Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 1.1
Drs Boris Lapin and Orville Smith at the IEPT in Sukhumi in 1987. Lapin, who became director of IEPT in 1958 and continued in that
capacity after the move to Adler in 2010 had directed a major primate research center longer than anyone else. Smith was a longtime director of the
Washington NPRC and studied the behavioral components of hypertension in baboons and collaborated extensively with investigators at IEPT and IMP.
Robert Yerkes and the Primate Laboratory
of the Yale Institute of Psychobiology
Robert Yerkes, an accomplished comparative psychologist,
had a vision for what the future held for nonhuman primate
research and how to realize those dreams (
Yerkes, 1916
).
Yerkes established the Primate Laboratory of the Yale
Institute of Psychobiology at Orange Park, Florida, in 1930
(
Bourne, 1971; Maple, 1979
). His plan was to establish and
develop “an institute of comparative psychobiology in
which the resources of the various natural sciences should
be used effectively for the solution of varied problems of
life” (
Yerkes, 1932
). As early as 1919, he proposed the idea
of establishing a nonhuman primate research institute for
the systematic study of the “fundamental instincts” and
“social relations” of nonhuman primates. Yerkes was
a contemporary of other notable early investigators of the
time such as Kohler and Kohts who were interested
in nonhuman primate research (
Maple, 1979
). Interest in
Kohts' perceptual and sensory work with chimpanzees in
the Soviet Union may have contributed to the initiative for
the establishment of the Sukhumi station (
Yerkes, 1943
).
Yerkes established his Orange Park station in 1930 with
funds from Yale University and the Rockefeller and Car-
negie Foundations. He received an initial gift of 13 chim-
panzees from a breeding facility belonging to Rosalia
Abreu in Cuba (
Maple, 1979
). The colony was expanded
during the next several years with 16 additional chimpan-
zees from Africa, a gift
Laboratory studies were multi-categorical, encompassing
neurophysiology, anatomy, pathology, nutrition, growth,
and development (
Bourne, 1971
). Orange Park was the first
organization of its kind in the western hemisphere.
In 1965, the laboratories in Orange Park were moved to
Atlanta, Georgia, and the animals were re-established in the
new Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center of Emory
University.
Cayo Santiago and the Caribbean Primate
Research Center
Clarence Ray Carpenter, a student of Yerkes and an
accomplished field primatologist (
Maple, 1979
), has as one
of his most enduring accomplishments the establishment of
the Cayo Santiago Colony of rhesus monkeys.
Rawlins and
Kessler (1986)
and
Kessler (1989; M. J. Kessler, personal
communication, 2007)
have provided extensive accounts of
the history of the Cayo Santiago Colony. Much of the
following historical
information is derived from those
accounts.
Carpenter formulated plans in the early 1930s for
establishing a population of both gibbons and rhesus
macaques on an island in the American tropics. The
possibility of conducting both behavioral and biomedical
research on an island colony was basic to those plans. He
interested a number of people, including the staff of
Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, the faculty of
Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons,
from the Pasteur
Institute.
