Dr. Mary’s Monkey

by Edward T Haslam

  Then, the monkey handlers would go home and resume their normal lives, including sexual activities. The potential for zoonoses (diseases jumping from animal to man) was very real, and the medical community knew it.

  Consider these comments written in the 1960s by Richard Fiennes, Britain’s leading primate researcher, about the dangers of primate research:

  There is ... a serious danger that viruses from such closely related groups as the simian primates could show an altered pathogenesis in man, of which malignancy could be a feature. The dangers of such happening are enhanced by man’s exposure in crowded cities to oncogenic agents and increased radiation hazards ...

  The danger of transmitting simian viruses in vaccines is a real and alarming one ...

  The further danger is that simian viruses might become adapted to human populations, and spread with appalling rapidity, and under circumstances in which there were no possible immediate means of control ...

  Knowledge of prophylaxis against viral diseases is in its infancy, and time must elapse before any effective vaccine could be prepared, tested, and manufactured in bulk to protect populations against a pandemic caused by a new virus ...

  Plainly, it is in the realms of virology that primate zoonoses present the greatest danger ...

  Far too little is known of the virology of simians ...7

  Does this sound familiar? Does it not predict the current AIDS epidemic? Speaking further of this danger, Fiennes discussed O’nyong-nyong, a mildly lethal virus that swept Africa:

  Had O’nyong-nyong been attended by a high death-rate... the human population of a large part of East and Central Africa would have virtually ceased to exist. To such an extent, in spite of twentieth-century medicine, is man still vulnerable to attack from new viruses.8

  The danger was real. The fear of public panic was real. With experimental animals, unpredictable viruses and exposed animal handlers intermingled in a sweltering tropical city of nearly a million people (like New Orleans), the opportunity for a biological disaster was ripe.

  The idea of an epidemic suddenly sweeping the streets of an American city was not foreign to the public. In fact, a movie called Panic in the Streets won the Academy Award for best screenplay in 1952. Panic in the Streets depicted a U.S. Public Health Service officer battling a modern day outbreak of bubonic plague on the streets of New Orleans. But the press of the 1950s and 1960s either did not consider the public’s interest in medical matters substantial enough to warrant coverage, or they felt they had a higher duty to prevent public panic. Either way, the press did a poor job of covering the issue then. But, they do a better job of covering it today.

  For example, an accident occurred at a Yale laboratory in the 1990s. The headline in Time shouted, “A Deadly Virus Escapes.” The sub-headline continued, “Concerns about lab security arise as a mysterious disease from Brazil strikes a Yale researcher.”9 The researcher worked at a Biohazard-3 lab and was studying a rare, potentially lethal virus when he broke a test tube. He failed to report the incident, which sprayed this virus into his nostrils. Instead, he went to visit friends in Boston. When the incident was discovered, the researcher was quarantined, and his friends were put under medical surveillance. The article concluded, “If researchers do not tighten some of their procedures, the next outbreak might not be so benign.” All of which makes one wonder: What safety procedures were enforced in the monkey labs of the 1960s? And what procedures would have been followed in an underground medical laboratory with no visible sponsor?

  To understand the type and extent of monkey virus research being done in medical schools in the 1950s and 1960s, I went to medical libraries and started reading the history of virology. While even an overview of these activities is beyond our scope at the moment, there are a few points worth mentioning. First is that it was well established in these medical research circles around the world prior to 1960 that certain monkey viruses caused various types of cancer, including cancers of the skin, lungs, and bones.10

  Secondly, experimentation with carcinogenic viruses was widespread throughout the network of primate research centers, from the U.S., to Europe, to the U.S.S.R. Blood, tumor cells, and viral extracts were routinely taken from a variety of animals and injected into monkeys like a game of viral roulette. One lab created tumors in as little as eight days.11 Another lab injected human volunteers with the known cancer-causing monkey viruses to observe the effects.12

  New diseases started to appear — diseases which were unknown in the wild. One such disease that first appeared in the lab is now called SAIDS or Simian AIDS.13 It occurred when African monkey viruses were given to Asian monkeys. SIV, the retrovirus that collapsed the immune systems of Asian monkeys, did not cause disease in its natural host, the African Green monkey.14

  In addition to viral roulette, researchers experimented with radiation therapy, beaming x-rays and gamma rays directly into tumors to encourage remission. The medical researchers of the 1960s irradiated tumors in laboratory animals, including primates, and shot radiation directly into the tumors of human patients.15 Think this one through before we proceed. When you shoot a radioactive beam at a tumor, you not only hit the tumor, but you also hit the blood and viruses in and around the tumor. Was the type of radiation used to dissolve cancer tumors strong enough and focused enough to damage the DNA and RNA of the viruses floating in the patient’s blood?

  At this point, the medically sophisticated reader might say, “Wait a minute! The radiation exposure of a clinical x-ray machine does minimal damage to DNA or RNA, and very many people receive very many x-rays without getting cancer.” And this is true where we are talking about the exposure and energy levels associated with common clinical use, which have been clinically established as relatively safe for humans.

  However, in the late 1950s a powerful new device emerged from the physics lab and quietly began to be distributed to selected medical research facilities. It was called a linear particle accelerator.16 Never before had a machine of this magnitude been put into the commercial workplace. You might think of it as a poor-man’s atom-smasher. These high-voltage scientific machines were capable of doing things never done before, and they spawned new ultra-hi-tech applications that stretched the imagination. Their basic capabilities included producing high-energy radiation and hurling sub-atomic particles near the speed of light into whatever object one desired.17 To illustrate their ability to change things generally considered to be unchangeable, let’s look at a commercial application of a linear accelerator in South Africa. Shooting subatomic particles through imperfect yellow diamonds stripped the impurities out of the yellow diamonds and turned them into clear marketable white diamonds. These linear accelerators were capable of destroying anything in their path. There is nothing they could not cut, if directed to do so.

  This particular point was dramatically demonstrated by a man named Jack Nygard, an engineer at a company in Boston which manufactured linear accelerators.18 Nygard developed ingenious new commercial applications for linear accelerators, from preserving bananas to cross-bonding wood. By shooting particles laterally through plastic-laminated wood, Nygard created a new structural matrix inside the wood. The result was an ultra-hard super-wood that would never warp. It was the perfect low-maintenance solution for the bowling industry. Nygard turned entrepreneur and set up shop in the heart of the lumber industry near Seattle, Washington, where he began producing his super-wood on a commercial scale. His success continued until the day the technician running his accelerator did not notice that Jack had stepped into the wood-processing area. When the technician flipped the switch on the 5,000,000 volt machine, it was the last anyone ever saw of Jack Nygard.19 The beam of electro-magnetic radiation burned him to the point of disintegration. They swept up his ashes. (Or so the story goes.)

  The medical applications of linear particle accelerators included destroying cancer tissue and conducting various types of viral and genetic research. These machines were quite capable of either killing viru
ses or simply mangling the molecules in the genome necessary for reproduction.

  In the field of virus research, radioactive medical experiments greatly increased the danger of an already dangerous scenario. They introduced the capability of mutating viruses already known to be deadly, and raised the possibility of creating both new vaccines and new super-diseases.

  Some of the scientists involved in the field of monkey virus experiments got extremely nervous about the dangers of such experiments, and warned their colleagues in the mid-1960s that if one of these monkey viruses mutated into a more lethal form and got into the human blood supply, there could be a global epidemic which would be unstoppable, given the current level of medical knowledge!20

  In 1959, the U.S. Congress finally took the danger of an accidental monkey virus epidemic seriously, and financed seven regional primate centers in order to get the experiments out of the cities.21

  In Louisiana, the Delta Regional Primate Center opened its doors in November 1964 with Tulane University serving as the host institution.22 This took the monkey virus research out of downtown New Orleans and put it in 500 wooded acres near Covington, Louisiana, across Lake Pontchartrain. Today that laboratory has over 4,000 primates, thirty scientists, and 130 support workers, plus a public relations director whose job it is to boast of the center’s virus research, especially on AIDS, and to point to the improvements in lab security, such as the high-security zone, where researchers and staff shower and change clothes before approaching or leaving the 500 monkeys infected with simian AIDS. Despite these security measures, Delta was back in the headlines in 1994, when eighty-three monkeys escaped. The public was told to call Delta to report any monkeys seen swinging through the trees,23 the center having claimed the week before that nearly all of them had been captured.24

  The Delta primate lab’s $4,000,000 per year operating budget comes directly from the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health, as it has for the past forty years. One critic of animal research, Dr. Peggy Carlson of the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine, claimed that animal research is big business, and said, “They are taking money away from other areas and dumping it into a sinkhole.”25 Other critics opposed animal research on humanitarian grounds, many believing that animal research actually contributes more to advancing professional careers than to advancing human medicine.

  A case in point involved ten monkeys, which were transferred to the Delta Regional Primate Center from Silver Springs laboratory after their infamous experiments triggered a national animal-rights debate in the 1980s. Delta terminated eight of the monkeys following heavy-handed experiments. The other two monkeys which had their spinal cords deliberately severed at Silver Springs in the mid-1980s were kept alive at the Delta Regional Primate Center until the early-1990s.26

  Dana Dorson, an activist from a group called Legislation in Support of Animals, saw little improvement in the new experimental oversight procedures: “Those committees just rubber stamp whatever is presented to them.”27 Attempting to counter the animal rights critics, Delta Regional Primate Center’s director Peter Gerone said, “Sometimes the public perception is that we do anything we want to monkeys, but that’s a myth. Maybe it was like that thirty years ago, but it’s not like that now.”28

  OK, so just what was it like then? Gerone surely knew. A virologist, Gerone had been director of the Delta Primate Center for twenty-three years before making that statement in 1994. Appointed in 1971, he had left the U.S. Army’s Biological Warfare Center at Fort Detrick, where he had been one of their experts on airborne transmission of diseases.29 In 1975 he collaborated with representatives of the Defense Nuclear Agency, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases to attend an NCI-sponsored symposium on “Biohazards and Zoonotic Problems of Primate Procurement, Quarantine, and Research.” There he presented his paper on “Biohazards of Experimentally Infected Primates.”30

  I CAN SAY FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE THAT, despite the establishment of the Delta Regional Primate Center in 1964, other primate research continued at Tulane Medical School in downtown New Orleans for years to come.

  One day in the spring of 1970 I had gone down to the Tulane Medical School to help my father with a clerical project. After several hours I took a break and, as a distraction, set out to explore the mysteries of the medical school. Near the elevator on one floor, I found an incredible display of mutated human fetuses stored in glass jars. This mind-boggling collection of genetic malfunctions featured two-headed babies, Mongoloid fetuses, and Siamese twins. I decided to explore the other floors to see what else they had.

  At the end of one hall I found an open door and a room full of cages. Inside there were monkeys. Each appeared to be wearing a flat-topped organ grinder’s hat. But a closer look revealed these were not hats.

  A voice came from inside the room. “Come in. Come in. Who are you? And what can I do for you?” A professor sat in his chair looking at me, his head cocked to one side. He was dressed casually, a plaid shirt, no coat, no tie, no medical jacket. I introduced myself saying that I was visiting my father who was a professor in orthopedics. He invited me to come in and see the monkeys. He explained that the tops of their skulls had been removed with a bone saw and electrodes had been placed deep inside their brains. He held a sample electrode up for me to see.

  It was a copper wire with a silver ball on the end which acted like a microphone inside the monkey’s brain, sensing and amplifying electrical signals. Once fifteen or so of these electrodes were implanted in the monkey’s brain, they were soldered to a data plug which was then glued to the monkey’s skull. Once everything was in place, the monkeys would be plugged into a electronic data-collection machine, similar to an EEG, and then injected with experimental psychoactive drugs. The machine measured the reaction of the various parts of their brains to the drugs. The professor held up a haphazardly folded scroll of paper full of squiggly lines to show me how the raw data was collected. “It’s amazing work,” I commented gesturing to the monkeys.

  “Putting in the plugs is nothing,” he said in a tone that could only be described as arrogant. “The technicians do that. The hard part is figuring out what’s happening inside their brains.” I thanked him and left. I had to get back to my task.

  FROM WHAT I CAN FIND IN THE MEDICAL LIBRARIES, the history of primate research in America started with psychology experiments. An American psychologist named Robert Yerkes originally became famous for developing and administering the first large-scale intelligence test to American soldiers during World War I. Later, as a professor at Yale, Yerkes started exploring the biological basis for intelligence by comparing the brain functions of a wide variety of animals. He called this niche “psycho-biology.” In the 1920s Yerkes went further still, getting as close to the human brain as he could, by dissecting and analyzing the brains of gorillas and other high primates. His 1924 book The Mind of the Gorilla catapulted him to become the world’s leading authority on brain function. In 1928 he established the first large-scale scientific primate laboratory for Yale University, not in Connecticut, but in the warmer suburbs of Jacksonville, Florida.31 There they used lobotomies and other techniques to isolate brain function further. In 1942 the laboratory was renamed in his honor. The Yerkes lab was eventually moved to Emory University in Atlanta, nearer the Center for Disease Control. Today it is one of the seven federally funded primate research centers. Only seven, if you do not count the U.S. military’s primate laboratories.

  For some reason, before the Delta Regional Primate Center was established, the Tulane/LSU monkey lab was unofficially referred to as the “ Yerkes lab.” I say this mostly from personal experience. Growing up I repeatedly heard the New Orleans lab referred to as “ Yerkes.” As my seventh grade teacher put it, “It’s not the famous Yerkes lab, but it’s like the Yerkes lab.” During the course of researching and writing this book, I heard three separate people refer to the Delta primate lab as “ Yerk
es.” Further, I found a reference in a 1967 medical book to “an outbreak of hepatitis at Yerkes in New Orleans,”32 reported by Dr. Arthur Riopelle in 1963, a year before the Delta Regional Primate Center opened.

  Dr. Riopelle was a psychologist specializing in brain function at the LSU Medical School in New Orleans, and he soon became the first director of the Delta Regional Primate Center. I wrote him a letter asking for clarification on the Yerkes name. He did not write back. The use of the Yerkes name for a lab in New Orleans remains somewhat of a mystery to me. But it certainly would have helped deflect any reports of misconduct in a lab if one circulated the name of another lab hundreds of miles away. When confronted with an accusation, one could say, “What are you talking about? The Yerkes lab is in Florida. You must be confused.”

  Monkey research in the 1930s and 1940s was by no means confined to psychology. Monkeys were the primary means of studying many viruses, including polio. Then in the late 1940s John F. Enders, a microbiologist from Harvard, and several students figured out how to grow viruses in a test tube full of human cells. At the time, the breakthrough was hailed as the end of the monkey era.33 Today, however, there are approximately 20,000 monkeys sitting in cages in scientific laboratories across the country who might disagree with that prediction.