In the late 1950s Dr. Harry Harlow conducted a vast number of different experiments basically exposing monkeys to extreme stress in various forms and noted the results. Later, he attempted to remediate any unhealthy outcomes and/or dissected the animal's brains.
One of his more often cited observations is that an infant needs to be touched and held to thrive.
When the details about Harlow's experiments drifted into the non-academic community it became one of the catalyst prompting the Animal's Rights Movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow
The former student (Stephen Suomi) that helped develop the 'Pit of Despair' has recently sought to continue Harlow's work in hopes of finding information helpful to the treatment of human mental disorders, and this has spurred aggressive push-back by PETA and other researchers.Harlow was well known for refusing to use conventional terminology, and instead chose deliberately outrageous terms for the experimental apparatus he devised. The tendency arose from an early conflict with the conventional psychological establishment in which Harlow used the term "love" in place of the popular and archaically correct term, "attachment." Such terms and respective devices included a forced-mating device he called the "rape rack," tormenting surrogate mother devices he called "Iron maidens," and an isolation chamber he called the "pit of despair" developed by him and a graduate student, Stephen Suomi, now director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Comparative Ethology Laboratory, at the National Institutes of Health.
In the last of these devices, alternatively called the "well of despair," baby monkeys were left alone in darkness for up to one year from birth, or repetitively separated from their peers and isolated in the chamber. These procedures quickly produced monkeys that were severely psychologically disturbed and used as models of human depression.[21]
Harlow tried to rehabilitate monkeys that had been subjected to varying degrees of isolation using various forms of therapy. "In our study of psychopathology, we began as sadists trying to produce abnormality. Today we are psychiatrists trying to achieve normality and equanimity." (p. 458)[22]
As a result of its investigation, PETA is accusing the researchers of causing the baby monkeys undue harm, amounting to what it calls "child abuse."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mental-h...eral-nih-labs/
http://wisconsinwatch.org/2014/07/un...onkey-studies/"The one thing that we have learned from these experiments from the NIH is that monkeys are like us in ways that matter," Justin Goodman, director of PETA's laboratory investigations department, told CBS News. "They need the love and comfort of their mothers when they're young, they need the companionship of the families and peers. When they're deprived of that they are devastated emotionally and physically."
In an email to CBS News, one of the lead researchers, Stephen J. Suomi at the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD), disputed the accusation of abuse, insisting that the studies "are conducted with the highest ethical standards at specialized centers that employ professional staff and highly skilled caretakers to ensure humane care of these animals, and are in strict accordance with animal welfare regulations and accreditations."
In addition to Suomi's lab, the experiments in question were also conducted at the National Institute of Mental Health under the late Dr. James Winslow; principal investigator Bruno Averbeck took over after Winslow's death and was not involved at the time, the NIH said.
Goodman said PETA believes the experiments are not only cruel, they're also unnecessary because similar issues have already been studied in human populations or could be more effectively studied in other ways. Additionally, PETA says findings about mental health and mental illness in monkeys are not necessarily relevant to human brains, and none of the research being conducted has resulted in better or new treatments for human mental illnesses. Goodman said he believes these studies are "completely unjustifiable and scientifically they are absolutely fraudulent."
Some independent scientists who reviewed the studies at PETA's request echoed those concerns. "I can no longer see a potential benefit from such experimentation," Agustin Fuentes, Ph.D., Chair of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, told the group. "It is my assessment that the monkeys used in these experiments experience substantial psychological (and likely physiological) harm and that there is no current evidence that there will be any results from the studies that move our understanding of human psychopathology forward."
Suomi, however, maintains this research could prove to have great value for humans. "NIH supports studies involving monkeys to supplement the developmental studies of human beings," Suomi told CBS News. "The same behavioral, neurological and health changes seen in nursery-reared monkeys are seen in children who were orphaned from their mothers, or raised by depressed, abusive, or neglectful mothers. These findings assist researchers in identifying humans most likely to suffer negative effects in at-risk situations and develop behavioral and drug therapies to improve negative outcomes early in development."
I normally have few qualms about animal research for the benefit of humanity, but I would really like to see some sort of probability as to what benefit they hope/expect to derive from these studies.In his 21 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s veterinary school, Eric Sandgren has seen a lot of controversies. But the UW’s most prominent defender of animal research has never seen anything like this.
Sandgren says a typical research project protocol receives around four person-hours of scrutiny from an oversight committee; he estimates this one got more than 170.
“It is the protocol that’s received the most attention since I’ve been here,” says Sandgren, director of the university’s Research Animal Resources Center. “The most intense I’ve been a part of.”
Sandgren is referring to the first experiment at UW-Madison in more than 30 years that will intentionally deprive newborn monkeys of their mothers, a practice designed to impact a primate’s psychological well-being.
The research, submitted by UW-Madison Psychiatry Department chairman Dr. Ned Kalin, has drawn unusual scrutiny and dissent from within the university and intensified a debate about the extent to which benefits to humans justify the suffering of animals.
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Originally Posted by Limey
I think they're a bunch of hypocritical cunts too!
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