"Much of Harlow's scientific career was spent studying maternal bonding, what he described as the "nature of love"."
Apparently he was not very successful with his research - did he try to research that because he had no feelings to begin with?
Probably horrors like that and worse happen every day in a lot of research institutions. Some of the research is probably important and interesting. Still I have a hard time imagining how anybody can come up with and conduct such experiments.
In 1971, Harlow's wife died of cancer and he began to suffer from depression. He submitted to electro-shock treatment and returned to work but, as Lauren Slater writes, his colleagues noticed a difference in his demeanor. [6] He abandoned his research into maternal attachment and developed an interest in isolation and depression.
His wife died, he got depressed and switched to the unpleasant experiments described in the article.
Wow. Yes, it seems like an awful lot of psychologists are in the field because they're trying to understand their own problems. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should never date a psychology student.
Yeah I was reading about those. But if you look at that, there's clearly some point to his previous experiments (studying maternal attachment) whereas it's incredibly hard to see the value in the "pit of despair" stuff he switched to after his wife died.
His experiments on maternal bonding were already disturbing. Fake mechanical mothers that tormented their babies with spikes and blasts of cold air? Yikes. The man had issues.
"With the pit of despair, he placed monkeys between three months and three years old in the chamber alone, after they had bonded with their mothers, for up to ten weeks. Within a few days, they had stopped moving about and remained huddled in a corner. The monkeys were found to be psychotic when removed, and most did not recover."
Voting you up because I see your point, but the problem is that without ethics committees you get cases like these slipping through.
When the public hears about these cases it serves as a rallying cry for the animal rights movement and makes it harder for everyone doing animal research, even those who aren't torturing monkeys because they're emotionally disturbed.
Immediately quotations from Spiderman ("With great power comes great responsiblity") and Jurassic Park ("Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.") come to mind.
Human progress without ethics and compassion is no progress at all.
Luckily for you, many PIs in the research field agree with you and have lax morals when it comes to torturing innocent defenseless animals. Compliance is a joke and doing whatever the hell you want to whatever creature you want (humans included, mind you) is as easy as checking a box on a piece of paper that nobody reads.
Our species is a virus, and we do whatever we can to protect our own kind until there is nothing else left.
So is the internet a new age "pit of despair"? Is there enough social interaction for children these days or do they replace it with WOW and other "almost" social situations?
Actually the point was that lack of direct social contact leads to depression. Interacting with people though a digital interface also probably leads to a similar, albeit not drastic, of an effect.
Personally, even though I have access to more people and more information over the net, I am less social and that does have an effect on my mood. I have to make an effort to spend face-to-face time with family and friends to become "normal" again. (By "normal" here I just mean "not depressed"). Digital interface just doesn't cut it, there is some physical aspect to the interaction that cannot be transmitted even through a video conference. Anyway, I don't have anything to support this, just a personal opinion.
No, you were making a point but you phrased it as a question, which is annoying. That added together with the inanity of said point (my opinion, but probably one I share with others) caused one person (not me) to mod you down.
I guess I was making an unintentional point, but mainly I was trying to ask others their opinions. I don't play alot of online games or use facebook but my wife and others around me are always online and they are taking up alot of the time that they could be actually socializing by looking at pictures on facebook of someone who they went to high school with that they haven't talked to in 10 years, and even then they weren't friends.
This reminds me of a bit of painful personal history.
When moving back from Canada to the Netherlands we took our dogs that we had acquired while in Canada back with us. Sarah, a three year old Irish wolfhound and Lisa, a 2 year old labrador / husky mix.
They went by plane, in crates specifically designed for the purpose.
On arrival the wolfhound had completely lost it, didn't recognize any of us and was totally out of it for at least two weeks, after which she slowly recovered. That was just 8 hours in a crate, not even close to the 'pit of despair' shown in the article, and anybody that willfully places an animal in such conditions just to see what damage will occur ought to be shot.
If I had had any idea something like that could have happened I would have gladly taken a boat with her, no matter how much longer that would have taken. It was incredibly sad to see her in that state, eventually she completely recovered though.
The other dog didn't show anything strange at all and took the whole thing in stride.
Not to sound pedantic but you do realize that those two qualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive in people right?
If we condone such cruelty to other living beings in the name of scientific curiosity, there is no limit to it. It's not ok to go around torturing others because one is 'scientifically curious'.
Our society is built on the backs of the less fortunate. We live in a country we've taken from weaker humans, we feed animals in factories until we're ready to kill them because it's cheaper than treating them humanely. We get our energy from coal mines where hundreds of thousands of workers have died and we stand by as genocides and famines wipe out entire regions. We buy products made by children who work all day every day in factories.
Given the circumstances, cruel experiments on animals (or even humans) to speed up scientific progress (and therefore welfare) looks like a really good deal to me.
Torturing monkeys to prove points about depression?
Depression sucks, and the worst versions of it could certainly be compared to torture in terms of the misery inflicted on the suffer, but I find it questionable that one could link externally-inflicted torture and depression in such a way that these experiments would have any value.
This ... words fail me. I'm not against reasonable experimentation in animals (for drug research and related) but this seems just like some sick psycho's idea of research. The article says the experiments were controversial but check out Harlow's biography, he got two awards after conducting these experiments. My view of psychiatry (clueless people trying random drugs to cure things they don't fully understand) has sunk to a new low. To me this is no different than Mengele's experiments. Do we take pity on him because he was depressed.
Jeez, this article ruined a perfectly good morning for me.
It really sounds like Harry Harlow was a sociopath (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy). I know a handful of academic science-types (some of which do experiments with animals) and I can't imagine any of them condoning so cruel a study. Ugh.
That is unbelievable. The scientist in question exhibited a profound lack of empathy; he probably would have been an interesting subject for experimentation himself.
I have long held that the worst way to die (IMO) would be to fall down a tube of gradually decreasing width, head first of course. It's appalling that someone actually did this to animals.
Why didn't he just setup experiments where he forced monkeys through a fine mesh screen to prove that their psychological disposition is less than satisfactory when their physical state is reduced to a puddle of goo. Lots of great science to unearth there.
The interesting thing for me was the effects, not the ethics of the research itself. It is interesting that the torturous aspects of this were primarily mental not physical and still disgust people. Contrast with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnecessary_Fuss (linked from that article) and you'll get what I consider a true idea of torture. That is not to say there aren't ethical concerns etc., but most of the horrible actions were committed by the monkeys themselves and were presumably unexpected, in contrast with something like in Unnecessary Fuss where there was intentional infliction of harm.
Unlike other commenters I actually do see some useful results from this study. At what cost though? I can understand the argument for animal testing but something seems just that little extra bit off; when you're trying to study depression you end up having to inflict emotional pain, which is as literally torture as you can get. I've seen enough of the Internet not to be shocked often but this managed.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 75.5 ms ] threadhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z05StkAKKF0
Apparently he was not very successful with his research - did he try to research that because he had no feelings to begin with?
Probably horrors like that and worse happen every day in a lot of research institutions. Some of the research is probably important and interesting. Still I have a hard time imagining how anybody can come up with and conduct such experiments.
In 1971, Harlow's wife died of cancer and he began to suffer from depression. He submitted to electro-shock treatment and returned to work but, as Lauren Slater writes, his colleagues noticed a difference in his demeanor. [6] He abandoned his research into maternal attachment and developed an interest in isolation and depression.
His wife died, he got depressed and switched to the unpleasant experiments described in the article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Surrogate_mother_e...
"With the pit of despair, he placed monkeys between three months and three years old in the chamber alone, after they had bonded with their mothers, for up to ten weeks. Within a few days, they had stopped moving about and remained huddled in a corner. The monkeys were found to be psychotic when removed, and most did not recover."
When the public hears about these cases it serves as a rallying cry for the animal rights movement and makes it harder for everyone doing animal research, even those who aren't torturing monkeys because they're emotionally disturbed.
Human progress without ethics and compassion is no progress at all.
Our species is a virus, and we do whatever we can to protect our own kind until there is nothing else left.
"...The United States withdrew from compulsory jurisdiction in 1986, and so accepts the court's jurisdiction only on a case-to-case basis."
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justice second paragraph).
Personally, even though I have access to more people and more information over the net, I am less social and that does have an effect on my mood. I have to make an effort to spend face-to-face time with family and friends to become "normal" again. (By "normal" here I just mean "not depressed"). Digital interface just doesn't cut it, there is some physical aspect to the interaction that cannot be transmitted even through a video conference. Anyway, I don't have anything to support this, just a personal opinion.
When moving back from Canada to the Netherlands we took our dogs that we had acquired while in Canada back with us. Sarah, a three year old Irish wolfhound and Lisa, a 2 year old labrador / husky mix.
They went by plane, in crates specifically designed for the purpose.
On arrival the wolfhound had completely lost it, didn't recognize any of us and was totally out of it for at least two weeks, after which she slowly recovered. That was just 8 hours in a crate, not even close to the 'pit of despair' shown in the article, and anybody that willfully places an animal in such conditions just to see what damage will occur ought to be shot.
If I had had any idea something like that could have happened I would have gladly taken a boat with her, no matter how much longer that would have taken. It was incredibly sad to see her in that state, eventually she completely recovered though.
The other dog didn't show anything strange at all and took the whole thing in stride.
Are you talking about sadism or scientific curiosity? I detest the former but I'm comfortable with the latter.
Given the circumstances, cruel experiments on animals (or even humans) to speed up scientific progress (and therefore welfare) looks like a really good deal to me.
Victims of science are just another statistic.
Depression sucks, and the worst versions of it could certainly be compared to torture in terms of the misery inflicted on the suffer, but I find it questionable that one could link externally-inflicted torture and depression in such a way that these experiments would have any value.
Jeez, this article ruined a perfectly good morning for me.
Why didn't he just setup experiments where he forced monkeys through a fine mesh screen to prove that their psychological disposition is less than satisfactory when their physical state is reduced to a puddle of goo. Lots of great science to unearth there.
Of course, like mice, perhaps he just hated monkeys for the sake of it: http://www.theonion.com/articles/worlds-scientists-admit-the...