Where It All Began ...

Harry Harlow’s psychological experiments on monkeys in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s were infamous for their cruelty. Harlow tore newborns away from their mothers, gave some infants “surrogate mothers” made of wire and wood, and kept other traumatized babies in isolation in tiny metal boxes, sometimes for up to a year. Realizing that such horrific conditions resulted in long-term, debilitating psychological trauma for the infants, Harlow began expanding his project. He and his then-student Stephen Suomi created the “pit of despair,” a dark metal box designed to isolate the monkeys from everything in the outside world. Within days, the monkeys kept inside the pit were driven insane, incessantly rocking and clutching at themselves, tearing and biting their own skin and ripping out their hair. When finally removed from isolation, they were too traumatized to interact with other monkeys, and some were so shocked and depressed that they starved themselves to death. To see what would happen when tormented monkeys became mothers themselves, Suomi and Harlow created what they called a “rape rack” in order to restrain and impregnate female monkeys, then they would later watch and photograph the mentally ill mothers physically abusing and killing their own babies.

Harlow died in 1981 and, though most people believe his experiments are a thing of the past, PETA has learned that his protégé, Stephen Suomi, has continued to conduct similar maternal deprivation and depression experiments on infant monkeys for more than 30 years in taxpayer-funded laboratories at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) facility in Poolesville, Maryland.