By: Barbara Smuts
Thursday, February 27, 2003


From Professor Barbara Smuts' February 2, 2003 New York Times Book Review of 'Love at Goon Park,' The Science of Love:

While studying wild baboons in Kenya, I once stumbled upon an infant baboon huddled in the corner of a cage at the local research station. A colleague had rescued him after his mother was strangled by a poacher's snare. Although he was kept in a warm, dry spot and fed milk from an eyedropper, within a few hours his eyes had glazed over; he was cold to the touch and seemed barely alive. We concluded he was beyond help. Reluctant to let him die alone, I took his tiny body to bed with me. A few hours later I was awakened by a bright-eyed infant bouncing on my stomach. My colleague pronounced a miracle. "No," Harry Harlow would have said, "he just needed a little contact comfort."

The phrase "contact comfort" was made famous through Harlow's experiments with baby rhesus monkeys at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950's and 60's. In her well-researched account of Harlow's life and work, "Love at Goon Park," Deborah Blum describes how Harlow removed newborn infants from their mothers and housed them with surrogate mothers, some made of terry cloth and some of wire. When exposed to a moving toy or a strange room, babies with cloth mothers rushed to them, buried their faces in the soft fabric and relaxed. Their peers, with only wire mothers, shook in terror against the wall. Left alone for months with only wire mothers, they pined away, staring at the world with lifeless eyes, like my orphaned baboon....

To read the full text of Smuts' review, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/books/review/02SMUTST.html?tntemail1.