Read Online Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet - Free Book Online Page B

hypothesis was to take a newborn monkey away from its mother and never give it back. Put it in a bare box, observe it. Anxiety first, shown in trembling and shaking; then come the screams. Watch it huddle, small limbs clutching. Make careful notations. Next, construct a wire mannequin that holds a milk bottle. See if the baby thinks the mannequin is its mother. When it does not think so, give it a mannequin draped with terry cloth, but no milk. See it cling to this milkless cloth mannequin.
    Repeat experiment with numerous infants. Make notations.
    Second, place infant monkeys in isolation, with neither monkey nor human contact save the sight of the researchers’ hands entering the box to change bedding or food. Leave them there for thirty days. Make careful notations. When the infants are removed, watch two among them starve themselves till they expire. Notations. Repeat with longer isolation periods. First
six months, then a year. If necessary, force-feed upon removal from box. Observe: If left in boxes for twelve months, infants will no longer move. Only life signs: pulse and respiration. Upon removal from box, such damaged infants may have to be reisolated for the duration of their short lives. Notations.
    Third, attempt to breed the isolate monkeys to produce needed new experimental subjects. When the monkeys show no inclination to mate, inseminate the females. Observe the birth of infants. Observe that the longest-isolated mothers kill infants by chewing off fingers and toes or crushing heads with their teeth. Notations.
    Fourth, create bad-mother surrogates: mothers with spikes, mothers that blast cold wind. Put baby monkeys on them. Observe: Time after time, baby monkeys return. Bad mother is better than none.
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    Only 8:00 pm, and he was already slurring. He would swing by that party. What the hell. Suomi had said he’d be there.
    But first, check the experiments.
    Walking along the row of vertical chambers, he gave cursory glances inside—one, two, three subjects in a row had given up trying to climb out of their wells of
isolation. The pits were designed, of course, to make it impossible to escape.
    One subject scrambled and fell back, a weak young female. She looked up with her great round black eyes. Blink blink. She was afraid, but still plucky. Still game to try to get out, change her situation. The others were abject at the bottom of their separate holes, knew by now they could never climb the sides of the wells. As far as they knew, they were in there for good. Plucky got you nowhere if you were a lab monkey.
    Then the boxes where Bill had dosed the subjects with reserpine. These monkeys, too, huddled unmoving. Serotonin had been suppressed; this seemed to equate almost uniformly with complete listlessness, complete passivity. Might be other factors, but still: very interesting.
    Back past the so-called pits of despair, where the young female—what had they named her? Minestrone?—was still trying to climb the walls and falling repeatedly. She squeaked at him. Well, not at him, technically. She did not know he was there; she could not see him. She could see no one. She was alone.
    Harlow got in the car. Drove. Wasn’t far. Hated faculty parties, hardly ever went to them: frivolous. Took him away from his work.

    He said this to a new female grad student who met him on the walkway, exclaiming at his presence. She had long curly hair and wore no brassiere.
    â€œDr. Harlow! I can’t believe you actually made it!”
    â€œWork allatime,” he said, nodding and shrugging at once. Not as easy as he’d thought it would be. Pulled it together, though. “Lucky. Always have smart wives to help me with it.”
    She shot him a look of pity: Everyone knew the second smart wife was on her cancer deathbed.
    â€œSome of the faculty,” he went on, “these guys don’t even work on Sundays. Not serious.”
    She was looking at him like he was a baby bird fallen