Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals

Human treatment of animals varies wildly--their lives matter (as companions, healers, possessors of wisdom), and their lives more frequently matter not at all (mere nutrient factories, or vermin and invaders). Animals in experimental laboratories occupy a special place in this calculus. Their use in research gives us a shudder: animals’ bodies are sliced, their organs removed; they are shocked, drugged, starved, confined in tight spaces, and sometimes deliberately killed. These harms are said to advance scientific knowledge (leading to drugs and therapies to alleviate human suffering). John Gluck explores the ethics of animal research in this searing, unflinching, and provocative memoir of his decades of work in primate research laboratories. This includes a close look at the famous experiments of Harry F. Harlow’s primate laboratory at the University of Wisconsin , beginning in 1968. In trying to tease out the balance in cost-benefit calculus between pain and suffering for animals with concern for human interest, the edge, even now, seems to go to humans almost invariably. Gluck takes a close look at how animal researchers think, based on his direct laboratory experiences; he describes the poverty (and sometimes cruelty) of living conditions for monkeys, locked in boxes 24 hours a day, though we also get to know the monkeys as individuals. His own emotional involvement commands the center of his story, and that story describes a career arc that began with him as an avid animal researcher and traces his transformation into someone who has doubts whether most present animal research can be justified. Animals, in parallel, evolve in this setting from non-feeling objects into sentient beings with ethical standing. Along the way, we get a moving life story of a man who grew up in a family that placed a special value on pets, but took a different turn with his later education (tilting him toward behaviorist perspectives and away from "emotionalism”). He later learns empathy, and writes here as if to make amends for the pain he caused, though he also exposes the politics and ego that abound in scientific practices in his close observation of colleagues. He learns that ethical reflection, in the end, can make a real difference.