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

by Deborah Blum

  Gary Griffin, now in administration at Waterloo University, was working on his master’s degree in psychology in Harlow’s lab at about the time the most severe isolation studies started. As he recalls, Harlow suggested that Griffin take on some of this work for his thesis. And he did. “We isolated the monkeys for three months, then looked to see how they’d developed socially, then we did six months of isolation.” Why six months? “Just seemed like a natural check point.” The results were horrific; animals stumbling blindly around their cages, rocking themselves, chewing their skin open. Griffin began to hate what he was doing. “We achieved real devastation. They were difficult, painful studies for the monkeys and the people. Imagine any animal that you know a lot about, a cat or a dog, putting it in a cage for three months and allowing it no contact with anything. They survive but it isn’t pleasant.” Griffin was troubled by a system that condoned such experiments: “I mumbled to Harry about the system but he made it clear that he wasn’t interested.” Griffin continues to believe that Harry’s work was important and that animal research is important and should continue. “But I personally don’t want to do the work. There’s value in the experiments, I don’t regret being involved, but I’ve decided it’s not for me.”

  John Gluck, more than any of Harry’s students, has tried to explore the ethical dilemmas raised by the specters of Harry’s final experiments. “Harlow’s colleagues, me included, never challenged him on the ethics points,” Gluck says, flatly and with regret. “The strengths of our spines were not sufficient to carry the weight of our professional goals and our conscience.” Harry was not the kind of professor to encourage such discussion; Griffin wasn’t the only student, either, who was discouraged. Gluck doesn’t hold his old professor responsible for that environment: “I am just saying that access to the moral resources, like empathy, comes from a community that sustains this kind of reflection. Harry neither created that type of community, nor did one emerge in the laboratory.”

  “No one said stop,” says Marc Bekoff. “But Harry Harlow was very famous and you don’t tell famous people to stop.”

  Marc Bekoff is a professor of population biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He’s also a scientist with a passionate belief that research must be moral and ethical in its treatment of research subjects, human and nonhuman. He works with the famed primate researcher Jane Goodall, trying to teach primate conservation. They co-founded Ethologists for Ethical Treatment of Animals (EETA), making the point that it isn’t only outside activists who think that animal welfare counts. Goodall and Bekoff are writing a book together; they’re also making other scientists really angry.

  Or at least, that’s the impression Bekoff gets from the researchers who walk up to him at meetings and scold him. “They should feel good that it’s people like me and Jane criticizing them. We’re not against research. We ask questions, we try to not let people hide behind the veil of science,” Bekoff says.

  He and Goodall were recently at an animal behavior meeting where she infuriated researchers by using the word “prison” for “cage.”

  Bekoff’s voice has a shrug to it; well, he says, cages are prisons. And “we’re all accountable for what we do.” He’s recently been writing angry editorials about a colleague who takes baby rats away from their mothers to test their stress response. The studies are, in fact, much like those conducted by Michael Meaney and Robert Sapolsky. “What bothers me almost more than Harry’s first experiments is that they keep getting done all over again,” Bekoff says.

  Bekoff lectures on Harry Frederick Harlow in his classes, but in a way that would undoubtedly startle the subject. He doesn’t teach mother love or the magic of a hug. Bekoff asks his students whether the community of science should have allowed Harry’s surrogate work to be done. And if you conclude that Harlow should never have done that work—never have taken baby monkeys from their mothers, caged them with air-blast mom, dropped them into vertical chambers—then, Bekoff says, the question of why such work continues becomes even more of an ethical dilemma.

  “I find that Harry Harlow himself is not the major problem,” Bekoff adds. The work is over, it’s done, you can’t get the monkeys back. “But social deprivation falls into a category of work that should never be done again, with all respect to Harry Harlow, and even though he did not make a mistake in his own eyes, we do not need to keep repeating this.”

  Martin Stephens found that isolation work peaked between 1965 and 1972. In those seven years, more than one hundred studies isolating lab animals—not just monkeys but dogs and cats—were reported. The Harlow lab conducted nine of the studies cited by Stephens, which made it hard to argue that Harry was solely responsible for the whole world of mother-child separation experiments. Harry’s real sin, in Bekoff’s eyes, is that he gave the experiments a kind of power and legitimacy that keeps them going today. “I could spend my life damning Harry Harlow, but where would that get me?” Bekoff asks. “I’m looking for institutional change, proactive change, and right now what I see is that he’s a consciousness-raising tool.”

  The problem, Duane Rumbaugh says, is that animal activists have tunnel vision about the ethical issues raised by Harry’s work. Yes, it’s important to ask whether the work should have been done. But there’s another set of ethical dilemmas that rise out of Harry’s work, dilemmas that are equally important, equally troubling. And in Rumbaugh’s opinion, these other issues aren’t getting the attention they deserve. Monkeys are smart animals, really smart. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, Harry’s work with the Wisconsin General Test Apparatus (WGTA) demonstrated that as emphatically as his cloth-mother studies would later make the connection between touch and love. And studies of primate intelligence have also gone far beyond the WGTA results. Rumbaugh himself has been instrumental in doing those studies across a range of species. He pioneered studies showing that chimpanzees could master the symbolic aspects of human language. He’s shown that rhesus macaques can do simple math problems, play computer games—and even outscore their human trainers in shooting down digital targets on a screen. “The classic WGTA underestimates the rhesus by a 1,000 percent,” Rumbaugh declares. “I’m really sorry that Harry wasn’t alive when we made those discoveries. He would have been ecstatic.”

  But, Rumbaugh adds, our own society is still coming to terms with the bigger ethical questions raised by such discoveries. Should we conduct research on animals who are so smart, so socially complex, so closely related? In the primate family tree, rhesus macaques sit an uncomfortably narrow genetic distance from humans. Scientists estimate they share about 92 percent of our genes, and you can argue that their sometimes astonishingly human-like capabilities—from curiosity to game playing, from mothering to friendship—may reflect that linkage. Shouldn’t we then question the morality of caging and experimenting on our kin? It’s easy to judge Harry in hindsight, Rumbaugh says, and it will be easy for others to judge us in the same way. “Harry was a captive of his times, as are we,” he says. “We, too, will be looked upon by future generations of scientists as less than sophisticated, less than human, less than sanguine. And they will be right. Of course, the generations that follow will hold the same of them.”

  By this reckoning, you could also argue that Harry Harlow’s work helped build the platform on which animal rightists now take their stance. He greatly added to our appreciation of the intelligence and the social complexity of other primates. His studies, directly and indirectly, helped create that sensitive social consciousness that we value today. Rumbaugh doesn’t bother to deny Bekoff’s complaint that science can seem to repeat itself endlessly. It does repeat, sometimes for no good reason and sometimes for the best of reasons. Repeating an experiment, confirming a finding and improving on it, is a fundamental part of the scientific process. In considering the moral implications, though, we might weigh other reasons for repetition. Perhaps scientific research is sometimes redundant because we are slow to get the point. Perhaps humans need redundancy because we ha
ve to hear something over and over before we learn it—or accept it. Long ago, Harry himself made the comment about our understanding of love, that even God had to accept that we learn at our own rate.

  Should we be angry with Harry or with ourselves for being such very slow learners? Perhaps it takes the extreme example of the isolated monkey or the baby in the box to force us to see the right and the wrong. Robert Sapolsky raises that point eloquently in Why Zebras Get Ulcers when he considers the human species as it plods toward an understanding of affection: “It is sad and pathetic when we must experiment on infant animals in order to be taught the importance of love. But it is sadder and more pathetic to consider that we have learned about love so poorly and still have to be reminded of its importance at every opportunity.” Living, loving, and learning are the most important parts of life, Harry Harlow wrote shortly before he left the University of Wisconsin. Learning never comes easy. And love is more difficult still. Yet we keep trying, those of us who have an inkling of what we’re seeking. One more time, we tell ourselves, and perhaps we’ll find the way.

  The path to wisdom isn’t well marked. There are plenty of signposts, but they’re confusing, contradictory, humbling. So we turn to guides, those who can see a bit more clearly through the thicket, a bit farther into the distance. Harry Harlow—dispassionate, curious, and fearless in inquiry—was one of those guides. As objectively as he knew how to be, he underscored what should have been obvious, he insisted that good research should make sense, even on the emotional level. He wasn’t perfect in the way he went about his work. It’s impossible to like everything he did or the way he did it. In his zeal to explore even the ugly aspects of love, his experiments became ugly. Harry performed experiments that no one today should repeat. If ever there was a legitimate scientific need to put baby monkeys into vertical chambers, that need is past. Let us agree with Bekoff on this one. Once is more than enough.

  But since we are so ridiculously slow, sometimes, to understand the lessons of love, perhaps we need to listen even to the most painful messages. No one who knows Harry’s work could ever argue that babies do fine without companionship, that a caring mother doesn’t matter, that we can thrive without ever being scooped up into someone’s arms and reassured that the day is going to be all right. And since we—psychology as a profession, science as a whole, mothers and fathers and all of us—didn’t fully believe that before Harry Harlow came along, then perhaps we needed—just once—to be smacked really hard with that truth so that we could never again doubt. Let us remember the best of Harry’s contributions as well as the worst. Let us not slip backwards, ever, into believing that we are not necessary to each other’s health and happiness. You don’t have to like the way Harry found his answers. Almost no one could admire every choice he made. But neither should we pretend that he did anything less than arrive at some fundamental truth. Our challenge is not to squander it.

  Notes

  This book is based on a variety of sources—interviews, correspondence, Harry Harlow’s unpublished memoirs/journal, books, magazines, newspapers, and research journals. Unless otherwise indicated in these notes, the comments of Harry Harlow’s colleagues, students, and family members are based on direct interviews. Many people interviewed are not quoted in the text and yet their comments and perspectives did help shape the story, and contribute to the portrait of Harry Harlow, his family, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s psychology department and primate laboratories during the time that he worked there. In that regard I would like to recognize the help given by: Leonard Berkowitz, professor emeritus of psychology, UW-Madison; and Harry’s former graduate students and colleagues and friends: Dan Joslyn, Robert Bowman, Robert Dodsworth, John Bromer, Albert Erlebacher, Billey Levenson Fink, Leslie Hicks, Kenneth Michaels, Gil French, Carl Thompson, Arthur Riopelle, Joyce Rosevear, Bill Seay, Frank Farley, Brendan Maher, Greg Oden, William Prokasy, Eleanor Schmidt, and Marge Harris. The information they provided was invaluable to getting this story right.

  Prologue: Love, Airborne

  “The Measure of Love,” Conquest, produced by the Public Affairs Department of CBS News; producer, Michael Sklar; writer, S. S. Schweitzer; director, Harold Mayer; aired November 1, 1959. Ernest R. Hilgard, Psychology in America: A Historical Survey (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987).

  Harry Harlow on proximity, quoted in John P. Gluck, “Harry Harlow: Lessons on Explanations, Ideas and Mentorship,” American Journal of Primatology 7 (1984): 139–146.

  Chapter One: The Invention of Harry Harlow

  Susan Fulton Welty, A Fair Field (Detroit: Harlow Press, 1968); Charles J. Fulton, History of Jefferson County, Iowa (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1914); Robert P. Long, Homegrown: An Iowa Memoir (selfpublished, 1988); Susan Fulton Welty, Man of Medicine and Merriment (Rockton, Ill.: Basley Prington, 1991); The Quill, Fairfield High School Yearbook, 1913–1926. Harry’s nephew, who also goes by the family name of Robert Israel, has archived a family history and photos at the Fairfield Public Library. It includes the photos of Harry’s parents and an Israel family tree that goes all the way back to seventeenth-century England.

  Harry Harlow’s recollections of Fairfield are from unpublished journals /autobiography, courtesy of Robert Israel. Family history and photos archived at Fairfield Public Library. Lon Israel’s work records are from the Fairfield City Directory and from Harlow’s unpublished descriptions. There are also some excellent descriptions of Harlow’s childhood in W. Richard Dukelow, The Alpha Males: An Early History of the Regional Primate Research Centers (Lanham, Mass.: University Press of America, 1995).

  Harry Harlow describes some of his early educational experiences in the book he co-edited with Clara Mears Harlow, and in “Birth of the Surrogate Mother,” a chapter in Discovery Processes in Modern Biology: People and Processes in Biological Discovery, ed. W. R. Klemm (Huntington, N.Y.: R. E. Krieger Publishing Co., 1977). There are similar stories—as well as childhood background—in “The Evolution of Harlow Research,” an introduction written by Clara Mears Harlow, Learning to Love: The Selected Papers of H. F. Harlow, ed. Clara Mears Harlow (New York: Praeger, 1986).

  Background on Stanford and its psychology department: Annual Reports of the President of Stanford University, 1923–1931; Margaret Kimball, Stanford: A Celebration in Pictures (Stanford: Stanford University Press); Jane Stanford’s Inscriptions (a publication of Stanford Memorial Church); correspondence from the Stanford archives between Lewis Terman and university officials. Background on Walter Miles and Calvin Stone in the Reports, an annual Stanford publication, which included activity summaries written by department heads. Lewis Terman filed the reports from 1924–1930, the period that I surveyed; in Ernest R. Hilgard, Psychology in America: A Historical Survey (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987); and in John A. Popplestone and Marion White McPherson, An Illustrated History of American Psychology (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1994); and from Harlow’s personal recollections. The story of Calvin Stone and the rat bite incident is from Carol Tavris, “Harry, You Are Going to Go Down in History As the Father of the Cloth Mother,” Psychology Today (April 1973).

  Background on Lewis Terman from Joel Shurkin, Terman’s Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1992); Henry L. Minton, Lewis M. Terman: Pioneer in Psychological Testing (New York: New York University Press, 1988); and from the Archives of the History of American Psychology, archived correspondence between May V. Seagoe and Harry Harlow, Nancy Bayley, Jessie Minton, and Robert Bernreuter concerning Seagoe’s biography of Terman, Terman and the Gifted (Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufmann, 1975). Terman’s research is also thoroughly discussed in Hilgard and other history of psychology texts, including John A. Popplestone and Marion White McPherson, An Illustrated History of American Psychology (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1994); C. James Goodwin, A History of Modern Psychology (New York: J. Wiley, 1999). For further background on the mixture of politics and s
cience that encircles IQ testing, I used Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman, The IQ Controversy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1990). The story of Harry Harlow’s name change is cited in Richard Dukelow, The Alpha Males: An Early History of the Regional Primate Research Centers (Lanham, Mass.: University Press of America, 1995); in Tavris’s Psychology Today story, in Clara Harlow’s brief biography of her husband, and in Harry’s unpublished journal. Walter Miles’s letter to Harry’s father is archived at the library of the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center. Other context is provided by interviews with William Mason and Dorothy Eichorn.

  Chapter Two: Untouched by Human Hands

  Records on the early history of foundling homes from Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), and from William P. Letchworth, Homes of Homeless Children: A Report on Orphan Asylums and Other Institutions for the Care of Children (reprint, New York: Arno Press, Inc., 1974). Henry Chapin’s paper is discussed in Robert Sapolsky, “How the Other Half Heals,” Discover, vol. 19, no. 4 (April 1998). Chapin himself coauthored seven editions of a book on the subject. The first was Henry Dwight Chapin and Godfrey Roger Pisek, Diseases of Infants and Children (New York: Wood, 1909). (Chapin’s report on infant deaths in institutions was published as “A Plea for Accurate Statistics in Infant’s Institutions,” Journal of American Pediatrics Society 27 [1915]: 180.)