, with all its attitude and humor and love of storytelling, is from an October 1973 story in the old Milwaukee Journal honoring Harry’s retirement from Wisconsin. The writer, Robert Bonin, is obviously entertained. He notes his subject’s love of tweaking the politically correct. He describes Professor Harlow as a “likeably charming pseudo-curmudgeon.” It’s difficult to like monkeys, Harry tells Bonin, because monkeys don’t like humans. “In all honesty, I should perhaps say that I like monkeys because they’ve certainly done more for me than I have for them.”

  And Harry Harlow was equally frank in his scientific publications. Animal researchers have always tended to smooth over their experiments, use jargon to describe their work in more indirect ways. Instead of writing that the research animals were killed, they’ll write that the experiment was “terminated.” Sometimes they avoid using word “animal” at all. They’ll just call it a “subject.” No one ever could have accused Harry of such gentle misdirection, or of using scientific terminology to buffer what he did. If an animal died, he said so. If an animal suffered, he said so. One of his later papers was titled, bluntly, “Induction of Psychological Death in Monkeys.” He used the term “rape rack.” He used the term “vertical chamber,” but he made sure that everyone knew it was also a “pit of despair.” He wrote of evil mothers and monster mothers and brass-spike mothers, even though the latter were equipped with bumps rather than spikes. He wanted people to notice what he did—in all the dimensions. Sackett recalled arguing with his professor over the terminology: “I begged him not to do that. I said, ‘Maybe we should make this work sound a little less depressing.’ And Harry replied, ‘You know, I like to grab people’s attention.’”

  Former colleagues, among them Bill Mason, found themselves reading his papers with dismay. “He would write about his experiments as if he did them with glee,” Mason says. “It made my flesh creep.” Sapolsky wrote that the isolation studies were among the most troubling and haunting in the history of science and that Harry’s descriptions made them seem even more so: “Harlow’s scientific writing displayed a striking callousness to the suffering of these animals.” As you might imagine, scientists weren’t the only ones to recognize those qualities in the publications from the Harlow laboratory.

  Five years after Harry’s death, in 1986, biologist Martin Stephens, now a vice president of the Humane Society of the United States, published a ninety-five-page report devoted to the evils of maternal deprivation research. It’s worth noting that instead of calling it “The Nature of Love,” as Harry did his best-known talk on surrogate mothers, Stephens devoted much space to “The Nature and Extent of Suffering.” Stephens gives Harry Harlow full credit for attracting his attention: “In a way, because of his eccentricity, Harlow invited criticism and attention. More than any other psychologist, he was responsible for psychology being singled out for attention and focus by animal protection groups.”

  This can seem wildly unfair to psychologists when, undeniably, their colleagues in other disciplines were far more brutal. Seymour Levine sometimes marvels that Harry’s work drew so much attent
ion from activists when many uglier experiments occurred during the same time. In 1957, when the Wisconsin lab was carefully comparing cloth and wire mothers, one notable rat experiment involved dropping unanaesthetized animals into boiling water to measure blood changes in response to shock and pain. Cats were used to study muscle atrophy. Their hind legs were pinned for more than three months until the tissue withered. In military research, dogs were blasted with radiation until, as the researchers noted, their skin crisped. Monkeys were shot in the head to measure rifle bullet impact, or in the stomach to study blunt abdominal trauma. “So was it Harry’s work or did he just provide a good controversial target?” Levine wonders.

  Until late in Harry’s career, animal activists were remarkably respectful of research priorities. They accepted, as did many American citizens, that scientists simply knew best. They might complain, they might write outraged letters, they might lobby the government on behalf of animals. But they were polite about it. In the 1950s, the American Humane Society even supported laws requiring animal shelters to turn their animals over to research labs. (This apparently was a little too respectful; dissident members pulled out and formed the less compliant Humane Society of the United States and the Washington D.C.–based Animal Welfare Institute [AWI].)

  Christine Stevens, founder of AWI, doesn’t recall scientists’ being at all respectful in return. Dismissive, contemptuous, hostile would be more accurate. Stevens particularly remembers receiving a letter from a national scientific organization calling her a “social pervert.” She responded by politely lobbying harder for a new animal welfare act, one that would for the first time include lab animals. The law passed in 1966, with one particularly significant provision. Medical researchers had been so outspoken in opposing protection for lab animals that even members of Congress began to mistrust them. The National Institutes of Health was not given responsibility for inspecting the laboratories it funded; the law instead created an inspection division at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

  In the next decade, though, it became obvious that lab animal care was not being overhauled. The USDA didn’t really want to hassle researchers over a few unhappy cats and rats. Even after the law passed, Stevens was able to put together a list of lab cruelties that included starving dogs and injured cats left untreated. Many scientists of the time acknowledge that they felt no pressure to improve animal care in their laboratories. “There was just so little respect for the [animal] welfare movement in the U.S. that it offered little or no check on the moral resources of the researcher,” says Harry’s former graduate student, John Gluck, now a bioethicist.

  In 1981, coincidentally the year that Harry died, activists ran out of patience. That year, a university student named Alex Pacheco went undercover in a monkey lab in Silver Spring, Maryland. Pacheco and a friend, Ingrid Newkirk, had just started an advocacy group so small that it almost seemed a club. It had twenty members. They named their group PETA, People for Ethical Treatment of Animals. A polite name for a group convinced that politeness accomplished nothing.

  Pacheco had picked his target carefully. He chose a well-known primate researcher named Edward Taub. In Taub’s lab, scientists were studying injuries to the nervous system. To do so, they surgically mimicked such damage. In a typical operation, Taub and colleagues would open a monkey’s spinal cord and slice sensory nerve connections to numb the animal’s arms and legs. Taub’s ultimate goal was recovery. He was trying to find out whether an animal could lose all sensation in a limb and regain function anyway. If so, perhaps, medical procedures could be found to help people in similar distress, such as paralyzed accident victims.

  In management style, the lab was nothing like Harry Harlow’s system. At Wisconsin, Harry—following years of monkey hoarding—had been obsessive about maintaining the physical health of his animals. The cages were cleaned and everything in them was cleaned regularly, too, even the surrogate mothers. The animals were still given vitamins, shots, and fresh fruit. After learning so much about isolation, he and his graduate students had opted for contact comfort. They tried to house at least two monkeys in each cage.

  Taub caged each monkey separately—partly to reduce potential injuries. As a result, the macaques showed all the classic isolation behaviors. They paced, rocked, clasped themselves, and—introducing injury anyway—chewed on themselves. And because their limbs were numb, the monkeys couldn’t tell when they tore through their own skin. They became marked by bleeding sores. Further, there was no nonsense about cleanliness and fresh fruit. Even the USDA inspection reports agree that the Maryland lab was filthy. Cockroaches scrambled through the cages. (One scientific supporter of Taub argued that the insects provided the monkeys with protein.)

  Pacheco photographed the animals in secret, gathered testimony from sympathetic lab workers, and reported Taub to the Montgomery County police. PETA also made sure that every newspaper and television station in the area had copies of those damning photos. As it turned out, the timing was perfect. The general public no longer trusted scientists quite so much. Readers and viewers of the news agreed that the lab was practicing animal abuse at taxpayer expense. In the outcry, the county brought animal cruelty charges against the scientist and the university.

  During the court process, Taub lost his monkeys, his grant, and eventually the lab itself. Pacheco’s strategy had worked. It was clear to animal activists that if they waited for the government to help, for scientists to care about their animals, they could easily wait until Hell chilled down. The sluggish official response and the active indifference of the scientific community had convinced the people at PETA—and other organizations—that to save animals they needed to fight dirty and fight now.

  As they did. Labs were broken into. Animals were let lose. Files were destroyed, death threats made, fake bombs delivered, buildings splashed with blood, private homes picketed. Harry was long buried in Tucson, by then, but his students were all too alive and all too visible. Bill Mason was burned in effigy in front of the UC-Davis primate center. Jim Sackett’s house was spattered with rotting vegetables, ashes, and the bodies of dead rats. That type of anger hasn’t diminished over the passing years, either. In the spring of 2000, protestors marched to Sackett’s home in the middle of the night and kicked his front door open, apparently just to prove to him that they could. Gig Levine was bombarded with hate mail; one letter threatened death for himself and his family, concluding, “You and your sadistic father figure Harlow are as sick and unethical and bloodthirsty as anyone convicted in the Nuremberg trials.”

  The fury over Harry’s work started after his death. Sometimes, it seemed as if he had calculated that perfectly. “It’s as if he sat down and said, ‘I’m not going to be around in another ten years. What I’d like to do then is leave a great big mess behind,’” Bill Mason says. Sometimes it seems timed to a different agenda, that animal activists knew they could do a better job of picking on a dead man. It’s too bad, says Steve Suomi, because Harry would have loved the fight: “He was a person who was used to being controversial and he would have taken them to the cleaners.” Irwin Bernstein makes the same point. “Harry was targeted after his death. I’ve always thought of that as cowardice. He could have defended himself more than adequately in life.”

  Further, Bernstein says, animal activists purposely exaggerate Harry’s sins—they also describe brass-spike mother as having barbed points when she had only blunt knobs. Critics make it sound as if Harry had put every monkey in his lab into isolation, when it was only a carefully small number. Animal rights organizations give no credit to how seriously he took the welfare of his own animals. Duane Rumbaugh recalls that Harry thought the NIH cage-size requirements for adult monkeys were too small and built cages larger than required by the federal government.

  Steve Suomi points out: “At the time that Harry was doing his mother love studies, the standard for housing primates in captivity, be it in labs or zoos, was individual housing, in other words, partial social isolati
on, until Harry showed how devastating it really was. And it took a long time in some places—actually, most of NIH prior to my move there—before those standards were changed, usually over the strong protests of the veterinarians responsible for taking care of the captive monkeys and apes.”

  Harry’s experiments—and his vivid descriptions of them—may have invited his critics to take on what he did. Still, there’s no doubt that some of their complaints are built on revisionist history. We may wish that the researchers of the mid-twentieth century shared our social consciousness. But the ethical questions that we raise about Harry Harlow’s research designs are ethical questions that occurred later. For much of his career—barring the last isolation and depression studies—Harry was squarely in the mainstream of how scientists regarded research animals.

  It’s worth considering the exceptions, perhaps because it’s too easy to gloss over moral issues by simply consigning them to history. The extremes of the Harlow lab did trouble people, even at the time. Psychology professor Kim Wallen, at Emory University, was a graduate student at Wisconsin in Harry’s final years. Although Wallen didn’t study under Harlow, he recalls the rippling sense of unease that the later work produced. “The view among other researchers was that you didn’t need to put a monkey in a pit of despair to socially damage him. And yet as long as NIH funded the research, there was very little you could do. And maybe more than that, I don’t think the ethical issues were generally raised or seen as a general concern in the 1970s. That just wasn’t the case.”