How Rat Massage Research Helped Save Premature Babies’ Lives
Clair Graubner/Flickr
In 1979, Gary Evoniuk, Cynthia Kuhn, and Saul Schanberg were studying rat growth hormones when they encountered an unexpected problem: When they separated the baby rats from their mothers to give them scheduled injections, the levels of the very enzyme they sought significantly dropped.
The scientists ruled out nutrition, body temperature and other factors in explaining why this happened, and soon realized that the levels dropped simply because the scientists had taken the baby away from its mother.
In order to return the hormone to normal levels, the scientists began plotting ways to mimic the physical attachment between mother and baby. As mother rats would spend a good amount of time licking and grooming their newborns, Evoniuk — apparently not wanting to lick a baby rat himself — picked up a tiny camera lens brush and began massaging the little rats with the brush. With repeated massages, the baby rats’ growth hormone production rates returned to normal levels.
Pediatric psychologist Dr. Tiffany Martini Field met with the group of scientists at a National Institutes of Health function later that year. At the time, Field was researching ways to help premature infants grow. Upon sharing notes with the rat researchers, she decided to measure the effects of massage on pre-term human babies.
The results of those tests are now widely known. Massage increased alertness and growth rates in infants, and decreased the babies’ hospital stay by an average of six days. Today, infant massage is used in 40 percent of newborn intensive care units in the U.S., and is constantly growing.
Though Field intended to save lives, not money, the use of infant massage has saved roughly $10,000 per baby in hospital stays and additional testing. Her work, facilitated by rat-massaging scientists, has ensured a better life for many premature babies past, present, and future.
Next, read about the accidental discoveries that changed the world and four of the most evil science experiments ever conducted.
