Monkey love.

This programme looks at the life and work of Harry Harlow who revolutionised the way we raise our children. Biographers, his children, former colleagues and psychologists contribute to the story of his success and the controversies surrounding his work. Most troubling were his psychological experiments on young monkeys which although undoubtedly enhanced our understanding of the power of an infant's attachment to its mother, also paved the way for the animal rights movement - if monkeys are so close to us that they can feel and think, then do we have the right to torture them pschologically as Harlow did? Harlow's initial work was to encourage love and touch between a human mother and her infant and these first experiments with monkeys were reasonably innocuous. For instance, to prove the importance of touch he created a set of 'surrogate' mothers for his monkeys which either had milk or were cloth-covered and comforting - given a choice every time the monkeys opted for the cloth-covered surrogate. But his experiments rapidly developed a darker side in which he believed to understand a heart is to break it. He inflicted a range of cruelties on the young primates including their beloved surrogate mothers suddenly piercing them with sharp needles, a 'rape rack' for antisocial monkeys to be forced into copulation, and worst of all the 'chamber of despair' in which a monkey would be isolated for up to a year while Harlow observed, seeking the moment that the monkey was completely 'psychologically broken.' Alongside these darker experiments Harlow's second wife was diagnosed with cancer and he turned to alcohol. As the 1970s arrived along with women's rights and animal rights groups he became more and more provocative in his public addresses, often beginning a lecture with an enormous film of copulating monkeys. Later he developed Parkinsons disease and suffered a stroke which killed him in 1981.