![]() ![]() ![]() And third, these pandemic-related events are exacerbating preexisting monkey shortfalls. last year and which shut off exports after COVID-19 hit. Second, this coincided with a massive drop in supply from China, which provided 60 percent of the nearly 35,000 monkeys imported to the U.S. First, COVID-19 has created extraordinary demand for monkeys. ![]() The reasons for the shortage are threefold. Scientists in academia and industry alike are all competing for a limited pool of monkeys. They’ve completely disappeared,” says Mark Lewis, the CEO of Bioqual, a contract research organization that specializes in animal testing. The pandemic has made acquiring monkeys even harder. is expensive and often controversial, making it challenging even in normal circumstances. “Nationally, there is basically a big shortage,” says Koen Van Rompay, an infectious-disease scientist at the California National Primate Research Center. There just aren’t enough monkeys to go around. And here, scientists in the United States say they are facing a bottleneck. But for any of these treatments to make it to humans, they usually have to face another animal first: a monkey. "He did for me the same thing that I think that I did for him, which was make him feel comfortable and certain and familiar with the situation.In the past seven months, more than 100 COVID-19 vaccines, therapies, and drugs have been pushed into development. "It was easy to hang out with him," he says. He says the chimp was never aggressive around him - and quickly became one of his good friends. Ingersoll immediately began using sign language with Nim to comfort him. we were really worried about Nim and we spent quite a lot of time with him, making sure he was eating and drinking and not being picked on by the other chimps." "You could read through his facial expression and his body language," Ingersoll says. Ingersoll is now the president of Mindy's Memory Primate Sanctuary.īob Ingersoll: 'Keeping Chimpanzees In Cages Is Torture'īob Ingersoll, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, was working as a research assistant at the primate facility and met Nim on his first day. But at the same time, there was kind of a normalcy about it in that he was just included in the family right away."īob Ingersoll (left) spent nine years with Nim, the subject of an experiment to see if apes could communicate with humans using sign language. "He needed diapers, he needed bottles, he needed feedings," Lee recalls. She says her mother grew quite attached to the chimp, even breastfeeding him throughout his stay at their house. Jenny Lee, who was 13 years old at the time, remembers her mom, Stephanie LaFarge, raising Nim alongside her and her siblings. The first family to take Nim in lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a giant brownstone. Jenny Lee: 'He Was Just Included In The Family' And the wild animal comes out in him very quickly, and was prepared for that." "And it was quite striking that there wasn't an investigation into what chimpanzees actually were or what they're like. "The premise of the experiment was to treat him as much like a human child as possible and to give him the nurturing of a human child in order he would behave like one," Marsh says. Marsh and two of the people who worked with Nim join Fresh Air's Terry Gross for a discussion about the film and about the controversial experiment. Nim and the many people who raised him over the years are the subjects of James Marsh's new documentary Project Nim. He was sent to a medical research facility, where he lived in a cage with other chimps for the first time in his life, before being rescued and sent to an animal sanctuary. At that point, researchers said he knew more than 125 ASL signs - but no one knew quite what to do with Nim. In 1977, Nim attacked one of the people taking care of him, and the experiment ended. It was decided that the family could no longer care for Nim, and he was shuffled from caretaker to caretaker for several years. He learned some very basic words in American Sign Language, but Nim continued to act like a chimp - he bit the children in the house and didn't understand how to behave like a human child. The goal of the project was to see if the animal, named Nim Chimpsky, could be conditioned to communicate with humans if he was raised like a human child in a human household. In 1973, an infant chimpanzee was taken from his mother's arms and sent to live with a human family as part of a Columbia University psychology experiment. ![]()
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