Virtue, Vice, and "Voracious" Science: How should we approach the ethics of primate research?

From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Harry F. Harlow's primate laboratory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison undertook a series of studies on infant rhesus macaque monkeys that gained the attention of both animal welfare advocates and the scientific community.1 Establishing one of the first primate research laboratories in 1932, Harlow began his career as a primate researcher by studying primate learning capabilities and shredding previous assumptions within psychology that primates were restricted to the conditioned learning of a rat. As his need for subjects in particular age ranges and easily susceptible to study grew in the 1950s, he again broke research ground by establishing a captive breeding...