Maternal Deprivation
A long history of brutality continued by the University of Washington

By Wayne Johnson, Ph.D.

The late psychologist Harry Harlow had used monkeys in research for years. But in 1956, he went so far as to establish a breeding colony of monkeys at the University of Wisconsin-Madison specifically for that purpose.

All of the infant monkeys produced by the breeding colony were taken from their mothers at an early age and placed in separate, isolated cages. Harlow's scientific mission was clear: he and his colleagues would take sixty of these baby monkeys, keep them in pediatric isolationist wards, and study their behaviors as they deal with the loss of their mothers. As surrogates for their real mothers, Harlow placed cloth dolls in the monkey's cages, designed to resemble the mother primates

Researchers soon noticed that the babies clung tenaciously to the cloth diapers in their wire cages. Harlow and his colleagues, evidently intrigued by this behavior, decided to find out why the animals preferred cloth to the wire of their cages. Was the cloth simply more pleasing to the touch, or was it in some way a substitute-a sad, terrible substitute-for their mothers' cuddling?

Harlow believed he had reached a breakthrough on the nature and necessity of motherly love. And the researchers didn't stop there. In order to continue testing their hypothesis, they began making some of the surrogate mothers "reject" the infant monkeys. Harlow biographer Deborah Blum (Love at Goon Park, Perseus Press) described these types of experiments involving surrogate mothers in a recent interview:

"They (the rejecting surrogate mothers) would shake the baby really hard until its teeth would chatter. Babies don't like to be cold, and some of these mothers were (rigged to be) really cold. Or they would throw the baby across the cage; they would be spring-loaded and would bounce the monkey off when it came close. Or there was one that had blunt-tipped, brass knobs that would bump hard enough against the baby that the baby would let go. What they found was that there was nothing that would make the baby not come back."

The research got much rougher than that.

Monkeys were separated and put into isolation pits to see how depressed they would become when deprived of light and the comfort of their mothers. Young monkeys were separated from their mothers and then exposed to an adult female monkey in heat, to test for sexual aggression. These experiments involved Harlow's infamous "rape racks."

There was no end to the cruelty and no end to the rationalized justification of the tests. To Harlow, historical studies on the importance of maternal love - conducted in orphanages and foundling homes - didn't mattered at all. Harlow's team began fanning out to dozens of universities, replicating and amplifying these maternal deprivation protocols, and similar work continues to this day at the University of Washington.

Dr. Gene Sackett arrived at the University of Washington's Regional Primate Center over thirty years ago. He was a young professor in the Department of Psychology who began specializing in research on infant primates. The university describes his research as the study of "the basic developmental mechanism...of breeding and husbandry of captive primates." His current projects include: "acute and chronic psychosocial stress on pregnancy in monkeys; postnatal effects of intrauterine growth retardation; and behavioral development in infant and juvenile monkeys exposed to viruses."

Prior to coming to the University of Washington, Sackett was a student of Harry Harlow at Wisconsin, and they collaborated on a number of maternal deprivation studies. Sackett brought to Seattle a commitment to continue, extend, and amplify the work that had been done on captive primates in Madison.

It did not take him long. The new University of Washington Regional Primate Center became a leader in maternal deprivation research, and attracted millions of research dollars, including public money from the National Institutes of Health. Sackett and his colleagues (Ruppenthal, Burbacher, and Worlein) carried Harlow's legacy into ever-widening research protocols at the University of Washington.

In the early 1970s, Sackett isolated six monkeys-three males and three females-and studied their self-injurious behavior. These monkeys, raised in the classic wire cage without their mothers, were observed slapping and banging their heads, pulling their hair, and biting their arms and legs. In 1975, Sackett published a paper in Vision Research, in which he describes raising ten monkeys in darkness for three to six months after their birth. He reported the results: the monkeys had "major disruptions of visual performance."

Around the same time, Sackett authored a paper entitled Ten Year Perspective of Motherless Monkey Behavior. His only conclusion from the work: more research had to be done.

And so the cycle of grant funding and specious experiments on innocent baby primates continued. The protocols expanded into the 1980s. In 1982, Sackett conducted a study called Rhesus Monkeys Reared in Isolation with Added Social, Nonsocial and Electrical Brain Stimulation. He followed this up with a study of the brains of fetal macaque monkeys. In this protocol, Sackett induced labor in almost ninety macaques between 60 and 166 days of pregnancy. Eighty-one fetuses were removed. Their lives were snuffed out and the brains of twenty-two were studied.

In the late 1990s, Sackett published a paper based on joint research with University of Oregon primate specialist Julie Worlein. The focus of the study, once again, was deprivation of social contact and the resulting self-injurious behavior (SIB). Sackett and Worlein found that male macaques who were deprived of social contact had an increase in SIB.

Worlein subsequently came to the University of Washington and began a protocol on maternal deprivation and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in juvenile macaques. Along with Mark Laudenslager of the University of Colorado, the principal investigator, Worlein continued the long legacy of the experiments that Harry Harlow began in Madison in the late 1950s.

Worlein's abstract, Behavioral Consequences of Loss stated that "these studies attempt to predict the development of full blown AIDS from SIV (simian immune virus) and the course of AIDS in macaque monkeys as a function of a two-week period of maternal deprivation at six months of age." For the study, the monkeys were isolated from their mothers at the Colorado facility and then transferred to the University of Washington at forty-two months of age, where they are inoculated with SIV and monitored for the development of AIDS or its primate counterpart. This protocol - giving AIDS to maternally-deprived monkeys - is costing taxpayers $500,000 a year.

Since 1998, federal taxpayer funding for Worlein's study has totaled at least two million dollars. Critics, including a prominent behavioral psychologist and a well-known pediatrician, have found it flawed from top to bottom. The animals are stressed by being placed in individual housing; they're shipped to another facility (the UW); they experience drastic changes in their environment, housing, diet, social factors, sleep and exercise levels. All of these stressors are impossible to control.

Most importantly, and most relevant to this study of isolation and attachment, is that researchers such as Bowlby, Ainsworth and others have been conducting classic research on maternal deprivation in children and adolescents for the past fifty years. Undoubtedly, as many social workers are quick to point out, the millions of dollars from the animal studies could be better spent on the target population: adolescents who are at-risk from parental drug users, HIV-positive mothers, and environmental factors.

Current studies at the University of Washington Regional Primate Center also feature important environmental concerns. Thomas Burbacher is focusing his research on the long-term effect of methyl mercury on prenatal primates as well as prenatal exposure to methanol. He has also collaborated on an academic paper with Gene Sackett regarding the effects of methyl mercury and social behavior.

In 1976, Sackett and his colleagues concluded that depressed behavior, including a failure to eat and drink, was a characteristic of maternally deprived monkeys. In 2002, Sackett reviewed thirty years of infant primate research -- he mentioned that between 1970 and the year 2000, two thousand monkeys were raised without their mothers.

In a discussion with animal rights advocates outside his home in August of 2002, Sackett insisted, as he does in his papers, that these animals are not socially deprived because they have contact with peers. This evidently includes those who were raised in darkness, but not those who were killed following caesarian section. Like his mentor Harry Harlow, Sackett has rationalized his research and his contributions to the science of mother-infant behavior.

Perhaps the French film director, Jean Renoir, said it best when he lamented the great problem of the 20th century: "everyone has his reasons." The reasons of Harlow, Sackett, Worlein, and others like them, however, are costing millions of lives and billions of taxpayer dollars every year.