Subject: Always Mount a Scratch Monkey
Date: Wednesday, 3 September 1986 16:46-EDT
From: "Art Evans" <Evans@TL-20B.ARPA>
To: Risks@CSL.SRI.COM

In another forum that I follow, one corespondent always adds the comment

Always Mount a Scratch Monkey

after his signature. In response to a request for explanation, he replied somewhat as follows. Since I'm reproducing without permission, I have disguised a few things.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My friend Bud used to be the intercept man at a computer vendor for calls when an irate customer called. Seems one day Bud was sitting at his desk when the phone rang.

Bud: Hello. Voice: YOU KILLED MABEL!!
B: Excuse me? V: YOU KILLED MABEL!!

This went on for a couple of minutes and Bud was getting nowhere, so he decided to alter his approach to the customer.

B: HOW DID I KILL MABEL? V: YOU PM’ED MY MACHINE!!

Well to avoid making a long story even longer, I will abbreviate what had happened. The customer was a Biologist at the University of Blah-de-blah, and he had one of our computers that controlled gas mixtures that Mabel (the monkey) breathed. Now Mabel was not your ordinary monkey. The University had spent years teaching Mabel to swim, and they were studying the effects that different gas mixtures had on her physiology. It turns out that the repair folks had just gotten a new Calibrated Power Supply (used to calibrate analog equipment), and at their first opportunity decided to calibrate the D/A converters in that computer. This changed some of the gas mixtures and poor Mabel was asphyxiated. Well Bud then called the branch manager for the repair folks:

Manager: Hello
B: This is Bud, I heard you did a PM at the University of Blah-de-blah.
M: Yes, we really performed a complete PM. What can I do for You?
B: Can You Swim?

The moral is, of course, that you should always mount a scratch monkey.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There are several morals here related to risks in use of computers. Examples include, “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.” However, the cautious philosophical approach implied by “always mount a scratch monkey” says a lot that we should keep in mind.

Art Evans
Tartan Labs

Scratch Monkey Story
11 February 1987

This morning, I spoke for an hour with Laura Creighton, who wrote the device driver for the equipment between the monkeys and the computer. This incident happened at the University of Toronto in late November of 1979 or 1980. The zoology department had used digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters in a large number of experiments, including attempting to synthesize pheromones to reduce breeding of beetles that fed on tobacco crops, some rat neurological experiments, and some cricket behavior/population studies. The rat experiments involved implanting electrodes in the rats’ brains, and the rats experienced some pain. The Humane Society learned of this and raised complaints, resulting in the shutting down of the zoology department for a day while the experiment was stopped. The University of Toronto has the third or fourth most respected zoology department in the world and wanted to maintain that prestige, so there was lots of screaming to avoid having such a thing happening again.

The various data from the experiments was collected by PDP-11/05 front ends and sent to an 11/44. Laura Creighton had written the software for this, fixing a problem they had previously with the 11/44 not being fast enough to collect the data by itself. This was being done for 16 to 18 experiments.

The folks in the physiology section of the Department of Medicine (separate from Science, which contained the zoology department) had bought their first VAX, an 11/780, and wanted a similar set-up. So Laura Creighton and the zoology department agreed to set up their software for this. The physiology people decided not to use 11/05s in between, since the VAX was fast enough to handle the data. So five monkeys were fitted with caps intended to sense brain waves, and the caps were attached to various A-to-D and D-to-A converters (which were US Army surplus from 1956) which were in turn connected to the VAX. This connection was piggybacked on a disk drive (pre-RL02), which contained a disk and was mounted read-only – the read-only button was pressed and taped over with a warning not to remove it. In normal operation, software would read data from that drive and write it to a regular disk. The room containing the monkeys was several stories removed from the computer room.

After some time, the VAX crashed. It was on a service contract, and Digital was called. Laura Creighton was not called although she was on the short list of people who were supposed to be called in case of problem. The Digital Field Service engineer came in, removed the disk from the drive, figured it was then okay to remove the tape and make the drive writeable, and proceeded to put a scratch disk into the drive and run diagnostics which wrote to that drive.

Well, diagnostics for disk drives are designed to shake up the equipment. But monkey brains are not designed to handle the electrical signals they received. You can imagine the convulsions that resulted. Two of the monkeys were stunned, and three died. The Digital engineer needed to be calmed down; he was going to call the Humane Society. This became known as the Great Dead Monkey Project, and it leads of course to the aphorism I use as my motto: You should not conduct tests while valuable monkeys are connected, so “Always mount a scratch monkey.”

Laura Creighton points out that although this is told as a gruesomely amusing story, three monkeys did lose their lives, and there are lessons to be learned in treatment of animals and risk management. Particularly, the sign on the disk drive should have explained why the drive should never have been enabled for write access.

— edp [Eric Postpischil]

Date: 5 May 2007
From: <name withheld>
Subject: Re: scratch monkey

The dead monkeys are real, but the story has been garbled. How I remember this – and it’s been over 20 years now – is like this:

I was working for the <institution> Department of Zoology. We didn’t do any experiments with monkeys. You need special permits for that in <country>, which are very hard to get. We didn’t have any. We did, however, have permits to allow experimentation on rats, including neurological experiments on the brains of rats. Those rats had sensors – electrodes – directly implanted in their brains.

This is all very crude and ugly work. Whoever coined the expression “this isn’t brain surgery” has a much higher opinion of the skill required for brain surgery than I have based on what I learned at this point of time.

We read data from the electrodes into a CAMAC crate and there was a complicated way to get the data from the CAMAC crate into a pdp 11/05. From there we could get the data into the 11/44 that was our timesharing system at that time. Note that the computer problem we were solving only involved reading data from the electrodes. Nobody wanted to control the electrodes so that they could administer shocks via the computer.When the electrode manufacturer came out with a new version of the equipment, it looked as if we could do away with the CAMAC crate, which would have been a real blessing. I wrote a driver for the thing, and this was based on a v6 unix disk driver. I can no longer remember why I thought that a disk driver was a good model for an electrode sensor driver, though I remember that the sensors had a block mode and a character mode. For 18 year old me, that may have been enough. It could also have been curiosity – I had written 2 tape drivers and a printer driver, and had hacked on a driver for DH-11s, and may have wanted to do something else.

The driver worked well enough, but for the defect that it was un-interruptable. The electrode equipment had no buffering. When it wanted to write something, you really had to give it the whole unibus and lock out everything else including the clock until it was done. This was unacceptable for a time sharing system, and that was where the problem stood. Naturally, we never tested it on any animals.

At this point the professor who was doing the rat experiments decided to take his research someplace else. We all breathed a sigh of relief and forgot all about him. In particular, I did not know that he had taken a copy of my driver with him when he left.

Skip forward a bit. Somebody, I forget where, who was doing primate brain research, with emplanted electrodes in monkey brains got a copy of my driver and modified it to work with a dedicated small Unix machine they had. The electrode manufacturer had released an even newer model, but as far as I know, even that model was not designed to deliver electric shocks on computer command. It did, however, have a self test mode and in running self tests it could deliver shocks.

And one day, a DEC service repairman really did try to run a diagnostic which involved copying data from a test diskpac into what he thought was a different drive which he had loaded with a scratch pack. But he got the volumes wrong – because they were mislabelled at the computer centre – and ended up trying to copy his diagnostic into the electrode driver, which was connected to some monkeys. This ought not to have done anything, but for some reason it did trigger the electrodes self-test mode, which was the cause of the catastrophe.

Some of the monkeys received shocks and at least one of them died. As I recall some of the electrode equipment was made unusable as well, which means it may have been the heat rather than the electricity which was fatal. To make matters worse, the tests were being done at a time when the researchers and the animal technicians who most closely worked with the monkeys were not around. And the monkeys, of course, weren’t in the machine room, but on a different floor of the building. Thus the fact that the monkeys were in distress was not noticed until people came to work the next day. At which point, and rightly so, all hell broke loose and everybody involved in the project was in for a lot of blame, including me because my name was in the comments for the driver.

I’m still pretty embarrassed about the whole thing.

<name withheld>

With last monkeys dead, U of T sees a shift in animal research
JAMES BRADSHAW
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Last updated Friday, Feb. 17 2012, 9:55 AM EST

The University of Toronto’s last two research monkeys are dead and gone, euthanized less than three weeks ago after seven years of experiments into movement and pain in the human mouth.

Treating a medical mosaic, doctors develop a new appreciation for the role of ethnicity in disease The use of “non-human primates” for research has steadily dwindled at U of T, down from about seven a year in the 1990s, as much for logistical reasons as ethical sensitivities.

And while U of T won’t close the book on primate research entirely, the school is clearly shifting away from using monkeys to advance science, a contentious issue debate that has at times been marred by violence and threats.

“We have no more monkeys, fortunately,” said Peter Lewis, U of T’s associate vice-president, research. “We have no intention at the moment of using non-human primates.”

The last two monkeys were macaques used to investigate the brain’s mechanisms for sensory and motor functions in the face and mouth, like chewing or swallowing, and pain pathways between them. The researchers consider the results crucial to understanding why some people’s bodies can’t adapt when their “oral environment” changes – if they lose a few teeth, or suffer a stroke, which can often impair a person's ability to speak.

Although the monkeys had electrodes implanted in their brains to stimulate and record brain activity, the lead researcher, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to past pressure from animal rights groups, insists they were not in pain.

“Any pain studies we do are done in rodents,” he said.

Last week, five U of T graduate students in primatology wrote an appeal to U of T that the monkeys be allowed to live out their lives in an animal sanctuary, hoping they might still be alive. That wasn’t possible, Dr. Lewis said, because the researchers needed to dissect the animals’ brains to verify the right parts had been stimulated.

“It was always the intention for this study that, in the end, the animals needed to be sacrificed,” he said.

Erica Tennenhouse, one of the primatology students, is glad to see U of T moving away from animal research, having read studies describing other laboratory macaques so distressed they bit themselves and pulled their own hair.

“I think monkeys are simply too intelligent and emotional to be subjected to these types of experiments and living conditions,” she said.

But university veterinarian George Harapa paints a different picture of the monkeys’ lives: they were kept in large cages where they could interact with each other and staff, and had “enrichments” like televisions and puzzle boards.

“The oversight is tremendously different than it used to be,” he said.

Dr. Harapa joined U of T in 1977, when standards were much looser. For 40 years, the rules set by the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC) have grown ever stricter, but to U of T Animal Rights Club organizer Paul York, they’re still too weak. He points to documents showing the university conducted more than 200 “category D” experiments in 2010 – those causing animals of various types “moderate to severe distress or discomfort.”

Mr. York also thinks the CCAC is an “industry-led body” that lacks credibility, but Dr. Harapa defended its “peer review” role: “We’re certainly not in bed with them – quite the opposite,” he said.

Public information on university animal research is scarce, and schools are squeamish about discussing it for fear of reprisals – in the 1980s, U of T laboratories were vandalized and fire-bombed. “I’ve even had death threats,” Dr. Harapa said, “and I’m a veterinarian.”

Decades have passed since many of Canada’s larger universities last housed research primates, and although the University of British Columbia holds a small number of small monkeys for experiments on diseases like Parkinson’s, none are being carried out now.

Across the country, Dr. Harapa has watched the appetite for research primates waning. Their cost and availability are factors, and universities do feel some ethical pressure, he said. “But the main reason is that people have just adopted other animals for their experimental needs – mostly rats and mice.”