YOUTHFUL-RUTHLESS / TENUOUS HUMAN RAPPORT /
DOMINEERING / INTELLECTUALLY ARROGANT / INSENSITIVE / DRIVEN TO SUCCEED AT ANY COST /
And there was a final “flopover” notation. The very concept of personality flopover had been evolved through ERTS testing. It suggested that any dominant personality trait could be suddenly reversed under stress conditions: parental personalities could flop over and turn childishly petulant, hysterical personalities could become icy calm—or logical personalities could become illogical.
FLOPOVER MATRIX: DOMINANT (POSSIBLY UNDESIRABLE ) OBJECTIVITY MAY BE LOST ONCE DESIRED GOAL IS PERCEIVED CLOSE AT HAND / DESIRE FOR SUCCESS MAY PROVOKE DANGEROUSLY ILLOGICAL RESPONSES / PARENTAL FIGURES WILL BE ESPECIALLY DENIGRATED / SUBJECT MUST BE MONITORED IN LATE
STAGE GOAL—ORIENTED PROCEDURES /
Travis looked at the screen, and decided that such a circumstance was highly unlikely in the coming Congo expedition. He turned the computer off.
Karen Ross was exhilarated by her new authority. Shortly before midnight, she called up the grant lists on her office terminal. ERTS had animal experts in various areas whom they supported with nominal grants from a non-profit foundation called the Earth Resources Wildlife Fund. The grant lists were arranged taxonomically. Under “Primates” she found fourteen names, including several in Borneo, Malaysia, and Africa as well as the United States. In the United States there was only one gorilla researcher available, a primatologist named Dr. Peter Elliot, at the University of California at Berkeley.
The file onscreen indicated that Elliot was twenty-nine years old, unmarried, an associate professor without tenure in the Department of Zoology. Principal Research Interest was listed as “Primate Communications (Gorilla).” Funding was made to something called Project Amy.
She checked her watch. It was just midnight in Houston, 10 P.M. in California. She dialed the home number on the screen.
“Hello,” a wary male voice said.
“Dr. Peter Elliot?”
“Yes . . .“ The voice was still cautious, hesitant. “Are you a reporter?”
“No,” she said. “This is Dr. Karen Ross in Houston; I’m associated with the Earth Resources Wildlife Fund, which supports your research.”
“Oh, yes . . .“ The voice remained cautious. “You’re sure you’re not a reporter? It’s only fair to tell you I’m recording this telephone call as a potential legal document.”
Karen Ross hesitated. The last thing she needed was some paranoid academic recording ERTS developments. She said nothing.
“You’re American?” he said.
“Of course.”
Karen Ross stared at the computer screens, which flashed
VOICE IDENTIFICATION CONFIRMED: ELLIOT, PETER, 29 YEARS.
“State your business,” Elliot said.
“Well, we’re about to send an expedition into the Virunga region of the Congo, and—”
“Really? When are you going?” The voice suddenly sounded excited, boyish.
“Well, as a matter of fact we’re leaving in two days, and—”
“I want to go,” Elliot said.
Ross was so surprised she hardly knew what to say. “Well, Dr. Elliot, that’s not why I’m calling you, as a matter of fact—”
“I’m planning to go there anyway,” Elliot said. “With Amy.”
“Who’s Amy?”
“Amy is a gorilla,” Peter Elliot said.
DAY 2:
SAN FRANCISCO
June 14, 1979
1. Project Amy
IT IS UNFAIR TO SUGGEST, AS SOME PRIMATOLOGISTS later did, that Peter Elliot had to “get out of town” in June, 1979. His motives, and the planning behind the decision to go to the Congo, are a matter of record. Professor Elliot and his staff had decided on an African trip at least two days before Ross called him.
But it is certainly true that Peter Elliot was under attack:
from outside groups, the press, academic colleagues, and even members of his own department at Berkeley. Toward the end, Elliot was accused of being a “Nazi criminal” engaged in the “torture of dumb animals.” It is no exaggeration to say that Elliot had found himself, in the spring of 1979, fighting for his professional life.
Yet his research had begun quietly, almost accidentally. Peter Elliot was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley when he first read about a year-old gorilla with amoebic dysentery who had been brought from the Minneapolis zoo to the San Francisco School of Veterinary Medicine for treatment. That was in 1973, in the exciting early days of primate language research.
The idea that primates might be taught language was very old. In 1661, Samuel Pepys saw a chimpanzee in London and wrote in his diary that it was “so much like a man in most things that. . . I do believe that it already understands much English, and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs.” Another seventeenth-century writer went further, saying, “Apes and Baboons. . . can speak but will not for fear they should be imployed, and set to work.”
Yet for the next three hundred years attempts to teach apes to talk were notably unsuccessful. They culminated in an ambitious effort by a Florida couple, Keith and Kathy Hayes, who for six years in the early 1950s raised a chimpanzee named Vicki as if she were a human infant. During that time, Vicki learned four words—”mama,” “papa,” “cup,” and “up.” But her pronunciation was labored and her progress slow. Her difficulties seemed to support the growing conviction among scientists that man was the only animal capable of language. Typical was the pronouncement of George Gaylord Simpson: “Language is. . . the most diagnostic single trait of man: all normal men have language; no other now living organisms do.”
This seemed so self-evident that for the next fifteen years nobody bothered to try teaching language to an ape. Then in 1966, a Reno, Nevada, couple named Beatrice and Allen Gardner reviewed movies of Vicki speaking. It seemed to them that Vicki was not so much incapable of language as incapable of speech. They noticed that while her lip movements were awkward, her hand gestures were fluid and expressive. The obvious conclusion was to try sign language.
In June, 1966, the Gardners began teaching American Sign Language (Ameslan), the standardized language of the deaf, to an infant chimpanzee named Washoe. Washoe’s progress with ASL was rapid; by 1971, she had a vocabulary of 160 signs, which she used in conversation. She also made up new word combinations for things she had never seen before: when shown watermelon for the first time, she signed it “water fruit.”
The Gardners’ work was highly controversial; it turned out that many scientists had an investment in the idea that apes were incapable of language. (As one researcher said, “My God, think of all those eminent names attached to all those scholarly papers for all those decades—and everyone agreeing that only man had language. What a mess.”)
Washoe’s skills provoked a variety of other experiments in teaching language. A chimpanzee named Lucy was taught to communicate through a computer; another, Sarah, was
taught to use plastic markers on a board. Other apes were studied as well. An orangutan named Alfred began instruction in 1971; a lowland gorilla named Koko in 1972; and in 1973 Peter Elliot began with a mountain gorilla, Amy.
At his first visit to the hospital to meet Amy, he found a pathetic little creature, heavily sedated, with restraining straps on her frail black arms and legs. He stroked her head and said gently, “Hello, Amy, I’m Peter.”
Amy promptly bit his hand, drawing blood.
From this inauspicious beginning emerged a singularly successful research program. In 1973, the basic teaching technique, called molding, was well understood. The animal was shown an object and the researcher simultaneously molded the animal’s hand into the correct sign, until the association was firmly made. Subsequent testing confirmed that the animal understood the meaning of the sign.
But if the basic methodology was accepted, the application was highly competitive. Researchers competed over the rate of sign acquisition, or vocabulary. (Among human beings, vocabulary was considered the best measure of intelligence.) The rate of sign acquisition could be taken as a measure of either the scientist’s skill or the animal’s intelligence.
It was by now clearly recognized that different apes had different personalities. As one researcher commented, “Pongid studies are perhaps the only field in which academic gossip centers on the students and not the teachers.” In the increasingly competitive and disputatious world of primate research, it was said that Lucy was a drunk, that Koko was an ill-mannered brat, that Lana’s head was turned by her celebrity (“she only works when there is an interviewer present”), and that Nim was so stupid he should have been named Dim.
At first glance, it may seem odd that Peter Elliot should have come under attack, for this handsome, rather shy man—the son of a Manin County librarian—had avoided controversy during his years of work with Amy. Elliot’s publications were modest and temperate; his progress with Amy
was well documented; he showed no interest in publicity, and was not among those researchers who took their apes on the Carson or the Griffin show.
But Elliot’s diffident manner concealed not only a quick intelligence, but a fierce ambition as well. If he avoided controversy, it was only because he didn’t have time for it—he had been working nights and weekends for years, and driving his staff and Amy just as hard. He was very good at the business of science, getting grants; at all the animal behaviorist conferences, where others showed up in jeans and plaid lumberjack shirts, Elliot arrived in a three-piece suit. Elliot intended to be the foremost ape researcher, and he intended Amy to be the foremost ape.
Elliot’s success in obtaining grants was such that in 1975, Project Amy had an annual budget of $160,000 and a staff of eight, including a child psychologist and a computer programmer. A staff member of the Bergren Institute later said that Elliot’s appeal lay in the fact that he was “a good investment; for example, Project Amy got fifty percent more computer time for our money because he went on line with his time-sharing terminal at night and on weekends, when the time was cheaper. He was very cost-effective. And dedicated, of course: Elliot obviously cared about nothing in life except his work with Amy. That made him a boring conversationalist but a very good bet, from our standpoint. It’s hard to decide who’s truly brilliant; it’s easier to see who’s driven, which in the long run may be more important. We anticipated great things from Elliot.”
Peter Elliot’s difficulties began on the morning of February 2, 1979. Amy lived in a mobile home on the Berkeley campus; she spent nights there alone, and usually provided an effusive greeting the next day. However, on that morning the Project Amy staff found her in an uncharacteristic sullen mood; she was irritable and bleary-eyed, behaving as if she had been wronged in some fashion.
Elliot felt that something had upset her during the night. When asked, she kept making signs for “sleep box,” a new
word pairing he did not understand. That in itself was not unusual; Amy made up new word pairings all the time, and they were often hard to decipher. Just a few days before, she had bewildered them by talking about “crocodile milk.” Eventually they realized that Amy’s milk had gone sour, and that since she disliked crocodiles (which she had only seen in picture books), she somehow decided that sour milk was “crocodile milk.”
Now she was talking about “sleep box.” At first they thought she might be referring to her nestlike bed. It turned out she was using “box” in her usual sense, to refer to the television set.
Everything in her trailer, including the television, was controlled on a twenty-four-hour cycle by the computer. They ran a check to see if the television had been turned on during the night, disturbing her sleep. Since Amy liked to watch television, it was conceivable that she had managed to turn it on herself. But Amy looked scornful as they examined the actual television in the trailer. She clearly meant something else.
Finally they determined that by “sleep box” she meant “sleep pictures.” When asked about these sleep pictures, Amy signed that they were “bad pictures” and “old pictures,” and that they “make Amy cry.”
She was dreaming.
The fact that Amy was the first primate to report dreams caused tremendous excitement among Elliot’s staff. But the excitement was short-lived. Although Amy continued to dream on succeeding nights, she refused to discuss her dreams; in fact, she seemed to blame the researchers for this new and confusing intrusion into her mental life. Worse, her waking behavior deteriorated alarmingly.
Her word acquisition rate fell from 2.7 words a week to 0.8 words a week, her spontaneous word formation rate from 1.9 to 0.3. Monitored attention span was halved. Mood swings increased; erratic and unmotivated behavior became commonplace; temper tantrums occurred daily. Amy was four and a half feet tall, and weighed 130 pounds. She was an immensely strong animal. The staff began to wonder if they could control her.
Her refusal to talk about her dreams frustrated them. They tried a variety of investigative approaches; they showed her pictures from books and magazines; they ran the ceiling-mounted video monitors around the clock, in case she signed something significant while alone (like young children, Amy often “talked to herself”); they even administered a battery of neurological tests, including an EEG.
Finally they hit on finger painting.
This was immediately successful. Amy was enthusiastic about finger painting, and after they mixed cayenne pepper with the pigments, she stopped licking her fingers. She drew images swiftly and repetitively, and she seemed to become somewhat more relaxed, more her old self.
David Bergman, the child psychologist, noted that “what Amy actually draws is a cluster of apparently related images:
inverted crescent shapes, or semicircles, which are always associated with an area of vertical green streaks. Amy says the green streaks represent ‘forest,’ and she calls the semi-circles ‘bad houses’ or ‘old houses.’ In addition she often draws black circles, which she calls ‘holes.’
Bergman cautioned against the obvious conclusion that she was drawing old buildings in the jungle. “Watching her make drawings one after another, again and again, convinces me of the obsessive and private nature of the imagery. Amy is troubled by these pictures, and she is trying to get them out, to banish them to paper.”
In fact, the nature of the imagery remained mysterious to the Project Amy staff. By late April, 1979, they had concluded that her dreams could be explained in four ways. In order of seriousness, they were:
1. The dreams are an attempt to rationalize events in her daily life. This was the usual explanation of (human) dreams, but the staff doubted that it applied in Amy’s case.
2. The dreams are a transitional adolescent manifestation.
At seven years of age, Amy was a gorilla teenager, and for nearly a year she had shown many typical teenage traits, including rages and sulks, fussiness about her appearance, a new interest in the opposite sex.
3. The dreams are a species-specific phenomenon. It was possible that all gorillas had disturbing dreams, and that in the wild the resultant stresses were handled in some fashion by the behavior of the group. Although gorillas had been studied in the wild for the past twenty years, there was no evidence for this.
4. The dreams are the first sign of incipient dementia. This was the most feared possibility. To train an ape effectively, one had to begin with an infant; as the years progressed, researchers waited to see if their animal would grow up to be bright or stupid, recalcitrant or pliable, healthy or sickly. The health of apes was a constant worry; many programs collapsed after years of effort and expense when the apes died of physical or mental illness. Timothy, an Atlanta chimp, became psychotic in 1976 and committed suicide by coprophagia, choking to death on his own feces. Maurice, a Chicago orang, became intensely neurotic, developing phobias that halted work in 1977. For better or worse, the very intelligence that made apes worthwhile subjects for study also made them as unstable as human beings.
But the Project Amy staff was unable to make further progress. In May, 1979, they made what turned out to be a momentous decision: they decided to publish Amy’s drawings, and submitted her images to the Journal of Behavioral Sciences.
2. Breakthrough
“DREAM BEHAVIOR IN A MOUNTAIN GORILLA” WAS
never published. The paper was routinely forwarded to three scientists on the editorial board for review, and one copy somehow (it is still unclear just how) fell into the hands of the Primate Preservation Agency, a New York group formed in 1975 to prevent the “unwarranted and illegitimate exploitation of intelligent primates in unnecessary laboratory research.” *
On June 3, the PPA began picketing the Zoology Department at Berkeley, and calling for the “release” of Amy. Most of the demonstrators were women, and several young children were present; videotapes of an eight-year-old boy holding a placard with Amy’s photograph and shouting “Free Amy! Free Amy!” appeared on local television news.
In a tactical error, the Project Amy staff elected to ignore the protests except for a brief press release stating that the PPA was “misinformed.” The release went out under the Berkeley Information Office letterhead.
On June 5, the PPA released comments on Professor Elliot’s work from other primatologists around the country. (Many later denied the comments or claimed they were misquoted.) Dr. Wayne Turman, of the University of Oklahoma at Norman, was quoted as saying that Elliot’s work was “fanciful and unethical.” Dr. Felicity Hammond, of the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta, said that “neither Elliot nor his research is of the first rank.” Dr. Richard Aronson at the University of Chicago called the research “clearly fascist in nature.”
None of these scientists had read Elliot’s paper before commenting; but the damage, particularly from Aronson, was incalculable. On June 8, Eleanor Vries, the spokesperson for the PPA, referred to the “criminal research of Dr. Elliot and his Nazi staff”; she claimed Elliot’s research caused Amy to have nightmares, and that Amy was being subjected to torture, drugs, and electroshock treatments.
Belatedly, on June 10, the Project Amy staff prepared a lengthy press release, explaining their position in detail and