The Koyal Group Info Mag: How A Failed Experiment On Rats Sparked

A Billion-Dollar Infant-Care Breakthrough

WASHINGTON -- At a research lab at Duke University Department of Pharmacology in 1979, a

group of scientists sparked a major breakthrough in infant care from a failed experiment on
rats.
At the time, Dr. Saul Schanberg, a neuroscientist and physician, was running tests on just-born
rats to measure growth-related markers (enzymes and hormones) in their brains. Together with
Dr. Cynthia Kuhn and lab technician Gary Evoniuk, he kept getting weird results. With the rat
pups separated from their mothers in order to run the experiments, their growth markers kept
registering at low levels.
The team varied the trials. They used an anesthetized mother rat to feed the pups during and
after the experimentation, and tried keeping the pups and mother in the same cage but with a
divider to see if a lack of pheromones was the problem.
The experiment failed, Kuhn recalled.
So the team approached it from another angle. Instead of stabilizing the rat pups so they could
run tests, they tried to figure out what was wrong with the pups in the first place. From a
friend, Kuhn had heard theories that massaging the pups could produce positive results.
Evoniuk, meanwhile, had watched mother rats groom their pups by vigorously licking them. He
proposed doing essentially the same thing, minus the tongue.

The team began using a wet brush to rub the rat pups at different pressure levels. Eventually,
they found the right one, and on cue, the deprivation effect was reversed.
"I said, 'Lets give it a shot,' and it worked the first time and the second time," recalled Evoniuk.
"It was just the touch.
Though they had no way of knowing it, Schanbergs team had taken the first step in a process
that would see the upending of conventional wisdom when it came to post-natal care. Three
and a half decades later, the theories that his team stumbled upon by failure would save an
estimated billions of dollars in medical costs and affect countless young parents lives.
On Thursday night, the team will be rewarded for its work. A coalition of business, university
and scientific organizations will present the Golden Goose Award to them and other
researchers with similar successful projects. It is a prize given for the purpose of shining a light
on how research with odd-sounding origins (really, massaging rat pups?) can produce
groundbreaking results. More broadly, its meant to showcase the importance of federally
funded scientific research.
The work done by Schanbergs team is inextricably tied to the support of taxpayers -- not just
because the group operated from a grant of approximately $273,000 from the National
Institutes of Health. As Kuhn and Evoniuk both argued, the breakthrough they were able to
produce never could have happened with a private funding source. The demand for an
immediate result or for profit wouldnt have allowed them to pivot off the initial failure.
It is not a straight path from point A to point B, said Evoniuk. There are all kinds of weird
little detours. We were really following a detour from where this work started. The federal
funding gave people like Saul the ability to follow their scientific instincts and try to find the
answers to interesting questions that popped up.
As Congress members head back to their districts before the midterm elections, fights over
science funding appear to be low on the list of priorities. The two parties are in the midst of an
informal truce, having put in place budget caps this past winter. And no one seems particularly
eager to disrupt that truce, even if science advocates warn it needs upending.
While NIH's funding increased this year from last year, when sequestration forced an estimated
$1.55 billion reduction, it still fell $714 million short of pre-sequestration levels. Adjusted for
inflation, it was lower than every year but President George W. Bush's first year in office.
Surveying the climate, the American Academy for Arts & Science released a report this week
showing that the United States "has slipped to tenth place" among economically advanced
nations in overall research and development investment as a percentage of GDP. For science

advocates, it was another sobering cause for alarm. Young researchers, they argue, are leaving
the field or country. Projects that could yield tremendous biomedical breakthroughs aren't
getting off the ground.
Looming over the Golden Goose awards ceremony is this reality: Would an experiment testing
rat-pup massages ever survive this political climate? Would it be admonished as waste by
deficit hawks in Congress?
Researchers massaging rats sounds strange, but oddball science saves lives, said Rep. Jim
Cooper (D-Tenn.), who is participating in the awards ceremony. In this instance, premature
babies got a healthier start. If Congress abandons research funding, we could miss the next
unexpected breakthrough.
NIH funding was certainly critical to the successful research behind rat-pup massages. "Without
the NIH none of this would have happened, zero," said Kuhn.
But serendipity also played a role. Not long after he made his discovery, Schanberg was at an
NIH study section with Tiffany Field, a psychologist at the University of Miami School of
Medicine. Field had also been doing research -- also funded by the NIH -- on massage therapies
for prematurely born babies. But she was getting poor results.
"We were just sharing our data, basically," Field recalled of that conversation. "I was telling him
we were having trouble getting any positive effects with the preemies. He talked about how
his lab technician had an eureka experiment when he saw his mother's tongue licking the
babies."
The conclusion reached was that Field probably wasn't massaging the premature babies hard
enough. Instead of applying "moderate pressure" (as Schanberg had been doing) she was
applying more of a "soft stroking."
A study done on rats became a study on humans. Field changed up her experiment and began
to see results right away. Instead of the discomfort felt from that tickle-like sensation, the
moderate pressure had a tonic effect, stimulating receptors. Babies' heart rates slowed down;
the preemies seemed more relaxed; they were able to absorb food and gain weight; there was
more evidence of growth hormone; an increase in insulin; greater bone density; and greater
movement of the GI tract. The magnitude of the finding was enormous.
"We published the data and we actually did a cost-benefit analysis at that point and
determined we could save $4.8 billion per year by massaging all the preemies, because of all
the significant cost savings for the hospital," Field recalled.

Her conclusion challenged the prevailing sentiment of the time that prematurely born babies
should be left in incubators, fed intravenously, and not touched immediately after birth lest
they become agitated and potentially harmed. But few people listened.
"The only person who paid attention to it was Hillary Clinton," she recalled, noting that Clinton,
who was working on a health care reform initiative as First Lady, expressed interest in the
research.
Since then, however, conceptions of post-natal care have changed. Subsequent studies have
confirmed Field's findings, though others have questioned whether there is enough research or
the proper methodology to draw sweeping conclusions. Nevertheless, whereas few people
used massage therapies in the '80s and '90s, as of eight years ago 38 percent of natal care units
were using those therapies, said Fields. The method is estimated to save $10,000 per infant -roughly $4.7 billion a year.
Those involved in the research still marvel that the chain of events started with a failed
experiment on rats and turned on a fortuitous meeting between two scientists.
"We didnt set out to figure out how to improve nursing care," said Kuhn. "But we wound up
saving a lot of money and helped babies grow better, their cognitive outcome was better, they
got out of the [intensive care units] sooner. There was no downside."
"One thing led to another," said Evoniuk. "We were just kind of following an interesting
question not thinking we were going to change medical practice."
Schanberg won't be around to receive his Golden Goose award Thursday night. He died in 2009,
and his granddaughter will accept on his behalf. But those who worked with him say that his
research remains a testament to the good results that an inquisitive mind and a respectable
funding stream can produce. It's a story that scientists may find uplifting.
But it doesn't necessarily have a happy ending.
In the aftermath of her work with Schanberg, Field continued studying natal care, starting the
Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami in 1992 with the help from the NIH and
Johnson & Johnson. Her work has been widely cited in medical journals and newspaper articles.
But the funding streams have run dry, and now she's faced with the prospect of dramatically
narrowing the scope of her lifelong work.

"We are faced with having to close the institute because we dont have any NIH grants," she
said. "It used to be a third of us would get the grants. Now they are funding at something like
the seventh percentile."