Anxiety study

In this behavioral study, a large piece of hardware is sewn into the backs of young monkeys and a remote controlled glider is flown over their heads to induce stress while their heart rates are monitored. She claims this will teach us about children with depression and anxiety disorders. In defense of this project she asserts that it has shown that some monkeys are more timid than others. This particular study was featured on Good Morning America as part of a series "You Paid For It!" about the waste of tax dollars on ridiculous research.

Exercise study

Cameron claims to be learning about the link between exercise and brain function. Out of the group of monkeys being used for the study, some are regularly placed on treadmills and others are forced to remain sedentary in their cages. She then gives cognitive tests to both sets of monkeys to see if the monkeys that exercise perform better. At a talk at Lake Oswego High, she said that we know that people who exercise have better brain function. She said that other lifestyle factors of people who exercise might also be contributing to their brain health so we need to clarify the relationship between exercise and the brain. She said what she has discovered is that exercise improves brain function.

Infertility studies

Cameron claims to be studying stress related infertility. One of these experiments uses monkeys to model women who stop ovulating because of stress, including psychosocial stress, too much exercise and excessive dieting. Monkeys are fed once per day instead of the usual twice per day, forced to run on tread mills, and deliberately stressed with such methods as moving the monkeys cages from room to room and placing them in a room with male moneys. This allegedly models the lives of workaholic women who compulsively diet and exercise. The alleged goal is to test treatments for this type of infertility. (Even if monkeys could model women, should we be aiming at helping women conceive whose bodies are telling them they have made themselves too unhealthy?)

Following is excerpted from Cameron's abstract of one of her fertility studies: "New findings this year indicate that monkeys with elevated basal heart rate are more prone to develop stress-induced reproductive dysfunction than monkeys with lower basal heart rate. We are currently examining whether this also holds true for women".

Heightened sensitivity during puberty study

From the abstract; "Examination of Differential Sensitivity to Stress During Pubertal Period" She is testing the hypothesis that during puberty there is more sensitivity to "external perturbations that may have long-term health consequences". The effects of social stress and exercise on hormone levels during puberty. Has she ever met an adolescent human? Or talked to a parent, teacher, etc? The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as well as the National Institutes of Health fund this study.

Divorce study

Former primate technician Matt Rossell reports that when he worked at OHSU's primate center, preparations where being made for a monkey study about divorce. Cameron was going to allegedly study the effects of divorce on human children by arranging the monkeys in nuclear families and then removing the father monkey from the group. This would be ludicrous even if monkeys did naturally live in groups with a mother, father and offspring but in fact, monkeys live in matrilineal groups. Since supposedly about 50% of marriages end in divorce, it seems that information about actual children impacted by divorce should not be hard to find.

Surrogate Parent study

Cameron is removing mothers from baby monkeys at different developmental stages, at one week old, one month, three months or six months, and measuring the relative effects of the stress. She has observed that some monkeys seem to miss their mothers more than others. Supposedly this is teaching us that in some stages of infancy, losing a parent is more stressful than in other stages.

Following are some revealing quotes from the October 27th Oregonian article about this study that admit that it is reproducing what we already know:

"The experiments offer evidence for what many scientists have expected"

"The results are intriguing because they match observations on humans who lose their parents, or whose parents are unreliable and emotionally unavailable, such as parents with serious drug abuse problems. Such situations of neglect or abandonment are unfortunately common, Cameron said".

"Another experiment suggested a way to ease the stress: adoption." (Cameron claims that this study is relevant because it shows us that children should be adopted instead of remaining orphaned.)

"This probably translates to humans, Cameron said. Although humans develop more slowly, she said, the work indicates that orphaned children should get stable new parents as soon as possible, certainly within the first year of life, to limit stress. Unfortunately, she said, that often does not happen in many foster-care and orphanage systems in the world."