In some experiments, the infants see no faces for a year, because the researchers effectively blind them. In 2016, the team sewed the eyelids shut in two monkeys; the sutures dissolved in a few days, but the eyes remained closed for a year.
DAVID GRIMM: Primatologists and animal rights activists are condemning monkey studies in the laboratory of Harvard University neuroscientist Margaret Livingstone. The work, which involves removing newborns from their mothers and, in two cases in 2016, suturing their eyelids shut to understand how the primate brain processes faces, is cruel and unethical, they say. But some neuroscientists defend the studies as crucial for understanding human vision.
Livingstone says the eyelid suturing procedure she and colleagues utilized is similar to that used to treat children with eye tumors and invasive eye infections—and they have no plans to use it again. But some of her studies still involve separating infant monkeys from their mothers.
That’s shocking to Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews who has studied primates in the wild for 17 years. “As a scientist, I question what we are learning that we couldn’t learn in another way,” she says. “As a human, I’m horrified”…
Hobaiter and her graduate student, Gal Badihi, sent a letter to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) signed by more than 250 animal behavior researchers, grad students, and postdocs, asking it to retract Livingstone’s most recent publication. The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has done the same. It has also asked Harvard to terminate Livingstone’s studies, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to defund the work…
Livingstone has spent 40 years studying vision in monkeys. To determine how the parts of the brain responsible for recognizing faces develop, her team sometimes removes rhesus macaques from their mothers after birth and hand-raises them for months, eventually housing them with other juveniles. In some experiments, the infants see no faces for a year, either because laboratory staff wear masks, or because the researchers effectively blind them. In 2016, the team sewed the eyelids shut in two monkeys; the sutures dissolved in a few days, but the eyes remained closed for a year. Since then, Livingstone says her team has used noninvasive approaches such as goggles.
Few primatologists were aware of the experiments until Livingstone published an article in PNAS last month… The fact that PNAS would highlight this work is deeply troubling to Hobaiter, who also serves as the vice president for communications for the International Primatological Society. Decades of research have shown how critical the mother-child bond is in nonhuman primates, she says. Orphaned animals “shut down socially… In some cases, they never recover”—to say nothing of the impact on the mothers. Livingstone’s recent paper, she says, adds nothing meaningful to our understanding of primate behavior. “It fails on every scientific and ethical level.”
Hobaiter and Badihi sent a draft letter detailing their concerns to a few colleagues. “It snowballed,” she says, eventually collecting 257 signatures from across the globe. The final letter asks PNAS to retract the paper, which Hobaiter says raises questions about all invasive research with primates…
Katherine Roe, a former experimental psychologist who studied brain development in children and who now serves as the chief of science advancement and outreach at PETA, sent letters to Harvard and two NIH agencies. She called Livingstone’s work inhumane and unscientific, and asked the institutions to end their support for it. “The long-term harms that these experiments are causing the mothers and the babies far outweigh any potential benefit to humans,” Roe says. “The benefits are always ‘potential.’ The harms are definite”…
PETA launched a public relations and social media campaign last week targeting both the maternal separation in Livingstone’s work and the eyelid sewing, which it called “straight out of a horror movie.”
The social media storm is taking its toll, Livingstone says. “I’ve become the target of increasingly hostile harassment, and I am seriously fearful for my own and my family’s safety.” She says she has received “violent, threatening, and obscene” calls and emails. Harvard released a statement on Friday condemning these “personal attacks.” It has not responded to further requests for comment. SOURCE…
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