Midweek Mention... Project Nim

Project Nim

Dan: do you keep all this bit in when I go? She, you should keep in the bit that before we start pressing

Sidey: button. So if we say anything good, I do leave it in, but we haven't said, we haven't said anything good for a while

or, or broadcast.

Okay.

Dan: Oh, I suppose that would, that would feature also, but I'm just thinking you know, all that clever chat we did before where we were just absolutely

Sidey: It's so profound, wasn't it, as well?

Dan: amazing. I mean, I think people deserve to hear it

Reegs: but unfortunately they're gonna hear us talk about this movie

Sidey: Project Nim.

Yeah. Nimrod.

Reegs: Yes.

Sidey: I, this is new or

Dan: Nim Chimpsky.

Reegs: Nim Chomsky.

Dan: Named often. Norm

Reegs: Norm Chomsky? Yes. Who was the MIT linguist?

Dan: And

Sidey: That's good. I could play on a play on words. Yeah. Yeah. There's my daughter looks after a chicken called Harry Styles. Yeah.

Dan: Oh, I like that. It's yeah, it is.

Is very Getting into Harry to, to learn a language because Norm [00:01:00] Chomsky kind of. Famously has said that what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is that we have language and Ry Yeah. In that order, I

Sidey: Is that why they did it? They got the guy's name and they thought, what's the closest animal we can,

Reegs: I think that happened afterwards, but Okay.

Sidey: Yeah.

Okay. He,

Reegs: It, he, Noam Chomsky had famously argued that language was exclusively a human thing. Yeah. And that apes couldn't be, Capable of it. And in this documentary that we watched, brought to us by Director James March, who did Man On Wire that we reviewed for this pod they put together a documentary, the BBC and HBO to look at a crazy time in the 1970s when the state of animal rights and activism and science and.

Sidey: It's not what it is

Reegs: The culture was at the point that would allow them to do something fucking mental

Dan: well, trying to debunk this. I, they really felt they were [00:02:00] on the cutting edge of science in attempting to find out if a chimp could be taught sign language in order

Sidey: I just felt that the first woman we meet just wanted a chimp.

Dan: Yeah. And the second, and the third and the fourth

Sidey: but the first one, and they got the door to there and she's like, yeah, we just got a chimp.

Reegs: Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the documentary opens with some grainy footage of Oklahoma in 1973. Some chimps at a wildlife park at the Institute for Primate Studies, and it's a birthing compound where we'll see NIMS mother, Carolyn, she's already had six babies taken away.

It's desperately sad. This part where they take Nim just after he's born from her.

Dan: What they'll do is they'll see that she's just given birth. They'll go then and shoot her with a tranquilizer and try and catch the baby before she falls and crushes it. In order to protect it.

She's kind of,

Sidey: they're, they're so hot in their animal welfare.

Dan: Yeah, they really are. And so they would go in and, and take it away. And it is [00:03:00] interesting this, because it's referred to later by one of the surrogate mothers one of the, the humans that she also felt that she had had the. Nim taken from her.

Yes. In such a, a, a kind of horrible way.

Reegs: the architect of this

Dan: rolling my eyes if you can't see

Reegs: I know, I know. Yeah. The architect of this study was a Dr. Terrace of Columbia University, and he wanted to test the nature versus nurture debate in a particular way, and he wanted to take a newborn. Primate chimpanzee and put it with a human family and see what characteristics or language it might acquire.

But there doesn't seem to have been any real rigorous scientific method to any of this. The woman who's chosen Stephanie Lafarge, she had never been around a chimpanzee before, had no knowledge of

Dan: She had had children of her own though. [00:04:00] Yeah. So that meant she was more than qualified in professor terraces ideas. And she then took it on without much consultation from the rest of her family because. Probably she just wanted a chimp because he was super cute.

Reegs: Lesbians. Mm-hmm. As

Dan: Nim Nim is just absolutely one of the most beautiful looking little chimpanzees you've ever seen.

Reegs: She breastfed him.

Sidey: She just chuck that in like a throwaway line, like it,

Dan: he ate with us. He drank with us. He would play with

Sidey: we wanted to raise him as

Dan: I breastfed him. We went to the beach together. We did. Whoa, we

Sidey: I had to measure the group and like, sorry, what the

Reegs: Yeah. 'cause they do kind of just skip

Sidey: immediately brush onto the next thing. I'm like, no, that's a significant fucking weird detail.

Dan: thought we were gonna see some footage because we do see in between the talking heads of interviews that they've got with all these different [00:05:00] characters, recorded video footage of Nim. Dressed up,

Reegs: trained

to use the toilet, have a ship and wipe his ass.

And

Dan: and although the experiment, if you like, is looking to see if he can learn sign language and then produce some actual coherent

Reegs: which only comes about later because they had no idea, you know, at the beginning what they were doing. They weren't keeping logs, they didn't have a plan to teach him language through a SL that just came about almost accidentally.

Yeah.

Sidey: The, the, the rich woman, I didn't think she was all there. She just seemed fucking, I don't know,

Reegs: Well, the thing that comes through this entire documentary is how everybody in this story thinks it's about them. And nobody is thinking about Nim at all. And she is a bit of a nut bag. And it is like a crazy situation because you find out that this woman amongst many other women,

standing the duke in, in this experiment, we're all fucking the main guy.

Sidey: [00:06:00] he's

Reegs: like a. Yeah. And he's got this big comb over, which she talks about in one of the scenes when he

Dan: the next girl that talks about that, I think, isn't it?

Reegs: it? Yes. His research assistant, who can, Laura and

Dan: they're all

young, beautiful

girls.

Sidey: But they're not from like a classic academic background, I don't think

Reegs: they're students at Columbia University. He brings in a load of them. Eventually he ends up setting up this fucking weird commune at this mansion that he can afford to pay the heating on and nothing else. And that ends up letting people move in there with him and him eventually,

Dan: and everybody's fucking, everybody there.

Well maybe that's a little extreme, but there's plenty of that going on.

Sidey: They do, you do see, like nim wearing a nappy diapers, as they say. They, they, they start to get fucking annoyed or fed up with having to change nappies or this.

Like, what the fuck do you think? So they train him together, Lou, then. Wouldn't, you know, it Nim doesn't stay like a cute little fucking baby chimp

Dan: Well, this going on for like four or five years and

Sidey: he starts to get fucking [00:07:00] bigger and more fucking

Dan: yeah. More, more aggressive. And he's not a, a little chimp. They can just pu push over and he starts displaying some of the hardwired characteristics of any

Sidey: he tries to fight the cat.

Reegs: He does try to hump the cap. Yeah.

Dan: and

also fight and bite anybody that he doesn't like. And he's actually able to start signing as well. They do in this second phase, once it's taken away from the mother with load of kids and they take it to that

Reegs: Yeah. She is taken away from Stephanie, but ripped away.

Dan: Yeah. Ripped away. And she says, oh, I felt like Caroline

Reegs: did.

Dan: You know? Pause. Yeah. Okay. Love. And you didn't get tranquilized at, at the, at the same

Reegs: would looked pretty cranked to wi to me.

I mean, there was also a, he, a heavy amount of experimentation going on with drugs.

Dan: beautiful young woman, probably 18, something like that 19 is suddenly in charge and she's got no primate experience at all.

[00:08:00] But she does seem to at least follow scientific. Thought in the sense she starts keeping logs. She starts recording the different signs and they've got some data points then of his nim sign language.

Reegs: And

he does actually acquire language at quite a rate. Yeah, I think he masters well over 120 signs. Now at this point, it becomes something of a sort of national celebrity. And also, I mean, undergoes some weird, he becomes kind of. Almost a, something in between a chimp and a and a human becomes part of the gang.

When he's with them. They, he likes to get stoned and have you know, they give him, yeah,

Sidey: 'cause there's another guy C Cracks up is like a proper hippie, isn't he?

Reegs: He's actually the only one who's really weirdly because he's getting him stoned in giving him booze. He's actually the only one interested in NIMS welfare. This

Dan: bob. Yeah. Yeah. And. Yeah, well there, there was two guys, wasn't there?

There was one that started having a relationship with the [00:09:00] research assistant and then there was Bob who came a little bit later, and it just used to be him and Nim and they'd go out for walks and he wouldn't bring food with him. So it wast about food. It was just about they'd find berries or they would do that and they were just hanging out together and he seemed to, you know, sign play.

There was like a clapping thing. And that would

Reegs: was like a, yeah,

Dan: Yeah.

Reegs: look at that.

Dan: And and they would just hang out and play a lot as, as two, two boys would. It, it's strange, you know, in the animal kingdom a lot of the time Boy, they don't get stoned. But boys hanging out with boys is absolutely fine, but you add a girl into it and it starts becoming a different dynamic and everything.

And it was kind of like that. Every now and again, Dr. Terrace would. Drop in, wouldn't he?

Reegs: he? Yeah.

Sidey: Is he the one they're all horny for?

Yes.

Dan: nor, yeah, normally he would bring a camera crew with him. I mean, he is all about the, the funding I guess, if I'm being generous. But he's also about self-promotion, I think as [00:10:00] well and getting whatever kind of girls interested in him for being a powerful, intelligent academia.

Kind of professor at Columbia University. 'cause he wrote books and things on, on this afterwards. But it was

Sidey: he just pulls the rip record on it.

Dan: Yeah, he does. It's a really distasteful way in, in finishing because he, he says, oh, NIM was never mine, but Nims go into now like Lem sip or

Reegs: It's what it's called. Yeah. The Laboratory for Experimental Medicine in surgery in Primates.

Lemsip.

Sidey: Looks a lovely place.

Dan: It, it's,

Reegs: well

Sidey: is, this is really depressing,

Dan: cold tiled chained up screaming monkeys who are getting injected and pinned down the worst kind of horrible things. And they would bring these monkeys in. And Nim being one of them, they

Reegs: were doing vaccine research there by a guy who looks like a Nazi

Sidey: Yeah. And he sounded like one, the way he described it is like, well, you know, it's the law that we have to do [00:11:00] this on before any drugs. Like, you seem really happy about it.

Dan: Yeah. Really grim And it wasn't until there was a public kind of outcry and a lawyer getting involved who had the

Reegs: well, it's Bob, it's, it's Bob, the guy who gets stoned who, who just can't see Nim go to this place.

Lemsip. He's been sent there basically. 'cause they've run out of funding. Yeah. And also the terrorist terraces completely undercut the scientific process because he said, oh, my conclusion is it wasn't language at all. It was just mimicry. So it's all

gone.

Sidey: just begging. He learned how to beg. Yeah.

Reegs: And so, he's gone off to this horrible place to be experimented on.

So Bob has got, has whipped up a little bit of press. They've got this lawyer involved who threatens to have his day in court with Nim in court representing himself and just the clearly horrific publicity that, that would generate scares off Lemsip so that

Dan: Yeah. [00:12:00] Ba based on the fact that he was brought up as a human child for the first five years of his life. And you're right, they get kind of. Scared of that and don't fancy it. And they end up selling him to a kind of wildlife sanctuary of,

Sidey: It's really, it's for, it's for horses

Dan: Yeah. It's called black beauty, I think,

Sidey: Yeah. And he's the only chimpanzee there.

Dan: and being very social animals, it's a perfect opportunity to leave him on his own in a cage.

So they felt and we hear a little bit later. He does have a few visits and things, but he dies at 26 rather than sort of

Reegs: well, there is a bit in between that. First of all, he has one last meeting with Stephanie where he attacks her

Dan: her around by the ankle.

Reegs: Yeah. And I'm not sure what she was expecting.

Dan: was quite happy with that, that he didn't kill her because that showed that she still, he still loved

Reegs: Mm-hmm.

Dan: This woman's

Reegs: But he did eventually get, you know, the last, at least five or [00:13:00] 10 years of his life, he did actually get a mate and was part of a kind of chimpanzee troop, because that was the awful thing when he was a the, the other primate place is that he was neither a monkey, you know, he was neither a chimpanzee nor a human anymore.

He was not, you know, he

Dan: no, he couldn't behave

Reegs: either, but he did eventually find himself in a troop of some sorts and had a mate and did live out. The last few years of his life in something approaching a

a normal life for somebody

Dan: In captivity. Yeah. Yeah, it was a really weird, weird experiment.

We are looking back into the 1970s where I guess this discussion hadn't been debunked in the sense that there were people that thought, well, could an animal be taught?

you

know, sign language, can it speak, can it, they even tried, you know, before that to try and get the animals, you saw those early grades to, to move its lips so it could enunciate words and you are like, [00:14:00] no, what was going on with you

Sidey: they just were a lot more comfortable with treating animals this way. You know, we've moved on a long, long way since then.

Reegs: Yeah. The, the ethics

Sidey: today's lens thinking this is fucking awful.

Reegs: But even them talk, looking back on the experiment,

Sidey: They don't seem

Reegs: they don't seem to, they don't really reconcile themselves with the ethics of it at all. No. And it's bad science, man.

It is bad, bad science. It's

Sidey: even science at all. It's just we wanted a pet monkey, see what would happen.

Reegs: Pet monkey, sex hippie thing. Yeah. Really distasteful that

Dan: Well, she was start the, the first woman was it Stephanie you say? Yeah. She started. Saying, oh, you know, I

Sidey: she had a

Dan: didn't Yeah.

A

Sidey: Poet. And, and that got kind of like, he was like, well, fuck this. And so she fucked

Mr. Tetris or something.

Dan: And he, she was like, well, no, I didn't, I didn't feel anything sexually towards Nim. And we are like. Because he was a pre, he was a preteen. He was like,

yeah,

Reegs: that's what she says. That's a

Dan: [00:15:00] whoa, whoa, whoa.

Just what is, maybe because it's a monkey, you know, it's a chimpanzee. What you, what you doing is

Reegs: Well, that was also a thing that, yeah, because they were really weird that they mentioned that the sole focus of her research was around Nims Edol complex, and documenting how he liked to and how frequently he masturbated.

Sidey: Yeah,

His numbers. His numbers were strong.

Reegs: Yeah. Its numbers. Were good. Yeah.

Dan: Yeah. Nobody's beating NIMS

Sidey: I, my viewing experience was I was just fucking hating all the humans in

Dan: Yeah.

Sidey: Yeah. Not so much Bob. 'cause even though he was getting the monkey stones, you could see his heart was in the right place. But everyone else, it just so exploitative and just, yeah.

Ethically just so fucking bankrupt.

Reegs: I

think we've come a long way, haven't we?

We have come a long way in terms of our treatment of animals.

Dan: I mean,

Sidey: shit doesn't happen to animals still. Of

Dan: I think there's a bonobo that is a bonobo monkey that's learnt more words. The thing is, with this kind of [00:16:00] money and this kind of dedication to a project, there should better things to learn about.

Animals. There's better science, there's better

Sidey: it's like they get surprised that, you know.

Lim starts to attack them when he is a fucking teenage rowdy like primate. Think like he nearly rips one of their faces off. You think? Well, yeah, of course

Reegs: She talks about her whole face, like the inside cheek hanging

Sidey: Tetris is like, well, I was just a bit worried that she might sue me.

Yeah,

Dan: It's they, she was saying they're six or seven times stronger than the average male. I mean, have you ever seen chimpanzees like, I mean they're

Reegs: scary,

Sidey: the Attenborough documentary. Remember when that one broke? When he showed what they're like in the world when they fucking go. I was gonna say bananas.

It's pretty funny. And I, I was, had that in the back of my mind thinking and there's also that famous nine one one call in the US where they had a pet chimp and it ripped someone's face off.

Dan: Yeah.

Reegs: Oh, nice.

Sidey: So, you know, you know how bad this can go.

Dan: This, this is it. Even at sort of five years old, it's, it's getting big and strong there. I mean, Michael [00:17:00] Jackson had bubbles, didn't he?

There was a picture of him on the TV at one point with his chimpanzee

Sidey: he was fine.

Dan: yeah. And, and so nothing, you know.

Sidey: all.

Reegs: What do you think about

Dan: could go wrong

Reegs: putting a documentary out about this? Like, is it the sort of thing that should be brushed over or is it things we should be discussing to go look, at least we're not doing that shit anymore or?

Dan: Yeah, I mean, I, I suppose in the,

in the very best sort of lens that you look at it is you're saying, well, this is back in the day where actually we, we. Didn't know what we didn't know. You know, they hadn't done this kind of experiment and now they've done it. It's,

I mean,

nobody, it is history and you don't

Reegs: much of an experiment though,

Dan: No, it wasn't, but it was an experiment enough to say. It's not gonna work for anybody that thought that it might work. I mean, it

Sidey: was who the fuck thought it was? What? Fuck it up. Well,

Reegs: At least hopefully in [00:18:00] publicizing the story, it's like, enough people find it distasteful that

Dan: yeah. Oh no's bad science. You know?

Sidey: is neutral.

It doesn't make any judgment itself

Reegs: I think it's fairly critical of him in the way, well, unless he just said a bunch of stupid shit,

Sidey: just so ignorant. Yeah.

Dan: Him being Dr.

Reegs: Yeah.

'cause I think it's fairly, it portrays him in an awful, all of the people in an awful light. So maybe, you know,

Dan: I think he's potentially doing it just so he could get into the pants of the young girls that he knew would be attracted into, you know, cute little animals

Reegs: Time Magazine or Vogue or whatever it was that were coming round and taking pictures of him.

He wasn't even there.

Dan: Make a few quid himself. Yeah. That was it. It was A

Really, really weird one. I've not heard of it before. And I guess looking at the other animal experiments that they were doing in and around is actually quite gentle compared to Lemsip and what they were doing to

Sidey: fucking barren stuff going on in

Dan: [00:19:00] Animals at the time. If you've, you know, if you're looking at it like that, at least people generally. Though they were daft and stupid, I think they weren't trying to mistreat him out of malice or anything like that. They were doing it because they'd taken him away from his family. They weren't treating it naturally and giving him

Reegs: Are you, are you against like all medical experimentation on animals?

Dan: I don't think it's really justified. No. Certainly in this day and age, I think they would've done anything that

Is is ready. I don't, yeah, I don't think there's many areas where I would consider it being a

Reegs: justifiable

Dan: thing these days. I mean, back in the day when they did lots of things and things weren't known, I dunno, it would've been hard to justify it then, but it's.

Doesn't seem, I mean, I'm not a doctor but No, no. But

Reegs: a bombshell,

Dan: But I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't think that, yeah. Testing [00:20:00] on animals for anything. Certainly, you know, do it still for crazy things, don't they?

Reegs: I

mean, cosmetic testing and stuff is gone, but I think, or they're probably done in barren parts of the world, but certainly in the West it's

Sidey: Do they do like vaccine stuff on rodents and things and

Reegs: Well, there is still a a, a big

Dan: and mice are still kind of tested on lots, aren't they?

Reegs: Yeah. And there are other, yeah, I don't know. difficult, isn't

Dan: Yeah, it's pr, it's, it's pretty horrid

Sidey: Shampoos and stuff. You don't be testing that, but if, you know, I think there's probably, it's naive to think that you could just say, don't do it ever again.

Dan: Let, let's, let's you know, you have to work up the, the things.

I mean, if they're looking at rats and, and mice and stuff like that and they're injecting a vaccine that could potentially save, you know, hundreds of people and, and thousands or millions of people,

Sidey: definitely, don't do it. definitely.

Dan: Definitely. Definitely.

Exactly.

Sidey: many people as [00:21:00] is. Yeah. Weird. It's weird. Enjoy it. No, but interesting. It was interesting.

Reegs: It was an interesting story when it

Sidey: It's the fucking breastfeeding thing. Just not me. For

Reegs: Yeah. Same, same

Dan: weird characters. Weird people.

Weird,

science.

Sidey: Yeah. Strong.