Young Monkeys and Children

UW-Madison vivisector Ned Kalin, and by extension every supporter of his use of infant rhesus monkeys to model early adversity in children, have terminally muddled notions about monkeys and humans.

If you read the public relations rhetoric from the university you'll see all sorts of silly and (probably) knowingly misleading claims. One of the silliest is that putting an infant monkey in an incubator is no different than putting an infant human in an incubator. Imagine putting a young goldfish in an incubator; the poor thing wouldn't last very long.

This might come as news to the university egg-heads, but, like fish, infant humans have different needs than infant rhesus macaques. Infant humans can be set down without causing them serious trauma. This isn't true for infant macaques and most other infant primates.

Infant monkeys either hang on to their mother or die. The psychological need to cling to their mother is a deep and genetically driven response to their natural history. It isn't shared with humans. At any moment, a mother monkey might leap through the forest canopy or rush up a tree. If the infant releases his or her grip, their life is likely over.

Monkeys are active semi-arboreal animals while humans are plodding fully terrestrial animals. There probably isn't a more stressful experience for an infant rhesus monkey than being pulled from his or her mother. Taking a human infant from his or her mother is not at all similar.

The physical pulling of an infant monkey from his or her mother may be the most distressing thing anyone can do to an infant rhesus monkey. After the separation, any other cruelty is just salt in the wound.

Because this particular psychological need and experience isn't shared by humans it is improbable that the resulting changes in a baby monkey's brain chemistry are meaningfully similar to what happens in a child's brain when he or she experiences a completely different kind of adverse event. Claims that there are meaningful similarities are little more than appeals to alchemy. It's just BS.

Kalin's cruelty exacerbates the already profound differences in the neurobiology of human's and rhesus monkeys' brains. After being socially isolated for a month or so, the infants are paired with other infants who were also taken from their mothers and isolated. All the monkeys are males. It is well established that male rhesus monkeys are much more negatively impacted by laboratory conditions and isolation than are females. Infant monkeys need to cling, and when they have only each other, they cling tightly together. Periodically, Kalin pulls them apart and separates them, re-wounding them in a way similar to their initial removal from their mother. While isolated, he frightens them in various ways, none of which would bother a human child of the same age, because humans aren't repetitively traumatized monkeys.

Kalin claims that a human child who is abused and a traumatized infant monkey have similar brain chemistry as a result of their different experiences. I doubt that he believes his own claims. He must chuckle to himself over that absurdity and the willingness of others to look like fools or ignoramuses by defending it. Although he nominally claims to be looking for some new molecular pathway that might be modified in some unknown way by some future drug that will cure or vaccinate children from the occasional bad effects of poor, or neglectful, or abusive parenting, I suspect that he is actually hoping only to find yet another patentable molecular pathway that he can add to his and university's portfolio of similar patents. It really is all about money. His decades of hurting, frightening, and killing young monkeys has never resulted in anything of benefit to human patients. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zippo. It won't this time either.