The National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire
the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and
place them in sanctuaries. This significant decision comes after a
lengthy process of examination and debate about the ethics of animal
research. For decades, proponents of such research have argued that the
discoveries and benefits for humans far outweigh the costs of the
traumatic effects on the animals; but today, even the researchers
themselves have come to question the practice. John P. Gluck has been
one of the scientists at the forefront of the movement to end research
on primates, and in Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals he tells
a vivid, heart-rending, personal story of how he became a vocal activist
for animal protection.
Gluck begins by taking us inside the laboratory of Harry F. Harlow at
the University of Wisconsin, where Gluck worked as a graduate student in
the 1960s. Harlow's primate lab became famous for his behavioral
experiments in maternal deprivation and social isolation of rhesus
macaques. Though trained as a behavioral scientist, Gluck finds himself
unable to overlook the intense psychological and physical damage these
experiments wrought on the macaques. Gluck's sobering and moving account
reveals how in this and other labs, including his own, he came to
grapple with the uncomfortable justifications that many researchers were
offering for their work. As his sense of conflict grows, we're right
alongside him, developing a deep empathy for the often smart and always
vulnerable animals used for these experiments.
At a time of unprecedented recognition of the intellectual cognition and
emotional intelligence of animals, Voracious Science and Vulnerable
Animals is a powerful appeal for our respect and compassion for those
creatures who have unwillingly dedicated their lives to science. Through
the words of someone who has inflicted pain in the name of science and
come to abhor it, it's important to know what has led this far to
progress and where further inroads in animal research ethics are
needed.
