The Mind and the Brain (20 page)

In a chapter he wrote for a book that year, Taub argued forcefully that his work with deafferentation pointed the way toward testing whether learned nonuse accounted for a stroke patient’s inability to use an arm, and he laid out a training procedure to overcome it. He emphasized that motivation was crucial but allowed that the electric shocks he used with the monkeys would probably not be necessary in stroke patients. (Praise, and perhaps tokens good for privileges or favorite foods, might be adequate, he suggested.) “I had had these data for 10 years, yet I never before thought of applying learned non-use to stroke rehabilitation,” Taub recalls. “In neuroscience then, you just didn’t think of applications to human beings. It didn’t occur to anybody.”

Actually, it did occur to one person. In 1967 Larry Anderson visited Taub’s laboratory at the Institute for Behavioral Research. There, he observed some of the conditioned-response experiments with the monkeys and asked Taub whether he thought something similar might work in stroke patients. “I said sure, try it,” Taub recalls.

Anderson did, with three stroke patients. He tied down the unaffected arm of each patient, leaving only the “paralyzed” arm free. Anderson then sounded a tone. Patients who failed to move the seemingly immobilized arm at this signal received a mild electric shock. Amazingly, the stroke patients learned to move an arm that they had thought they would never use again. For one of the
patients, this demonstration led to a significant improvement in the life situation; for two of them, without follow-up therapy, the demonstration did not translate into real life.

Anderson’s boss decided to scale up the experiment and recruited twenty-four stroke patients. Immobilizing the good arm, and motivating patients to use their “useless” arm, produced substantial improvement in all twenty-four. “There are those two papers in the rehab literature,” Taub says,

That was the radical proposal in his 1980 paper. He was a year into this work when Alex Pacheco asked whether Taub could use some help around the lab.

The month after the September raid, the National Institutes of Health suspended the rest of Taub’s grant. The decision reflected a simple political calculus: although the agency knew that to withdraw funding from a researcher embroiled in a controversy—indeed, a court case—over his use of lab animals would ignite the wrath of many in the biomedical community, NIH also recognized that it would otherwise have been impossible to maintain its
credibility with the public and Congress. Throughout the saga of the Silver Spring monkeys, NIH would be caught in a crossfire between its core constituency—biomedical researchers—and the public.

At Taub’s November 1980 trial, Pacheco testified that cages were cleaned only infrequently, that cockroaches had the run of the lab, and that if caretakers failed to show up, the monkeys could go two or three days without food. He testified to the animals’ self-mutilation, describing how Billy chewed off eight of his ten fingers and Paul tore off all five fingers of one hand. Courtroom exhibits featured gruesome photographs of the macaques with chewed-off fingers and bandaged arms. Five of the nine deafferented monkeys had mutilated themselves; open sores drained the length of their arms. Several had bone fractures; one suffered from osteomyelitis. Defense witnesses, and Taub himself, testified to the scientific merit and promise of his work and argued that deafferented monkeys are notoriously difficult to care for: with no feeling in the limb, they treat it as a foreign object, mutilating it and chewing off digits. The main point, and the only fair indicator of whether conditions in the lab were acceptable, argued the defense, was that the monkeys were healthy. As for the feces and other filth, they argued, monkeys are well known for fouling their cages.

“Nobody ever saw the conditions that Pacheco photographed,” Taub maintains; he had long been convinced that Pacheco staged at least two of the photos introduced into evidence.

In the long history of researchers’ administering electric shocks to animals, operating on them without anesthesia, and, of course, “sacrificing” them by the truckload, Taub had the distinction of being the only scientist ever hauled up on criminal charges for what he had done. People were aghast to learn that, as part of the experiment, day-old monkeys had their eyelids sewed shut. Yet when Harvard’s David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel did the same to newborn kittens, as described in the previous chapter, their research won them a Nobel Prize. Many scientists therefore viewed Taub as
a victim. They aided his defense in the belief that an unfavorable verdict would be the leading edge of a drive by antivivisectionists (the term most scientists preferred to “animal rights activists”) to outlaw all animal experiments. Supporters such as Edward Coons, Jr., of NYU, Neal Miller of Rockefeller University, and Vernon Mountcastle of Johns Hopkins University raised more than $2,500 for Taub’s defense; they believed that he had been set up and that NIH’s suspension of his grant reflected nothing but a cold political calculus. Yet the biomedical community was clearly fractured by the case of the Silver Spring monkeys. NIH officials, writing in
Neuroscience Newsletter
, noted that deafferented monkeys kept at NIH “have not developed lesions comparable to those in five of the nine deafferented monkeys from IBR…. [F]ractures, dislocations, lacerations, punctures, contusions, and abrasions with accompanying infection, acute and chronic inflammation, and necrosis are not the inevitable consequences of deafferentation.” Their animals, implied the NIH officials, had been given proper, humane care—unlike the Silver Spring monkeys.

In late November 1981, a district court judge found Taub guilty of six counts of failing to provide veterinary care for six monkeys (Paul, Billy, Domitian, Nero, Big Boy, and Titus) who had, among other injuries, massive scar tissue on their open wounds. The judge dismissed the other 113 counts. Taub was defiant throughout. He insisted that the animals had suffered no pain and after the verdict declared, “What has happened to my work harks back to the Middle Ages, and to the period of religious inquisition, when scientists were burned at the stake.” The $3,000 fine the court imposed belies the true price that Taub paid. His NIH grant would never be reinstated; he lost his job at IBR; his research came to a standstill. He would spend several years trying to write up his work on deafferentation, under a $20,000 grant he received from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1985.

Taub appealed the verdict to the circuit court in Rockville,
Maryland. A jury there cleared him of all but one misdemeanor count of animal cruelty on July 2, 1982, sustaining the conviction only for Nero, whose arm had required amputation after the raid because it developed a massive infection. Two months later, Judge Calvin Sanders ordered Taub to pay the maximum fine, $500, but added, “I hope and trust this will not deter you from your efforts to assist mankind with your research.” On August 10, 1983, however, the Maryland Court of Appeals unanimously overturned that one-count conviction, ruling that a federally funded researcher was not subject to state laws on animal cruelty. Taub described himself as “delighted to be exonerated…delighted on behalf of science.” Two weeks later, as he addressed the American Psychological Association’s annual meeting in Anaheim on “Tactics of Laboratory Attacks by Anti-Vivisectionists,” nearly 200 animal rights demonstrators burned him in effigy.

As for the monkeys, their saga was far from over. Immediately after their seizure they were housed in the basement of the home of a PETA member in Rockville. There, vets cleaned and bandaged the animals’ wounds, volunteers groomed them with toothbrushes, and a television was installed so they could watch soap operas, which they seemed to love. Just days after the seizure, however, a judge ordered the monkeys returned to Taub’s lab, where a court-appointed vet would supervise their care. After mysteriously vanishing for several days (no one ever owned up to kidnapping them, but after prosecutors explained to Pacheco that they could not make a case against Taub without their star evidence, the monkeys reappeared), the seventeen monkeys were trucked back to IBR. Their stay was brief, however. Six days after, Charlie was found dead in his cage, apparently of cardiac arrest suffered after surgery to repair damage he had sustained in a fight with Nero. The judge was singularly unamused at this turn of events. That day he reversed his order and ordered the sixteen sur
viving monkeys sent to NIH’s primate facility in nearby Poolesville. NIH took custody even though the animals remained the property of the Institute for Behavioral Research, an arrangement that would cause problems.

PETA sued in U.S. District Court to have the monkeys transferred from Poolesville to a primate sanctuary called Primarily Primates, in San Antonio, Texas, but the court ruled that PETA lacked legal standing. In 1986 PETA persuaded Representative Robert C. Smith of New Hampshire and Representative Charlie Rose of North Carolina to draft a petition calling on NIH to send the monkeys to the sanctuary; 252 members of the House signed it. (Smith even offered to buy the monkeys himself.) Pundits weighed in; James J. Kilpatrick wrote that the monkeys “deserve a break that the law won’t give them…. Why can’t a just and humane court…let the monkeys go?” In a letter, James Wyngaarden, the director of NIH, promised that he would indeed allow the monkeys to be moved from Poolesville; he also promised, “These animals will not undergo invasive procedures for research purposes.” Any experiments, he continued, would occur only after their “natural death.” On June 13 of that year Wyngaarden repeated his promise in testimony before Congress: the animals would never again undergo invasive procedures as part of research. By this time, investigating panels from the Society for Neuroscience, the American Psychological Association, and the American Physiology Society had all cleared Taub of animal cruelty charges. The Society for Neuroscience even contributed $5,000 toward Taub’s legal bills.

Whatever promise animal rights activists thought they had wrested from Wyngaarden, the Silver Spring monkeys were not moved to a sanctuary. NIH had begun to feel the wrath of the biomedical community—its constituency—over the perception that it was caving in to “antivivisectionists.” In 1984, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania had been caught, on videotapes that
PETA stole, dangling baboons by crippled hands, even propping up one trembling, brain-damaged baboon, turning the camera on him, and asking in voice-over, “Look, he wants to shake hands. Come on…he says, ‘You’re gonna rescue me from this, aren’t you? Aren’t you?’” That was too much even for NIH. The following summer, the secretary of health and human services (HHS) ordered the Penn lab shut down, an action that triggered a flood of furious calls and letters from scientists to NIH. In retrospect, it seems very likely that the firestorm over the Penn closing and other perceived cave-ins to animal rights activists “sealed the fate,” as the
New Yorker
put it, of Billy, Sarah, and the other Silver Spring monkeys. NIH was accused of pandering to “animal lunatics” and was feeling the bitter backlash of a scientific community convinced the agency had sold out one of their own. NIH was going to take a stand in favor of using animals in biomedical research, and that stand would be on the Silver Spring monkeys.

So over a June weekend in 1986, the NIH assistant director, William Raub, contacted two of the country’s leading primate facilities, Yerkes Regional Primate Center in Atlanta and the Delta Regional Primate Center, located across Lake Ponchartrain from Tulane University’s main campus in New Orleans. Yerkes wanted no part of the symbol-laden animals. But Delta’s director, Peter Gerone, was game. On June 23, the fifteen surviving monkeys (Hard Times had been euthanized at Poolesville in 1982) were moved to Delta, deep in the tranquil woods of Covington, Louisiana, surrounded by magnolias, sweet gums, and pine trees. Within a week of the animals’ arrival, protesters were blocking the entrance road. Alex Pacheco felt betrayed; he had made arrangements for the monkeys’ transfer to Primarily Primates, going so far as to outfit a mobile home as an animal clinic where the animals could be cared for. Instead, the monkeys were housed at Delta, in double-decker stainless steel cages that lined the walls of a nine- by twelve-foot concrete-block room. Brooks died a few months after
he arrived; five of the control monkeys—Chester, Sisyphus, Adidas, Hayden, and Montaigne—were sent to the San Diego Zoo in the summer of 1987. That left Sarah, plus the eight male macaques that had undergone deafferentation—Augustus, Domitian, Billy, Big Boy, Titus, Nero, Allen, and Paul. Gerone refused to allow anyone from an animal rights group, or even newspaper reporters and photographers, to see the animals.

Although PETA continued pleading for the monkeys to be moved to a sanctuary, in April 1987 the Supreme Court upheld lower court rulings that PETA lacked legal standing to sue for custody. The following month, less than a year after taking custody of the animals, Gerone recommended that eight be put to death as “the humane thing to do.” PETA and its allies were outraged. Newkirk charged that the monkeys “had been through hell and back” and deserved to be with “people who care about them.” NIH rebuffed the requests throughout 1988—for it had been presented with an intriguing proposal.

In connection with a paper sent to the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
on February 22, 1988, the neuroscientists Mortimer Mishkin and Tim Pons of the National Institute of Mental Health suggested that the Silver Spring monkeys perform one last service for science. When humane considerations require that one of the animals be euthanized, they said, let scientists first examine its brain in search of evidence that the cortex had reorganized after twelve years of being deprived of sensory input from one limb or more. The Silver Spring monkeys, which had been deafferented when they were three or four years old, were a unique resource, the scientists argued. As NIH’s William Raub told a reporter, “The Silver Spring monkeys were the first animals ever…in which so large an area of the brain—namely, the region corresponding to the map of an entire forelimb—had been devoid of its normal sensory input for as long as a decade.” Throughout the 1980s and even earlier, as we’ll see in the next chapter, scientists had been documenting cortical remapping in the brains of adult
primates.
Cortical remapping
is what happens when an area of the brain that once processed sensation from, say, a thumb now processes input from a finger. In earlier studies, Pons and Mishkin found that the brains of seven macaques had been remapped in that the cortical representation of the hand had been taken over by the foot. But the remapping generally being reported by other studies was minuscule: the distance between the old representation and the new was usually on the order of only a couple of millimeters. By examining the brains of the Silver Spring monkeys, Pons and Mishkin hoped to determine whether cortical remapping occurred to a greater extent than anyone had previously reported.