"Love at Goon Park" by Deborah Blum

What were the results? If the monkey babies could, they clung to their "monster" mothers even harder, scurrying back even when thrown off, showing the dummy mothers even more love than before, with increasing vigor, begging to be accepted and risking physical pain again and again. With real mothers, the results were the same: "No matter how abusive the mothers were, the babies persisted in returning," wrote Harlow.

Harry Harlow was determined to go as far as possible to understand the darker side of love. He observed how his ill-raised monkeys, many of them psychopathic, behaved, especially when raising their own young. (They would crush their babies' skulls and chew off their toes.) Inspired by what he saw in his dysfunctional subjects, Harlow sought to unmask the neglect and loneliness he believed to be the cause of depression, a condition he felt "results from social separation when the subject loses something of significance, has nothing with which to replace the loss, and is incapable of altering this predicament by its own actions."

Harlow placed monkeys in a featureless, vertical isolation chamber that he called "the pit of despair" for a month. These monkeys would emerge psychologically ruined, unable to function in normal monkey society. Why did Harlow inflict such patently terrible suffering by secluding living things at the bottom of what even he called a dungeon? "Because that's how it feels when you're depressed," Harlow said.

According to Blum, Harlow was all too familiar with depression and isolation, although, except for a brief stint at a mental hospital, the scientist never spent time rotting in an actual pit. Blum suggests that Harlow was profoundly lonely after his divorce from his first wife in 1946, after 14 years of marriage: "We aren't meant to be alone," Harlow said. "Isolation is only a punishment." But from Blum's too-hazy depiction, it's hard to conclude that Harlow's personal life directly affected his professional endeavors. His first marriage -- a failure due to his neglect of his wife and two children -- is covered in a disappointing handful of pages.

Harlow remarried in 1948 and was a better husband and father the second time around. Did Harlow's experiments on love and childhood force him to face his own inadequacies as a parent? That's difficult to say for sure, but what's clear is that, while losing his second wife to cancer and corrosively depressed, stumbling around drunk, cigarettes burning down to his fingers, Harlow began to conduct his harsher isolation and depression experiments.

His eccentricity also devolved into deliberate provocation. When confronted by a feminist movement in full swing -- one none too happy with Harlow's suggestion that mothers need to spend a lot of time at home with their young -- Harlow shot back with caustic commentary, burying himself deeper in what seemed like chauvinistically motivated science. "Isolation-reared monkeys were forever confined to a stage of infantilism," Harlow once said, "which wasn't so bad if you were a female."

These are some of the most vivid passages in "Love at Goon Park"; when he's falling apart, Blum's Harlow comes alive. It's also at the end that Blum takes a deep breath and tackles Harlow's treatment of animals. Harlow remained unapologetic for his scientific sins -- "If my work will point this out and save only one million human children, I really can't get overly concerned about 10 monkeys" -- and his biographer seems more heartbroken about it than harshly critical. "The path to wisdom isn't well marked," she writes.

It might have been more helpful, and maybe more interesting, to consider the ethical issues of Harlow's experiments as they unfolded, as Harlow and his family of graduate students observed the destruction that science can wreak. Blum's biography has the advantage of hindsight, of knowing how important the results would be. And as much as we admire Harry Harlow, poetic doctor of maternal love at the book's beginning, we are forced to confront the dreadful question that haunts his story: How much suffering is justified by the imperatives of science? Is Harlow's legacy, our understanding of child abuse or our use of "touch therapy," worth the pain his experiments caused?

Blum's greatest feat -- more so than having written the type of cultural history that tingles with the discovery of new ideas -- is that you neither worship nor revile Harry Harlow by the end of "Love at Goon Park." You are humbled by his brilliant work, torn apart over his cruel methods and ultimately grateful to live, and love, in a post-Harlow age.

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