It's worth noting that Kalin at UW-Madison is looking to resurrect Harlow's work on socially deprived primates[1], something that was previously posted here at

It's worth noting that Kalin at UW-Madison is looking to resurrect Harlow's work on socially deprived primates[1], something that was previously posted here at HN. Some of the primate researchers' work is (to a layman like me) just bizarre -- one study involved isolating mother-deprived rhesus monkeys in individual cages and giving them unrestricted access to food, water, and ethanol, in order to test their postmortem CSF 5-HIAA levels and study "early life stress on drinking and serotonin system activity." (Conclusion: if you deprive a monkey of maternal contact and then give it booze, you'll end up with a drunk monkey.) For me, I'm both fascinated and repulsed by research into, e.g., rh5-HTTLPR polymorphisms and anxiety. Fascinated because it really is inherently interesting, and repulsed because I'm not at all certain that torturing monkeys through isolation and/or maternal deprivation and then killing them is really advancing the state of 5-HTTPLPR research far beyond what is already being done with studies that don't involve the psychiatric destruction of presocial primates. (PubMed shows 75 animal-based 5-HTTLPR/rh5-HTTLPR studies, and 1221 human-based studies.) There are some truly thorny questions here -- and I'm a proponent of animal studies in many cases -- that I feel researchers, particularly those involved in psychiatric animal models, are hand-waving away. [1] Fellow UW-Madison researcher A. J. Bennett's view of Harlow's work is available at http://speakingofresearch.com/2014/08/03/harlow-dead-bioethicists-outraged/ http://speakingofresearch.com/2014/08/03/harlow-dead-bioethi...