The one-day-old rhesus monkeys went to their wire mothers only when they were hungry and thirsty. They spent considerably more time with their cloth mother. They nuzzled her, embraced her, told her where they hurt and where they needed scratching, and slept on her fuzzy belly. Every single one of the baby monkeys pined for the comfort of the cloth mother. As for the wire mothers like myself, well, we dangled whatever sustenance we had to keep the babies from going to the cloth mother. But they never chose us in the end, never even glanced back in our direction after we allowed them to be fed. Most of the time, it was only their backs we remembered as they tottered without hesitation to their tender cloth mothers.
As for the ones forced to stay with their respective wire mothers, they all suffered from digestive problems. Harry attributed digestive upset to a physiological manifestation of the stress of being with wire mothers.
And would you like to know what Harry found out when he elicited fear among the baby monkeys? He frightened them by introducing a loudmouthed teddy bear, which was quite harmless and made us hope he simply limited himself to stressors of the teddy-bear sort. Without the mother nearby, the baby monkeys cowered. Sometimes, they ended up paralyzed with fear or curled into a fetal ball, sucking their thumbs. If the mother was nearby, regardless of whether it was the wire type or the cloth one, the baby monkey would cling to her. And in the presence of the mother, the baby monkeys were stronger, braver. They made bold moves, such as approaching the noisy teddy bear and attacking it.
2.
No monkey has died during isolation. When initially removed from total social isolation, however, they usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by the autistic self-clutching and rocking.… One of six monkeys isolated for 3 months refused to eat after release and died 5 days later. The autopsy report attributed death to emotional anorexia.
— an excerpt from the paper “Total social isolation in monkeys” by H. F. Harlow, R. O. Dodsworth, and M. K. Harlow
It is in Harry’s nature to not speculate, to not deduce from available data, and to not make use of theoretical experimentation. So, he came up with his prefabricated isolation kit, the portable editions of which are now sold, along with smartphones and wearable computing devices, in stores around the world.
This was after Harry had indulged in a long, long investigation into the nature of isolation and loneliness. Constructed out of stainless steel, the isolation chamber comes in many variations. Some are customized to withhold maternal devotion. Some are intended to take away social interaction. All of them are designed to stunt emotional growth. What resulted from a Harry-appointed period of partial isolation — as in the case of a bare wire cage that enabled baby monkeys to hear, see, and smell other monkeys — were animals that stared blankly, circled their cages repetitively and obsessively, and exhibited acts of self-mutilation.
With another Ivy Leaguer, Stephen Suomi, the insatiable Harry made strides by unveiling the grand version of the isolation chamber: the vertical apparatus, which was aptly and variously nicknamed by Stephen the Pit of Despair, the Well of Despair, or the Dungeon of Despair. The cramped vertical apparatus suspends infant monkeys upside down and restricts their movement in this position for up to two years. Only their mouths can move, of course, as they eat food and drink water placed at the bottom of the pit.
What Harry wanted to achieve is articulated in the abstract for “Total Social Isolation in Monkeys,” in which it states the researchers’ intention to “not only capture and distill the essence of depression, but to invent it.”
After a year in total isolation, two monkeys refused to eat and eventually starved to death. After spending up to two years in the darkness and silence of the pit, the surviving baby monkeys emerged completely deranged: clawing and attacking and screaming at everything in sight and were beyond rehabilitation. Yes, Harry tried to undo the mental damage. But do not mistake it for a gesture of atonement. Harry was no Anne Sullivan to the monkeys’ Helen Keller! He is not that kind of person. He went through the motions of attempting to rehabilitate the crazed monkeys and forced them to mingle with the normal ones in the control group only because it was a viable area to be explored in his laboratory protocol.
Sometimes, when I lay awake at night watching the motion-regulated light fixtures strewn across the ceiling, I imagine how it must have been for Harry’s monkeys. I am shaped into what is supposed to be a cold and unfeeling contraption, but I realized a long time ago that I have limits: I cannot stomach torture. Torture, for me, has always been the resort of the weak, the inept, the ill-equipped. What torturers do not understand, they simplify by disassembling, by destroying the very essence and mystery of what they are trying to comprehend. What they covet, they steal and tinker with until it bores them or they discover that the tampered thing cannot be put back together again. And what they cannot subjugate, they maim — for no other reason but because they can.
What it must have been like being suspended upside down, being trapped and unable to move for years? I asked Harry one time about the pointlessness of his Pit-of-Despair exercise when he came for one of his rare visits to my room.
He said, “I’m sure it wasn’t very comfortable.”
Then I explained that he did not really have to torture the baby monkeys, that he could have just as easily predicted they won’t come out all right. All sentient creatures would not come out all right in those circumstances. It was a moot point. “So, why do you keep doing it?” I could not help but ask.
And he said with the air of the unflappable, “Because I can.”
I have not seen Harry since, and I can’t say I’m surprised.
3.
[Harry Harlow] “kept this going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this offensive. It’s as if he sat down and said, ‘I’m only going to be around another ten years. What I’d like to do, then, is leave a great big mess behind.’ If that was his aim, he did a perfect job.”
— An account by William Mason, one of Harlow’s students, as reported by Harlow’s biographer Deborah Blum in The Monkey Wars (Oxford University Press, 1994)
George Bernard Shaw, who lives next door in a sunlit bungalow surrounded by his wild orchids and well-trimmed shrubbery, is not good friends with Harry Harlow. Commenting on his neighbor’s achievements, Shaw once remarked, “Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.” And although I found myself agreeing with Shaw, I did so grudgingly as it meant that I had failed as a proper wire mother to nurture Harry; to encourage him to become a man of dignity and honor — two qualities that escaped him entirely as he hurtled toward his great all-American dream and the pageantry that went with it, leaving me and his early experiments far behind.
When the humidity is just right and there is no need to worry about my teeth chattering, I find myself wondering about Harry a lot. I wonder what goes on inside that mind of his. My wires twitch and my imagined folds of skin wrinkle, sometimes in terror, sometimes in awe.
Let me tell you about a third thing, the rape rack, a crude piece of equipment Harry designed as an adolescent and always carried with him inside his alligator tote bag. The rack was intended for disturbed monkeys finally freed from the total isolation chamber, for disturbed monkeys that had regressed such that they refused or did not know how to mate. A simple affair, the rape rack secures the female monkeys in a mating posture and forces them to copulate.