Then there was Herbert Terrace, a Columbia University behavioral psychologist and the grand architect of the project, planned to raise a chimpanzee in a human home, with no other contact with other chimpanzees, and begin instructing him in sign language from infancy. Days after his birth, Terrace scooped up the infant Nim, flew him to New York, and had him placed, like a foster child, in the home of the LaFarges, asking the family to instruct the chimp in American Sign Language. Not a single member of the household was fluent, or even competent, in sign language. The LaFarges were wealthy, eccentric hippies—W.E.R., a pony-tailed and put-upon poet, and Stephanie, a former student and lover of Terrace’s—with a Brady-Bunch-sized family who lived in a brownstone on the Upper West Side. And wait—it gets weirder.
FR post here. It's Romans 1.
I’m not suicidal, but how depressing for both the kid and the chimp. It is scary to think what people are capable of doing in the name of “science,” isn’t it.