Invent Ways to Hurt Animals and Become a Millionaire.

One of the news feeds I subscribe to sends me scientific papers written by researchers experimenting on monkeys. A recent one was titled "A Rhesus Monkey Model of Non-suicidal Self-Injury." It was written by Melinda Novak and Jerrold S. Meyer. Meyer: "Much of our recent work has involved the use of a rat model to determine the mechanisms of cocaine action on the developing brain and the neurochemical and behavioral consequences of chronic prenatal cocaine exposure...". What a dick.

It caught my eye, not only for the title, but also because Melinda Novak was one of Harry Harlow's last PhD students, and I am somewhat familiar with one of their co-authored publications. Many of her papers are indexed here, here, and here.

Her career has largely been a study of the damaging impacts to monkeys from being kept alone in a cage and being hurt and frightened throughout their lives. None of her work seems to have benefited the monkeys in the labs, let alone any abused human children. It is estimated that self-injurious behavior "in the form of self-biting is observed in approximately 5–15% of individually housed rhesus monkeys."

She has brought in the big bucks. Her NIH-funded project SELF INJURIOUS BEHAVIOR AND PRIMATE WELL BEING (Project Number1R24RR011122-01) received $7,863,045 in taxpayer dollars from 1996 to 2006.

Data is hard to find, but the 2016 paper, Survey of 2014 Behavioral Management Programs for Laboratory Primates in the United States, reported that of 59,636 primates in the 27 facilities they surveyed, 83% were socially housed. So, 17% weren't. That means that more than 10,000 monkeys in U.S. labs are probably being kept in conditions widely acknowledged to cause multiple psychiatric maladies.

Novak is now claiming that further study of these mentally ill monkeys might lead to some benefit to adolescents and young adults manifestiong non-suicidal self-injury. But the study of monkeys raised in environmentally deprived conditions has never led to a benefit to human children or adults. Her claim that even more study is called for is particularly odious.

I'm particularly disgusted by her claim because of her history with Harry Harlow. They, probably her -- some research suggests that university professors commonly attach their names to their graduate student's research papers -- invented a device intended to terrify young monkeys. It is likely that they were already disabled as a result of their isolation.

[Unless otherwise noted, the passages quoted below are from "Isolation", Chapter 5 of "We All Operate in the Same Way." The Use of Animals at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Rick Bogle. Virginia Smith Books: 2017. See too: Harlow, Harry F.; Novak, Melinda A. (1973). Psychopathological Perspectives.

Harlow and Novak reported on the use of a novel device they designed and characterized as "diabolical" and intended to "produce turmoil and terror." The apparatus had two main parts, a small cage positioned above a larger unit. The larger lower unit was divided into two parts. The small cage could be lowered between them so that the monkey inside the cage was more or less surrounded by them. Harlow said it was like an elevator. The idea was to put frightening objects in the two bottom parts and then lower the monkey so that he or she was confronted on both sides by the objects. They write:

... and after a 1-minute delay [the monkey] was lowered into the fear apparatus to face the assault of arm-flapping, light-flashing, buzzing, or shrieking monsters -- one on each side of him. They say that the device was "extremely successful in producing terror in monkeys," and report that several of the monkeys clung to the top of the cage for as long as 15 minutes. They reported that monkeys balled up in the bottom of the cage. Others, they say "many," screamed the entire time they were in the apparatus, "... or until they became hoarse from the violence of their vocalization." They reported that all the monkeys developed intense phobias.

... in the case of Novak frightening monkeys in an effort to induce any sort of interesting behavioral aberration, she wanted to use monkeys similar to each other and who had had similar life experiences. So she first used four six-month-old monkeys who were all semi-isolates -- monkeys raised alone in a bare wire cage in a room with other individual monkeys in other bare wire cages -- and put them into the device, called by Harlow and Novak the "terror trap," for 15 minutes every day, for six weeks.

Now, 50 years later, she is still claiming that the study of profoundly emotionally damaged young monkeys will shed light on mental illness in humans. But why not? These claims, the willingness of scientific journals to publish these claims, the willingness of federal funding agencies and university's to support such cruelty, do, at the end of the day, pour more money into her bank account.