Chimp Researchers Defend Their Work : Despite Death Threats, Demonstrations, Yerkes Center Staff Sticks to Its Mission

ATLANTA--In a wooded corner of Emory University’s suburban campus, the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center has long exuded an air of mystery.

Those who find the way down a winding two-lane road behind the Emory dorms and offices, through the woods and past a secluded lake, find fences and “Private Property” signs around the site where scientists in lab coats have labored quietly for years. Through studies and experiments with monkeys and apes, they seek clues to human health problems.

These days, there is an us-against-them feeling at Yerkes. The researchers’ pride in their accomplishments is tempered by frustration, anger and even fear. A growing band of crusaders would like nothing more than to shut down the center.

“I wasn’t hired to do this, you know,” grumbled Dr. Frederick A. King Jr. as he explained to yet another reporter the steps Yerkes takes to conduct experiments as humanely as possible.

King, an outspoken advocate of research on animals who has directed Yerkes for a decade, has received death threats. The center, an arm of the university and one of seven regional primate research centers sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, has been the target of numerous “animal rights” protests.

Last December, 12 pickets were arrested on the campus in a demonstration against the use of animals in studies, and it was the second such protest in a month. Three of those arrested lowered themselves on ropes down the front of a six-story building and unfurled a banner reading: “Save the Yerkes Chimps.” The other nine tried to block the university’s main gate. Members of the California-based group In Defense of Animals said it was the beginning of a two-year campaign against centers like Yerkes.

Elsewhere in the nation, buildings have been burned and demonstrators have been arrested with bombs. Yerkes staff members say they sometimes fear for their personal safety.

King said he has good reason to believe that virtually every institution of this kind has been infiltrated by these activists.

His chief worry, King said, is that the “animal rights” movement might diminish the center’s effectiveness. New techniques for treating Parkinson’s disease were found here, and ape communication studies at Yerkes have opened new ways to teach retarded children.

“What I am afraid of,” he said, “is that these people may get bills passed in Congress, regulations passed through federal agencies, that could be terribly, terribly injurious to research, terribly restrictive and costly beyond belief.

“That’s my fear, that they will whittle us down--not that they will knock us out of the box. By their acts of violence and terrorism--breaking, entering, bomb threats, destroying property, stealing animals, falsifying photographs of this and that--they cost us a hell of a lot of money.”

The center, named for its founder, Dr. Robert M. Yerkes, a primate research pioneer, has three locations: the main station with labs and offices; a language lab in southeast Atlanta and the 117-acre field station in suburban Gwinnett County, where 1,500 primates--from 1,000 rhesus monkeys to a family of pygmy chimpanzees--are housed separately in two dozen groups.

Add to them 13 gorillas and a dozen orangutans that live at Zoo Atlanta under an unusual and popular arrangement.

At Zoo Atlanta the primates roam in open-air habitats. The project has spurred an ambitious renovation plan that has brought the once-beleaguered zoo new-found respect and thousands of new visitors.

It is good public relations for Yerkes because it keeps the center’s name before zoo visitors. It is also an ongoing research effort. Yerkes scientists continue to study the behavior and reproduction of the gorillas and orangutans at the zoo. In particular, Yerkes staffers and Atlantans in general hope that Zoo Atlanta mainstay, Willie B., a gorilla who spent nearly 30 years in a cage, will settle down and mate with a Yerkes female in his new outdoor playground.

Most of the Yerkes animals are kept at the field station, a large site once in the country but now rapidly being surrounded by subdivisions.

It is there, in heated concrete shelters and pens, that about 30 research scientists and animal care technicians work with sooty mangabeys, squirrel monkeys, chimps and that staple of research labs, rhesus monkeys.

Monkeys Have Names

On a recent winter day, field station coordinator and research professor Tom Gordon strolled up to a gymnasium-size pen housing hundreds of rhesus monkeys and started calling them by name.

“You get to know them after a while,” he said.

Yerkes scientists continually observe the monkeys to learn about their behavioral characteristics. Even in the largest colonies, one monkey is king and the social hierarchy flows from him to his mate and their offspring. The other families are subservient.

Although some from the rhesus colony are taken from time to time for lab experiments at the main station, others live on at the field station for generations, as part of a behavioral study.

Another primate getting a great deal of attention at the field station these days is the sooty mangabeys. They, it turns out, are almost universally infected with SIV--simian immune deficiency virus, a close cousin of the human immune deficiency virus HIV, believed to cause AIDS.

Most primates infected with SIV will become ill, as do humans infected with HIV. But for some reason, most sooty mangabeys harbor the virus without ever becoming clinically ill.

AIDS Link Sought

“We hope that if we can figure out what the devil provides that protection, we can contract a vaccine that provides protection (for humans),” Gordon said.

Around the corner from the mangabeys are the pygmy chimpanzees, part of an ambitious breeding program. These animals sometimes don’t breed in captivity, and the Yerkes researchers are proud of the eight births that have occurred there.

Across the grounds are full-size chimpanzees being watched in a food-and-behavior study and as part of the National Chimpanzee Breeding and Research Program. Researchers figure that animals so closely related to man may be needed for AIDS research.

In the laboratories at the main Yerkes station in Atlanta, scientists are studying various primates in search of new ways to combat Parkinson’s disease, eye disorders and tooth decay.

The Parkinson’s research, King said, is one of the center’s crowning achievements since he started as director in 1978. Yerkes scientists were the first to demonstrate the feasibility of implanting fetal brain tissue that produces dopamine--a compound that acts as a transmitter in the nervous system--into the brain of Parkinson’s patients as a treatment for the debilitating nerve disease. Now, doctors in several countries are trying the technique in humans.

“I consider this one of our major advancements,” King said. “We were the first. It’s a big step in the right direction.”

Benefits for Humans

Other achievements at Yerkes in the last 10 years:

- An anti-inflammatory drug that stops the progression of gum disease in rhesus monkeys is being tested on human patients at Emory’s dental school.

- Yerkes scientists and Emory ophthalmologists, using primates, are studying post-surgery treatments for children born with cataracts. Their work has shown that the common practice of patching the normal eye to force the child to use the surgically corrected eye may be detrimental.

- Researchers using monkeys, chimps and human volunteers have identified structural and chemical changes in cervical secretions during the menstrual cycle. These could someday lead to new methods of contraception or fertility enhancement.

- Language studies in chimpanzees yielded a language system--with visual symbols, a computer-operated keyboard and step-by-step teaching strategies--that Georgia State University experts are using to teach severely retarded children. The work was spearheaded by two psychologists from Yerkes and Georgia State University, Dr. Duane Rumbaugh and his wife, Dr. Sue Savage Rumbaugh.

“The work of the Rumbaughs must stand very high in the achievements of this center,” King said.

‘Pure Science’ Pays Off

King, a neuroscientist and psychologist, enjoys explaining that the Rumbaughs did not set out looking for a way to help retarded humans. They were looking at apes.

“That (study) began as an attempt to explore some fundamental questions about the capability of great apes to use symbols,” he said. “The important thing is that it started out as a fundamental scientific project, with nothing in sight in terms of application.”

He compares the accomplishment to Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin during routine studies of molds.

“It is that kind of science that has brought us out of medieval fear and superstition into enlightenment and our ability to deal more effectively with the world around us,” King said.

He acknowledged that animals die at Yerkes, but said they die in the pursuit of what researchers believe is a greater good. Most people, King said, believe that too.

“I believe in the sanity of the people of this country,” he said. “This is a utilitarian nation. That utilitarian sense, and the recognition of what animal contributions have been--and the recognition that scientists are not ogres, but care for living beings other than humans--I think will lead the nation to recognize, eventually, the benefits of science.

Confidence in System

“This nation will support, and continue to support, life sciences in general and medical and behavioral sciences in specific, with primates or whatever other species. I have that confidence.”

King bristles at a question of whether, in retrospect, some experiments have caused unnecessary killing of animals.

“Do we have experiments that fail? Of course we do,” he said. “It’s part of science.

“If we knew what was going to happen for sure, we wouldn’t do the experiment! Nobody wants to do stupid, meaningless work.”

King stresses in his lectures that animal researchers are not extremists. The extremists, he insists, are those who would needlessly butcher and torture animals, and those who would ban all scientific uses of animals.

“In all sincerity,” he said, “scientists occupy the middle road of compassion and humane treatment. . . . I don’t know any scientist or institution that doesn’t want to reduce that discomfort or pain to a minimum, but at the same time recognizes that human priorities, with regard to using animals in research, must come first.”

Goals for the Planet

King envisions a day when he and the center can put the debate behind them and get on with their work, and his goals go beyond behavioral and medical research.

Without prodding, a discussion of Yerkes quickly turns to King’s two passions: the vanishing rain forests of Central and South America. “Without those,” he said, “neither the primates nor other species will survive long.” The other is global population control, as man’s increasing presence taxes the planet’s resources.

“I would like to see us move into the area of population concerns,” he said, but he conceded that for a primate research center, such work poses “a difficult question.”

“ ‘Primate center’ doesn’t just mean monkeys and apes,” he said. “It means humans too.”