Love at Goon Park (5 page)

The central Stanford campus is a beautiful, arrogant place. Frederick Law Olmstead, designer of New York City's Central Park, laid out the university's landscaping. Boston-based architects were chosen to give the buildings an old Italian elegance. The resulting main quadrangle is brilliant with red tile roofs, fringed palm trees and, of course, the dancing, luminous light that refracts off the nearby Pacific Ocean. It illuminates the old campus. It washes over the Memorial
Church, over its Venetian glass murals and sternly carved Victorian moral sayings: “A noble ambition is among the most helpful influences of student life and the higher this ambition is, the better.”

Harry tried to walk quietly around Stanford's elegant passageways and shining exhortations and, oh yes, the self-styled geniuses who ran the department of psychology. As a graduate student, he worked directly under Calvin Stone, an animal behaviorist and editor of the respected
Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology,
and Walter Miles, a vision expert who would eventually design night goggles for World War II fliers. Stone and Miles, in turn, worked under Lewis Terman, the flamboyant, red-haired, ultraconfident developer of the Stanford Binet IQ test who served as the department's chairman. Harry considered these three men—in both positive and negative ways—the fathers of his passion for the science as it existed and of his desire to change it.

He always called Walter Miles his moral mentor—although that was partly affection. Miles liked Harry, too. He went out of his way to give the young psychologist extra support. When Harry's money started running out—and he was reluctant to demand even more sacrifices from home—Miles gave Harry a job. Miles kept a colony of rats in the garage of his Palo Alto home. Harry would hurry over to his professor's home after a day of classes and help run the rats through experiments. He became friendly with the professor's family; although, as he noted, not too friendly: “From time to time Dr. Miles' disarmingly beautiful daughter dropped in and chatted on her way home from high school. Dr. Miles gently discouraged this platonic pursuit. He had higher aspirations for his daughter and so did she.”

Harry was unoffended, and, frankly, uninterested. He was far more focused on making it through Stanford than on pursuing high school students. Although his brother Robert used to laugh about the girls that Harry had yearned over in Fairfield, at Stanford he didn't pursue any serious relationships. He was turning into Harry Harlow, beginning to develop the tunnel vision—not Israel uber alle, but psychology before all—that would also characterize him through
much of his life. And he learned, from the ways that Miles tried to help him, that colleagues could also be family.

Harry's major professor, Stone, was neither warm nor nurturing nor familial. But he was a scientist through and through. Stone approached his students almost as he did his experiments: with absolute insistence on getting it right. He was a dedicated believer in the animal model. Most of Stone's research was done in rabbits and rats. He studied the effects of brain damage on the sexual behavior of rabbits. He looked at the influence of diet on the sexual responses of albino rats. He explored the learning abilities of castrated rats, and whether food or water was more likely to inspire a rat to escape. Stone was clinical, systematic, and cautious to his bone marrow. He was widely respected as a meticulous observer who built his scientific cases detail by solid detail.

He and Harry were a near perfect mismatch of temperaments.

Stone used to tell his students that good researchers “will push the domain of science forward inch by inch.” Harry hated the thought. He wanted to leap. Never mind inch by inch, Harry used to pun; his professor was going to pursue scientific inquiry stone by stone. Stone expected only orderly science. Another of his Ph.D. students, William Mason, who would later do postgraduate work with Harry, recalls doing a study for Stone and, being in a hurry, hastily scribbling his findings on whatever piece of paper he could find. Stone, frowning, called him aside: “Mason, we do not record data on scraps.”

Years later, Harry hadn't forgotten an encounter with Stone when “I was almost bleeding to death from a lab accident and met him in the hall.” Stone promptly began a detailed discussion of an experiment, describing apparatus design and testing plans while Harry “wondered how long it would be before he would notice the blood all over my hand and my gown. Finally, he looked down and said, ‘Oh, bitten by a rat, eh?' You see, he was methodical; he wasn't jarred by the fact that a person was bleeding to death.”

There's no doubt, anyway, that Stone would never have spun a small rat bite into a near-death injury. Things were what they were.
And if he didn't teach the habit of storytelling out of Harry, he did teach him a lifelong respect for doing the research properly, for lining up facts with precision. Stone's students agree that even if he was chilly personally, he radiated a love of good science. He did his best to teach that, too. Harry and his professor maintained respectful relations; when Stone retired as editor of the
Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology,
he successfully recommended that Harry take over the job. When Stone died, it was Mason who wrote the professional tribute and Harry who encouraged him to “use some of that Lincolnesque style of yours, Mason,” in praising their former professor. Years later, Harry was still joking about Stone and the rat bite incident, telling a magazine interviewer that his old professor was basically a good man and that “he probably went out and bawled the hell out of the rat.”

Stone directed Harry's Ph.D. dissertation, a 170-page exploration of feeding habits in baby rats. The study was classic Stone, completely and obsessively thorough about what infant rodents liked to drink, when, where, and how. Harry was polite in thanking Stone for his “consideration, his suggestions and his consistently stimulating interest in this investigation.” But one of Harry's fellow students, psychologist Robert Sears, suggested that the dissertation fostered a dislike of rat research that Harry never overcame. It was those hours on a “pedestrian rat problem,” under Stone's guidance, that “soured [Harry] forever on both rats” and statistical analysis, according to Sears.

Harry concurred. He used to say that he'd seen enough of rats at Stanford—in Stone's lab, in Miles's garage—to last him a lifetime. “Although I am thought of as a monkey psychologist, I'm sure that I have spent more man-hours studying rats than any two living psychologists combined.” He announced that when he took over as journal editor, he was more than ready to resist if “somebody tried to push a rat paper down my throat.” For the rest of his life, he insisted on calling psychological studies with rats “rodentology.”

Still, Harry Harlow's future glimmers in that dissertation, once you get beyond the title: “An Experimental Study of the Feeding
Reactions and Related Behavior Patterns of the Albino Rat.” The primary discovery is, as Sears pointed out, no real surprise. All those hours of research showed that rats will swallow liquids other than rat milk as long they think the taste half-way decent. If it tastes bad, they'd just as soon spit it out. The rats in Harry's study would accept whole and diluted cow's milk and sugar solutions. If nothing else was available, they would reluctantly make do with orange juice and even cod liver oil. The bitter taste of quinine, the sting of a weak acid solution, and the sharpness of salt solutions produced instant rejection—which meant spitting it out and squirming to get away.

Perhaps more to the point, Harry began to learn that the baby rats needed constant “mothering,” including guidance in how much food they should take. In his first cows' milk test, he fed the rats every three hours, which turned out to be not nearly enough. One of his little rats died of malnutrition. In dismay, he doubled the feeding schedule. This turned out to be too much. The baby rats happily sucked down all the milk but, by the tenth day, all of them were dead from overfeeding. Being a parent—even the scientific surrogate for a lactating rat mother—clearly required knowledge and experience, including when to say “Enough.” It also raised another question.

Are there conditions that inhibit feeding, that simply turn off all that natural greed and hunger? Harry tried some simple experiments in temperature. Rat families were placed on a glass floor, which could be alternatively chilled with ice cubes or warmed by an electric heating pad. He discovered that too much cold simply froze the feeding process. If they were chilly, the little rats just wouldn't eat. It was as if they were numbed to a standstill. Curiously, though, warming the floor didn't improve their feeding habits, either. The baby rats were likely to just huddle down into the warmth. They needed to be cared for, coaxed by something more than the ambient temperature. Mother rats, as it turns out, squash their infants firmly between their own bodies and the nest while the babies eat. The warmth, the sense of being wedged into a big family pancake of sorts, seems to help stir up the hunger response. Scientists could manipulate
eyedroppers and drip milk and juice and sugar-water down the throats of baby rats, but glass instruments weren't nearly as productive as the simple act of being sat on by a mother rat.

The next set of experiments was not pedestrian at all, although it's not clear that anyone involved really appreciated the potential. Neither Harry nor Stone followed up on the results. They were, though, a haunting testament to mother nature. Harry built a device in which mothers and baby rats were separated by a mesh barrier with small holes cut into it, large enough for the newborn rats to squeeze through, but not the mothers. Lost and bewildered, on the wrong side of the mesh, the babies crawled in aimless circles. The mother rats, on the other hand, weren't aimless at all. They were desperate to get to their pups. They would bite the mesh angrily, try to force their way through the too-small holes; and when the barrier was removed, they immediately began collecting the young. Even if the mothers were hungry, even if food was placed temptingly before them, they would first gather their families to safety. Then they would eat.

What lay behind the intensity of this response, the imperative riptide pull of mother toward child? Was it a simple sensory reflex? At Stone's direction, Harry removed ovaries, blinded the female rats, and removed their olfactory bulbs. Sightless, hormone-deprived—it didn't matter. The mother rats crawled determinedly toward the baby rats. They were slower, maybe, but the homing instinct was magnetic, needle to the north.

On the title page of Harry's dissertation, directly under that stuffy title, is one more, very different clue about the author's future direction. The paper is credited not to Harry Frederick Israel of Fairfield, Iowa, but to Harry Frederick Harlow of Palo Alto, California. And, to understand that change—the disappearance of
Israel uber alle—
one needs to appreciate both the strength of Harry's dreams and the extraordinary presence and influence of Lewis M. Terman.

Terman was a luminary in the still new field of psychology. He knew it, his colleagues knew it, the university knew it. Let him fall ill and the Stanford administration paid anxious attention. In 1926,
when Terman canceled a trip to the East Coast due to influenza, the university president, Ray Lyman Wilbur, responded with a solicitous note: “I am sorry to learn that you have not been entirely well, but am glad that you are taking care of yourself.” At Stanford in the 1920s, Terman wasn't just a famous and innovative researcher, he was also a powerful one. It was
his
psychology department and everyone—down to the lowliest student—knew that.

To paint Terman as pure autocrat would be misleading. Like Miles, he considered his students an extended family and he paid attention to them. He could be disarmingly affectionate. He and his wife, Anna, visited a graduate student, Jessie Linton, in the hospital after she had given birth to her first child. They both demanded to hold the baby. Linton recalled teasing her professor, saying she thought men didn't like to be handed small, squirmy infants. “That's what you think,” Terman replied, cuddling the child to him. He would take students on picnics to celebrate their achievements. He held weekly seminars at his house, open to undergraduate students if they were interested. He charmed and he listened and he prodded and if he saw any promise in you at all, he would push you relentlessly to exceed. “Terman was entirely different from Stone,” Harry said, “He was out to find the creative and he took great pride in that.”

By the time Harry Israel arrived at Stanford, Terman was in his mid–forties, his red hair flecked with gray, his face wonderfully rumpled, his health uncertain, his vision straight ahead. Terman's particular research focused on human intelligence. Tests to “measure” intelligence had begun to appear in the late nineteenth century, both in the United States and Europe; many psychologists believed that such examinations were yet another way to demonstrate that their field was growing into a precise, documented, quantifiable branch of science.

Terman used the intelligence test as a probe, a research tool to assess human potential. He had adapted the test for the purpose. An earlier version, created by French psychologist Alfred Binet, had been more of teacher's aid. Binet saw his test as a way to pick out children who needed extra tutoring, to better tailor their schooling to
their needs. But Terman saw it differently; less compassionately, maybe, and more clinically. Terman refocused the exam into a purer test of analytical talent. The improved version measured such things as one's ability to think through the angles of a triangle or solve that well-known problem of two trains approaching a station at different speeds. Terman had little interest in judging whether students were being taught properly. He cared about their native intelligence, their innate capability to reason through a challenging problem. He did hope that his test would someday allow society to sort people by their abilities. Perhaps children could then be taught in accordance with their talents. That way, the brightest could be made even brighter. But he didn't believe that improving teaching was the primary issue because, frankly, he believed people were born smart—or were not.