The First Fight For Animal Right
A Redemption That Came Too Late
Since 1950s, brain scientist Roger W. Sperry had been working on split-brains.
For sake of science, Sperry split apart the two halves of the brains of his lab monkeys and studied their behaviors. His monkeys showed that each half of their brains could still learn new things. But each half did not share its learning with the other half.
Sperry later located some human patients whose brains have been similarly split into two halves — to treat them of their severe epilepsy. He found an identical pattern in these patients. Each of their brain hemisphere had its own world of consciousness and was entirely independent of the other with regard to learning and retention.
Finally, in the winter of 1981, the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, chose Sperry to receive one-half of that year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his three decades of work on split-brains.
Threshold: Violation of the Silver Spring monkeys
In the summer of the same year, 1981, Alexander Pacheco went to work as an unpaid volunteer at the Institute for Behavioral Research (IBR) in Silver Spring, Maryland. This was a federally funded research facility. And the scientist who ran it was Dr Edward Taub — a psychologist and researcher who loved doing animal experiments, and had a record of securing nearly 15 federal grants for eighteen years of his work with monkeys.
The 23-year-old Pacheco, son of a doctor who wanted to be a Catholic priest, walked into a place that was an animal hell on earth.
Sixteen macaques and one rhesus were kept jammed into small, rusty wire-cages roughly 18 inches wide. Many kept their arms hanging out. The air in the lab stank foul with urine, feces, and rotting flesh of these monkeys.
Pacheco soon discovered that in 9 of these seventeen animals, the scientists had cut off the sensory nerves leading from their arms to their brains, a process called deafferentation. This made one or two of their arms go limp and useless.
