What could we possibly learn from massaging rat pups? The answer is, a lot. Just ask the millions of families whose prematurely born infants have survived and thrived on account of that research.
That's why the researchers behind this work – Saul Schanberg, Tiffany Martini Field, Cynthia Kuhn and Gary Evoniuk – will receive the Golden Goose Award September 18 at a ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. (Katie Eimers will accept the award on behalf of her grandfather, Saul Schanberg, who died in 2009.)
The Golden Goose Award honors scientists whose federally funded research may not have seemed to have significant practical applications at the time it was conducted but has resulted in major economic and other benefits to society. In this case, the impact of the researchers' collective work has been momentous. The key discovery – that touch, in the form of infant massage, can vastly improve the outcome for babies born prematurely – has affected millions of lives around the world and saved billions of dollars in healthcare costs in the United States alone.
And it began when researchers studying infant rats decided to rub their backs with a tiny brush.
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