When the Control Becomes the Specimen in a Chimpanzee to Human Experiment
This is a research that happened in 1931, but although the date is far, we are going to be learning about what happened with a child that was separated from his sister, never to be united again. You would assume that it is a painful thing to be separated from ones sibling after being inseparable in the last 270 days but then his parents forcefully gave him the sister in the first place. The sister had a very strong influence on the boy child that they had to be separated.
The boy was forced to accept a baby chimpanzee as a sister, and they began to live together. This was done by his parent Winthrop and Luella Kellogg who brought home a 71/2 month old chimpanzee named Gua to the house to meet their son Donald Winthrop. His father was a psychologist that worked with dolphins, rat, mice, and other mice but his most famous research was the one performed on his child which he named "The Ape and the Child. A study of Environmental Influence Upon Early Behavior".
The father has had this research in his mind in 1927 when he was a grad student in Columbia University. Prior to their book, there was a book titled 'Wolf-Children and Feral man. The American Journal of psychology studying 'Wolf children' in India". This book was written by Reverend J.A.L Singh, and he went to look for the Bengali Cryptid which has the limbs of humans and the white face of a ghost but then found a wolf den with three wolves, two cubs and two ghostly figure that lived with the wolves. They were humans and the mother protected her cubs and the humans in her den.
Although, he was able to bring the girls to the community, they were unable to integrate into society and the younger who was 18 months died after a year, while the elder one who was 8 years was able to learn a few words and died in 1929, which was 2 years after she was found. While this story has a lot of controversies and is still being debunked. But this would have been the push for the experiment since it made rounds in the year.
Since humans were able to act like wolves, the research by Kelloggs was to look if animals were capable of human cognitive abilities, and speech. So in other words, they were looking for a civilized animal. They were going to treat this animal as a child where she was going to be washed, fed upon a bottle and given characteristically human environment. They intended to speak with him like a normal human.
They will test both the Chimpanzee and the child. While they had lots of tests, they also took Gesell Tests for Pre-school Children. They were going to check out their developmental, Alphanumeric,linguistic comprehension, Visuo-Spatial test, and Socio-adaptive test. When checking both the Donald and Gua, it was seen that Gua was able to use eat on his own at 13 months while Donald wasn't until 18 months.
They were both tested for scribbling, vocalization, depth Perception, Reflexes, Blood Pressure, Memory, Body Size, Strength, Reaction to Tickling, Locomotion, Problem Solving, Fears, Manual Dexterity, Language, Grasping, Comprehension, Equilibrium, Obedience, Climbing, Play Behavior, and so on. They were doing lots of tests where they assume that Donald was the control while Gua was the Specimen. It is funny that they stopped the experiment after 9 months but didn't specify why they stopped it.
While there were many speculations on why the experiment was stopped, one that is looks like a possibility is the fact that instead of Gua to learn from Donald, it was the other way round. This means that it was showing an opposite result compared to what they were experimenting for.
Read More
https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news
https://archive.org/details/ComparativeTestsHumanChimpInfant
https://ia804706.us.archive.org/32
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24966858
https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/10/archival_objects/3382171
Image Reference
https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/20219764820
https://www.peakpx.com/590920/statue-of-a-gorilla
Why will someone use their child for such experiment. You see, there are a lot of things that people do in the name of science and then I ask if it is ethical?
Lots of unethical things have been done in science, especially before the 1970s. Well, I doubt it might be allowed in our world today but when it comes to science, so many things are possible.
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