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[rivka]

hobbitbabe recently posted questions about work - including asking about the oddest or most unpleasant work people had ever done. It got me thinking about my monkey job.

Then the monkeys came up in conversation today on our way home from work. "I didn't say anything about the monkeys in my list of 100 things!" I realized. "You could post an addendum," curiousangel suggested. I gave it a try:

1. I shaved the monkeys.
2. I dyed some monkeys red and green with Manic Panic hair dye. But I only did it once.

"Hey," I said. "This has potential."

So, without further ado:


1. I shaved the monkeys. I used a regular Gilette safety razor.
2. I dyed some monkeys red and green with Manic Panic hair dye. But I only did it once.
3. We carried the monkeys around in Playmate Coolers.
4. I once got in trouble with my housemates for leaving monkey blood in the refrigerator overnight.
5. I am all too familiar with the euphemism "self-mouthing."
6. The monkeys all had numbers tattooed on their arms in blue ink. No one but me seemed to think this was creepy.
7. I've spent much too much time looking after monkeys who had recently been anesthetized with ketamine to be able to conceive of that stuff as a party drug.
8. I am one of the world's experts on methods of testing infant monkeys' vision.
9. Even now, seven years later, when I see parents buying Corn Pops for their children, I am briefly shocked. That's monkey food.
10. It comforted me to reflect, from time to time, on the fact that my horrible, evil, cruel-to-the-monkeys boss used to have to jerk them off.
11. It comforted me even more to know that that would never, ever be part of my job description.

[Note: I don't really want to get into a debate about the validity of animal research. Something I once wrote about the topic can be found here. My opinion hasn't changed substantially since then.]

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

3. I am fairly curious about the methods of testing infant monkeys' vision, but not enough to hassle you about it if you don't feel like going into more detail.

How about a brief overview?

Method One took advantage of primate infants' natural preference for high-contrast patterns over plain stimuli. We had pairs of cards made, each pair having one card with black and white stripes and one "matched gray" card - meaning that it had equal luminance to the striped card. The stripes were graded from "huge" all the way down to "tiny." We presented the baby monkey with each pair of cards, and an observer who couldn't see the cards tried to decide which one the monkey preferred. If the monkey appeared to prefer a striped card 75% of the time, we assumed that it was capable of distinguishing stripes of that size. If the monkey showed approximately equal preference for stripes and greys at a given size, we assumed that the stripes looked grey - that they weren't distinguishable.

Method Two is where the shaving came in. We placed recording electrodes on the back of the monkey's scalp, over the visual cortex, and a ground electrode on the monkey's side. Then we showed the monkey a visual stimulus on a computer screen - usually rapidly alternating bars that gradually faded in contrast. We then recorded the electrical activity in the monkey's visual cortex that corresponded with the alternation. As the contrast faded to the point at which the monkey could no longer see it, there stopped being cortex activity in the rhythm of the alternation.

The major problem with both Method One and Method Two was getting the monkey to look at the goddamned stimuli. Method Two also suffers from the additional disadvantages of needing to keep the monkey still and calm for shaving and electrode application, keeping the monkey from pulling the electrodes off, and keeping the monkey from moving - because movement would produce competing electrical stimuli in the brain and thus drown out the signal from the visual stimuli. Plus, all of this had to be done without making the monkey unhappy, because an unhappy monkey will refuse to look at the goddamned stimuli.

Unsurprisingly, a single session of Method Two usually took upwards of three hours.