Some primatologists and animal rights activists are against monkey studies. They say that the work, which involves removing newborns from their mothers and then reconstructing their faces, is cruel and unethical. Some neurosciences think the studies are important for understanding vision.
Livingstone says that the eyelid suturing procedure she and colleagues used is similar to the one used to treat children with eye tumors and eye infections. Some of her studies involve the separation of baby monkeys from their mothers.
Catherine Hobaiter has been studying primate behavior in the wild for 17 years. She wondered what we were learning that we couldn't learn in another way. I'm horrified.
On Monday, Hobaiter and her graduate student, Gal Badihi, sent a letter to the PNAS asking it to withdraw Livingstone's most recent publication. The animal rights group has done the same thing. Harvard and the U.S. National Institute of Health have been asked to stop funding Livingstone's research.
A neuroscientist at Harvard who has conducted brain scans on monkeys for decades but doesn't work with Livingstone says that such efforts could crush research that is critical for human survival. She says that if we want to understand how the brain works, we need to do experiments that make people feel something. We have to look at the bigger picture.
Livingstone studied vision in monkeys. In order to determine how the parts of the brain responsible for recognizing faces develop, her team sometimes removes rhesus macaques from their mothers. In some experiments, the infants don't see faces for a year because the researchers effectively blind them. The eyes remained closed for a year after the team sewed them shut in two monkeys. Livingstone's team has used non-traditional approaches.
Livingstone's article in PNAS was the first time primatologists were aware of the experiments. Livingstone was invited by the PNAS to write a piece about her work as a newly elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
The piece recounts anecdotal observations Livingstone made in the course of her research after giving soft stuffed animals to monkey mothers. The paper reported that the toys helped calm the mothers down. The research on the infants was detailed in a 2020 PNAS research paper.
The fact that PNAS highlighted this work is troubling to Hobaiter, who is the vice president for communications. The mother-child bond is very important in nonhuman primate. The impact on the mothers of orphans is not known. She says Livingstone's paper doesn't add anything to our understanding of primate behavior. It fails on many levels.
The draft letter was sent to a few colleagues. She collected 257 signatures from around the world. Hobaiter says the final letter asks PNAS to pull the paper because it raises questions about all the research done with monkeys. It says we can't ask monkeys for consent. We can stop promoting cruel methods that cause distress.
The PNAS is aware of the concerns and is considering formal criticism submitted to the journal.
Last week, a former experimental psychologist who studied brain development in children sent a letter to Harvard and two other agencies. She asked the institutions to stop supporting Livingstone because he was inhumane. The long-term harms of these experiments are outweighing any potential benefit to humans. The possibilities are always there. The harms are definitely true.
Livingstone's work is based on science that helped treat vision loss in kids. She says that her research has helped develop therapies for Alzheimer's disease and brain cancer.
The public relations and social media campaign was launched last week and targeted both the maternal separation in Livingstone's work and the eyelid sewing.
Livingstone claims that the social media storm is taking its toll. I am frightened for my own and my family's safety because of the hostile harassment I have become the target of. She says she has received threats. Harvard condemned the personal attacks. It didn't reply to any more requests for comment.
All of Livingstone's work has been approved by the university's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, which is designed to ensure that animals are properly cared for and only necessary experiments take place.
Michael Goldberg is a doctor at Columbia University who studies perception in monkeys. Goldberg was one of the reviewers of this year's PNAS paper and he said that the committees don't take their jobs lightly. He says Livingstone's work is justified. Critical research isn't unnecessary cruel to animals.
When it comes to animal research, ethics continues to evolve. She would like to see more discussion about the issue. She says that even though the ethics committee sets minimal standards, you can still do better. We need to hold ourselves to a higher standard.
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