Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human by Elizabeth Hess

From the Publisher

Could an adorable chimpanzee raised from infancy by a human family bridge the gap between species—and change the way we think about the boundaries between the animal and human worlds? Here is the strange and moving account of an experiment intended to answer just those questions, and the astonishing biography of the chimp who was chosen to see it through.

Dubbed Project Nim, the experiment was the brainchild of Herbert S. Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University. His goal was to teach a chimpanzee American Sign Language in order to refute Noam Chomsky’s assertion that language is an exclusively human trait. Nim Chimpsky, the baby chimp at the center of this ambitious, potentially groundbreaking study, was “adopted” by one of Dr. Terrace’s graduate students and brought home to live with her and her large family in their elegant brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

At first Nim’s progress in learning ASL and adapting to his new environment exceeded all expectations. His charm, mischievous sense of humor, and keen, sometimes shrewdly manipulative understanding of human nature endeared him to everyone he met, and even led to guest appearances on Sesame Street, where he was meant to model good behavior for toddlers. But no one had thought through the long-term consequences of raising a chimp in the human world, and when funding for the study ran out, Nim’s problems began.

Over the next two decades, exiled from the people he loved, Nim was rotated in and out of various facilities. It would be a long time before this chimp who had been brought up to identify with his human caretakers had another opportunityto blow out the candles on a cake celebrating his birthday. No matter where he was sent, however, Nim’s hard-earned ability to converse with humans would prove to be his salvation, protecting him from the fate of many of his peers.

Drawing on interviews with the people who lived with Nim, diapered him, dressed him, taught him, and loved him, Elizabeth Hess weaves an unforgettable tale of an extraordinary and charismatic creature. His story will move and entertain at the same time that it challenges us to ask what it means to be human, and what we owe to the animals who so enrich our lives.

Publishers Weekly

In what is surely one of the most memorable and intelligent recent books about animal-human interaction, Hess (Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter) tells the story of Nim Chimpsky, who in the 1970s was the subject of an experiment begun at the University of Oklahoma to find out whether a chimp could learn American Sign Language-and thus refute Noam Chomsky's influential thesis that language is inherent only in humans. Nim was sent to live with a family in New York City and taught human language like any other child. Hess sympathetically yet unerringly details both the project's successes and failures, its heroes and villains, as she recounts Nim's odyssey from the Manhattan town house to a mansion in the Bronx and finally back to Oklahoma, where he was bounced among various facilities as financial, personal and scientific troubles plagued the study. The book expertly shows why the Nim experiment was a crucial event in animal studies, but more importantly, Hess captures Nim's "legendary charm, mischievous sense of humor, and keen understanding of human beings." This may well be the only book on linguistics and primatology that will leave its readers in tears over the life and times of its amazing subject. (Mar. 4)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Library Journal

In the 1970s, Herbert Terrace of Columbia University decided to challenge Noam Chomsky's widely accepted theory that the capacity for language is unique to the human species. Believing that a chimpanzee might acquire (sign) language ability in the proper reinforcing environment, Terrace undertook Project Nim and gave his male chimp the name of Nim Chimpsky-a clever pun on Chomsky's name. According to Hess, a journalist who writes about animals (Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats, and Everyday Heroes at a County Animal Shelter ), the infant Nim was initially treated just like a human baby. He lived in a home with a large family, bonded with his human mother, wore clothes, and eventually attended school-of sorts-to learn American Sign Language (ASL). Hess then documents how after four years of being the famous and charismatic subject of a language experiment, Nim nearly became an anonymous subject of medical experiments. Nim's engrossing life story deserves a place next to those of Koko and Washoe, who died last October, and is recommended for all public libraries. For another perspective on Project Nim's controversial nature and its linguistic legacy, see Roger Fouts's Next of Kin: What Chimpanzees Have Taught Me About Who We Are .-Cynthia Knight,Hunterdon Cty. Lib., Flemington, NJ

Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Sympathetic account of a chimpanzee raised in a human family and taught sign language. Hess (Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats, and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter, 1998) augments the narrative with the stories of many amazingly dedicated animal lovers and researchers, as well as a goodly supply of other chimps. She begins in 1973 with Nim's birth in Norman, Okla., at the Institute for Primate Studies (IPS), directed by Dr. William Lemmon. Herbert Terrace, a behavioral psychologist at Columbia University, obtained the newborn chimp with the aim of showing that nonhuman primates could acquire language, in contradiction to linguist Noam Chomsky's claim that language is an exclusively human trait (hence the chimp's name). Terrace's former student, Stephanie LaFarge, was willing to take Nim into her Manhattan home and raise him with her children. For Hess, the tribulations of Lemmon, Terrace and the LaFarge family are as much a part of the story as the charming, obstreperous chimp. In 1975, Nim was transferred to an estate in Riverdale, N.Y., where Terrace's graduate students took over the challenges of caring for the chimp, teaching him sign language and recording his behavior. In 1977, when Nim had outlived his usefulness as a research subject, he was returned to IPS. Here, Hess expands her story again with more personal portraits and anecdotes, including some choice details about Lucy, a chimp whose humanized lifestyle included French wine and whiskey sours. In 1981, Nim and other IPS chimps were sent to the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates in Texas. Media attention and animal-rights activists saved him from experimentation, and Nim eventually foundsanctuary at Cleveland Amory's Black Beauty Ranch. A female companion and an empathetic human with whom to communicate brightened the years before his death in 2000. Though long and sometimes rambling, this troubling narrative raises important questions about humans' relationships with and responsibility toward other primates. Agent: Sarah Lazen/Sarah Lazen Books

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

A Q&A with author Elizabeth Hess

Q: What was writing this book like? What about the process most surprised or illuminated you?

I had no idea how difficult it would be to write a biography of an animal! There are so few records kept on captive animals that pinning down dates of birth, transfers of ownership, health records—anything that should have been easy—was needlessly difficult. I also had to track down all the people who actually knew Nim and get their stories. And, needless to say, many of their stories conflicted so I had to sift through all the information on Nim and piece together his reality. I often felt like I was putting together pieces of a complicated puzzle. We project all kinds of things onto animals, which makes knowing them much more difficult. Nim’s people all loved him, but they had all lost track of him and their memories had faded into their feelings of tremendous guilt over having lost contact with him.

Q: Can you name the first book you read that inspired you in some special way? Why?

Black Beauty. It is still one of the most powerful books about the subject of humane treatment of animals. I remember reading it as a child and I read it to my daughter over and over. Also, Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. It’s a primer on animal rights that virtually started a movement in this country. And—a real favorite is Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee. An intense and riveting novel about people, animals and survival.

Q: Can you tell us about the book you are working on now? And when you finish writing your answers to this Q&A, what will you do next?

I’m working on a book about pit bulls. The inspiration is a little dog named Lucy, an 8 year old pit bull, currently sleeping under my desk. A rescuer found her one year ago wandering the streets of Albany, sick and homeless. Now she will be with me for the rest of her life. (She joined my two other dogs—a golden retriever and a husky-mix—who can’t remember life without her.) In the year I’ve lived with Lucy, I’ve become fascinated by American Pit Bull Terriers. As everyone who lives with one knows, pit bulls are highly intelligent, extremely athletic, courageous, loving, and loyal. What else does one need in a dog? But it’s important to keep them away from the Michael Vicks of the world…I’m currently trying to find out how these dogs because the scapegoats for everything violent—everything that is wrong in our hardly ideal lives. What will I do now? Take the dogs for a good long walk. I do my best writing walking through a field behind my house as the dogs sniff for rabbits, birds, and sent of deer passing through.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One


Early Days on the Chimp Farm

NIM'S STORY BEGINS AT the research facility in Oklahoma that was founded by the notorious Dr. William Lemmon. Early in his academic career chimpanzees became the focus of Lemmon's lifelong research, and helped to make him—for a time—the most prominent psychologist in Oklahoma. Over several decades, he authored many of the state's mental health policies, helped to shape numerous public programs, and virtually founded the clinical psychology department at the University of Oklahoma (OU), where he remains a legendary figure thanks to his early chimpanzee experiments. From its inception until its demise, Lemmon ran the Institute for Primate Studies (IPS), the place where Nim Chimpsky was born. Lemmon bred and owned Nim. As a result, the psychologist was responsible, often behind the scenes, for every major event that shaped the chimp's life, both before and after Project Nim.

Virtually everyone who ever had anything to do with Lemmon (Bill, as he was called) or his chimpanzees came away with strong feelings about the psychologist, but what those feelings were varied considerably. Some loved Lemmon, some despised him, and some still won't speak about him at all because it's just too painful. Lemmon, who has been dead for more than two decades, remains a controversial figure in Norman and the wider primate world, where his unconventional methods of animal husbandry and research are often attacked. He ruled his chimpanzees with an electric cattle prod, as many unenlightened keepers still do, and tried every possible disciplinary technique, including shock collars, all kinds of guns, and a pair of Dobermanpinschers trained to tree escapees. (This last was not an effective method; the chimps dominated the dogs and ripped one of them apart.) When asked by a friend, "How do you discipline a chimpanzee?" Lemmon responded, "Any way you can."

The chimps learned to respect their keeper. Lemmon's graduate students also understood their place. One claims that he locked her in a cage inhabited by a few adult chimps, just to see her reaction. She survived to tell the story, one of many about the sadistic pleasure Lemmon took in pushing people to the edge. Lemmon's proteges, employees, and patients all worshipped him—or fled.

Still, however much he was feared by both his experimental animals and his students, Lemmon was one of a very few researchers in the 1960s who had any expertise in raising and breeding chimpanzees in captivity, where they rarely survived or reproduced. Lemmon and his carefully selected graduate students studied chimpanzee mating habits, sexuality, and social development, and they even collected data on the personalities of individual chimps. Unfortunately for Lemmon, and for the field in general, little of this research, apart from a handful of articles, was ever published. Lemmon's vast knowledge of chimpanzees mostly benefited those who became members of his prestigious inner circle in Norman. Ultimately, the scientific community labeled his work "anecdotal," their way of deeming it worthless. For better or worse, he was an outsider who was destined to remain on the margins because he refused to maintain his academic status by regularly publishing his results or writing books. In the long run, this arrogance did not serve him or his animals well. But in the short run, it made IPS, known as the "chimp farm," a compelling place for students to cut their teeth on primatology.

Lemmon was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1916. A prodigy of sorts, from a working-class family, he earned his doctorate at Ohio State University, where he studied with Carl Rogers. The promising young psychologist had a background in biology and a passion for the theories of Sigmund Freud. By twenty-eight, Lemmon had married, fathered three children, and become the director of clinics in the psychology department at the University of Maryland. There he fell in love with one of his graduate students and moved on to the next chapter of his life.

Dorothy Lemmon—known as Dottie—met her husband-to-be in a classroom, where she found herself enthralled by his erudite lectures, liberally sprinkled with literary references and stories about his personal experiences. Dottie was said to have had a Mona Lisa smile and a dark, mysterious appeal. After Lemmon divorced his first wife he and Dottie promptly moved to Norman in 1945, where Bill had been offered a position in the department of psychology at OU, and where they had two children, Peter and Sally. Dottie, like her mentor and husband, became a clinical psychologist. But she opened an office at a local mental health center, maintaining as much distance as possible from Lemmon's university sphere. Throughout her life, Dottie's carefully nurtured independence from her powerful husband was critical to her emotional survival. She had her own practice, her own friends, and even her own plants—in a greenhouse where her husband was not welcome to dig around. He had a greenhouse too, separate from hers, where there was more than enough dirt.

However, the greenhouses, as well as the chimpanzees, came later in the marriage, some years after the Lemmons found an affordable farm, which they bought in 1957. Located on the outskirts of Norman, on East Lindsey Road, it was a private paradise just a short distance from the OU campus. The original wooden farmhouse, built in 1907, was far up on a hill, at the end of a long, winding driveway, surrounded by 140 acres of meadows, woods, and ponds. There were few amenities—the house had no bathroom or running water—but the land was spacious and ideal for farm animals, or any other kind of animals. At the time Lemmon bought the farm, animal behavior and comparative psychology had already become the focus of his research, and he envisioned turning the place into a research institute, which he would stock with multiple species. He promptly began to design one, which was constructed over a period of years, as funds became available.

Although Lemmon supplemented his university income with money from a highly successful private practice, as a professor in the 1960s he made a modest salary, so it took some time for his dream to become a reality. Meanwhile, he started to purchase exotic birds and small mammals the way other people buy baseball cards or stamps, grabbing one of each kind to round out their collections. By the early 1960s, the Institute for Primate Studies had come into existence on Lemmon's farm, and moving there enabled the psychologist to add more birds as well as border collies, spider monkeys, gibbons, sheep—and anything else he could get his hands on. Lemmon liked to purchase one or preferably two of each species, Noah's ark-style, so that they would breed and he could scrutinize their mating habits, gestation periods, and physical and psychological details of reproduction. He sold the resulting offspring to other researchers or gave them away to friends. On occasion, he did more elaborate, and less humane, behavioral experiments on his animals. The farm allowed him to be more ambitious. Hidden away from OU, Lemmon had a new sense of freedom.

Over the years, the old wooden farmhouse was transformed into a modern residence covered with a pinkish stucco surface, and other buildings were constructed to house Lemmon's growing menagerie. The animals appeared content and well cared for. The grounds were dotted with jerry-rigged pens and numerous gardens where flowers, fruit trees, and vegetables were plentiful. Both Lemmons were amateur horticulturists, in their separate greenhouses, and the farm, though not a lavish place, had a genuine elegance of sorts, a seedy rustic charm.

Lemmon's popularity as a professor and a psychotherapist grew as rapidly as his farm. Well known on campus for his idiosyncrasies, he was admired by his students for his refusal to conform to convention—in either the academy or his personal life—regardless of the consequences. Even Lemmon's attire challenged university standards. At a time when most OU professors wore jackets and ties to class, Lemmon, a proto-beatnik, wore leather sandals over bare feet and shaved his head; he had wild bushy eyebrows and a well-trimmed goatee. During cold spells, the professor donned a belted trench coat, the collar flipped up, as if he were a spy. Typical OU faculty members dressed up, not down; they also did not keep cobalt-blue hyacinth macaws, the largest species of parrot in the world, in their campus offices.

Not surprisingly, Lemmon was a target from the very beginning of his time in Norman, where everything he did was noticeably different from what other professors were doing. Already in 1946, the dean of the university was asking Lemmon (in a letter on official stationery) to wear socks and shave off his signature goatee, as people were beginning to "think he was eccentric." Lemmon continued to wear his sandals barefoot but immediately shaved off his goatee—and grew it right back.

But the problems between the charismatic Lemmon and the conservative university, which started early and escalated for years, went far deeper than surface appearances. The more consequential trouble had to do with Lemmon's academic views, the radical nature of his chimpanzee research, and the highly irregular relationships he fostered among his students, his colleagues in the clinical psychology department, and even the patients in his private practice. Lemmon, inhabiting some parallel chimp universe, had much in common with Alfred Kinsey. He shared Kinsey's intensity, his originality, his love of controversy—and his interest in sexuality. By the 1970s, Lemmon was doing research on clitoral orgasms in female chimpanzees. Operating on the cutting edge, he exerted a magnetic effect on many of those in his sphere of influence, who saw him as a visionary, a leader. Lemmon, however, would never make a significant contribution to his field. His ideas were often too far out to be fundable—even if they were in fact doable.

Eccentric as he was, no one could deny Lemmon's popularity on campus, which irked other professors in the psychology department. Undergraduates lined up to get into his famous introductory courses, and graduate students clamored for acceptance into his program, known as the Psychological Clinic, to undergo Lemmon's intensive training program for therapists. Lemmon wanted only the brightest, most devoted acolytes, and in a grueling process of selection he handpicked each student for the program. Other professors competed for the same students and lost. For students, getting a green light from the master therapist was equivalent to a coveted membership in a club.

Lemmon turned the Psychological Clinic into his headquarters. The clinic operated out of a building on a separate area of campus known as South Base, which was a short distance from the main campus, and Lemmon ran it virtually as his own private enterprise. Home to his delightful macaw as well as other research animals he occasionally brought in for observation, it had an atmosphere the students found exotic and appealing. Lemmon's students functioned almost like a cult, supporting each other and worshipping their leader. They filled his workshops to capacity, used him as an advisor for every decision large and small, and longed for hands-on time with his endlessly fascinating, not to mention highly amusing, chimps, who began showing up in Norman in the early 1960s. An invitation to Lemmon's "home"—IPS—was a badge of honor.

Lemmon had a mystique, an aura, which attracted students looking for inspiration, guidance, or perhaps just a father figure. Students literally scrambled to get physically near him, and some even emulated his personal habits. If Lemmon smoked a certain brand of cigarette in class, his students switched to that brand. Once he conducted an experiment to see how far they would go to imitate him. Lemmon began smoking big stinky cigars—and observed that the smokers in his entourage did the same.

As a prerequisite for entrance into his clinical program, Lemmon's students had to undergo psychotherapy or some alternative therapy with a faculty member or with the master himself. Lemmon, of course, was the most revered and feared therapist of all. Students were often both therapist and patient, simultaneously in therapy with one of their professors while treating one of their peers. The interior of Lemmon's building on South Base looked more like a real clinic than an academic setting. There were small offices, each one with a couch, where Lemmon and his graduate students saw private, paying patients in between classes and training sessions, day and night. Other professors, along with associates, often moonlighted in the building to augment their modest academic salaries. Some of the professors who didn't moonlight charged those who did with unethical conduct in an academic building.

Lemmon never took his opposition, mostly experimental psychologists in the department, too seriously. But ignoring his critics did not make them go away. They scrutinized Lemmon's program ever more carefully in an effort to gather ammunition to destroy it and snatch his students. Lemmon's conservative colleagues wanted to see some rats and pigeons and some grants to support them, not to mention an end to the lucrative therapy sessions, which they viewed as a disgrace to the department. Lemmon had no intention of preaching the theories of B. F. Skinner, or what he called "rat science." He was a Freudian, which was unusual for a clinical psychologist. Even more unusual, he did Freudian-type research on his chimpanzees, hoping to explore their early development and how their personalities formed.

Lemmon was best known in Norman for his highly successful chimp breeding program and for his long-term cross-fostering experiments, which began in 1962 with the purchase of his first two chimpanzees, Pan (born in Ghana) and Wendy (born in Sierra Leone). The young chimps, a year old when they arrived, were raised in the Lemmons' home with their two human children, Peter and Sally, ages eleven and ten. (Three half siblings from their father's first marriage made periodic visits.) Peter Lemmon, who remembers Pan and Wendy fondly, describes them as "his first two hairy brothers and sisters." There would be many more.

Convinced that comparative studies between humans and chimpanzees would lead to new insights into the evolution of the human brain, something researchers still knew very little about, Lemmon wanted to find out everything he possibly could about chimpanzee behavior and early development. The key, he believed, was raising the chimps in human homes, where their "humanness" could be reinforced and made more distinct and observable. Lemmon planned to cultivate a colony of human-raised chimps that were kept isolated from members of their own species, and a parallel colony of chimps reared by their natural mothers and living in a large social group. When in a whimsical mood, he wondered, occasionally to the press, whether or not chimps could learn to talk, understand the value of a dollar, or drive cars. As of yet no one had proved otherwise. Chimp genetics, DNA forensics, the discovery of AIDS, the Endangered Species Act, and Project Nim were still years ahead.

Pan and Wendy were the beginning of all Lemmon's aspirations. For their first few years, the young chimps were attention magnets and about as big a novelty in Oklahoma as the first Model T. People had seen a few chimps in movies or on television but never up close and personal. Eager to show them off, Lemmon allowed those he trusted to hold them and interact with them, which was a rare treat. His chosen students lined up to help collect detailed data, sometimes hour by hour, on Pan and Wendy's development. They were magnificent ambassadors for their species, and simultaneously remarkably like human children, which made them infinitely endearing. Lemmon's associates had adopted all kinds of animals in his wake, mostly exotic birds and monkeys, and now they wanted their own chimps too. Lemmon, eager to collect more data for his research, set out to bring more chimps to Norman.