Cruel ‘Mother’s Love’ Monkey Study Fuels Backlash
When neuroscientist Margaret Livingstone published “Triggers for a mother’s love,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September, there wasn’t much of a reaction in scientific circles. Then social media began discussing the details of the study and a backlash began, leading to a damning letter to PNAS, co-signed by 250 scientists calling for retraction.
The experiment involved permanently removing newborn macaque monkeys from their mothers, then giving the bereft moms a plush toy to placate them. “The infants were removed from the mother at lights-on (7 AM) of the day of birth,” the paper reads. “To do this the mothers were lightly anesthetized with 2 to 4 mg/kg ketamine plus 0.01 to 0.02 mg/kg dexmedetomidine. … The infants were removed from the mothers so they could be hand-reared in order to study the effects of altered early visual experience on cognitive development. They were hand-reared in an otherwise enriched environment.”
The scientists who disapproved of this research are as angered by the experiment’s uselessness as they are by its inherent cruelty. “Experiments like this one do not add any meaningful contribution to our knowledge of primate or human behaviour,” they wrote. “This study is obviously outdated.” (Livingstone’s paper cited similar studies decades old.)
In a long and passionate statement, Livingstone defended her work: “Do I wish we lived in a world where generating this important knowledge were possible without the use of lab animals? Of course! Alas, we are not there yet. We continue to work toward this future through our ongoing efforts to refine, reduce, and replace animal models — the three Rs of animal research.”
Livingstone’s defense of this particular research sounds shaky. “But people might ask how this work helps humans. Beyond showing that maternal attachment could be triggered by soft touch, these observations can inform the development of comforting interventions to help women cope with loss in the immediate aftermath of a miscarriage or still birth.”
It is widely believed that computer modeling can eventually replace a lot of the barbaric experiments we conduct on animals, maybe all of it. It can’t happen soon enough.
Photo credit: PNAS
