Project Nim Page #6

but get him out.

Oh, you saw that, huh?

See you later, Nim!

We just liked each other right off,

and sometimes it's like that.

Chimps aren't humans.

You have to kind of understand chimps

to be able to understand

how to work with them and be with them.

I took him out on walks.

I didn't bring food.

I didn't do the kind of things

that would interrupt the relationship

or the building of the relationship.

He grows on you quick.

He was so charming.

It didn't occur to me that animals

had that kind of personality like ours.

And you had to be true of heart.

You had to be true of heart.

If you had dark places in you, they'd

know it and they wouldn't like you.

Good morning. With us this morning

is Dr Herbert Terrace,

a professor of psychology

at Columbia University.

For several years, Dr Terrace

was in charge of an experiment

where he and several other human beings

tried to teach a chimpanzee named Nim

the sign language of the deaf.

But now in a book just published,

which is called Nim,

you're saying, Dr Terrace,

that these experiments don't prove

as much as you had

originally thought they did?

I changed my mind about the data.

I suddenly saw what the key to this was.

Nim was a brilliant beggar.

He learned how to beg

and he could work his teachers

and always get what he wanted

by moving his hands in different ways.

And most of the time he moved his hands

in the ways that the teachers suggested.

And the motive for signing

was not to say,

"What a nice cat you have over there,"

but, "I want it. "

When the experiments

were over,

you returned Nim to the primate colony

where he was born.

A year after that you went back for a

visit, and we came along with a camera.

You and he are talking

in sign language here.

Here we have it in slow motion.

What's Nim saying?

He's saying, "Give Nim banana. "

Why is it that you're saying

that he can't speak like a human being?

Well, a string of signs is not

necessarily a sentence.

You can learn a list of words by rote,

and that says nothing about

your ability to use a grammar.

Aren't you very disappointed that you

spent all this time and all this money?

Well, it would have been

very electrifying news,

almost like communicating

with a creature from outer space,

if I could show that another organism

could use language the way humans have.

- But it didn't work.

- It didn't work.

Thank you very much, Dr Terrace.

I hope somebody

can still talk to Nim, in any event.

I didn't care about

the language argument after a while,

it didn't matter to me.

He might not have had

sentences or grammar,

but there's no question that there

was communication going on,

and I saw it clearly.

He talked about the trees,

the berries that he found.

He liked to play.

Favourite sign, "play".

Holy sh*t, he doesn't know

which one to grab.

He knew what pot was,

or hash, or whatever.

And he wanted

to smoke a joint.

Stone.

Smoke.

Now.

When we went out on walks with him,

Nim was one of us,

and if we smoked a joint,

he smoked it with us.

In the circle, we handed it to him.

Chimps are like us, they're hedonistic,

they like to do pleasurable things,

they like to...

You know, they like to have fun,

and hell, who doesn't?

And there was something

in marijuana...

They weren't aggressive.

You talk less, you do different things,

you enjoy each other.

Lily and Nim lived together

in the pig barn.

Both of them didn't have

many chimp friends,

and then they became friends.

They were seen copulating,

and we think Nim might have been

the father of Lily's baby.

Had the best time in my life,

I still say that.

I've never had such a good time.

Except maybe at a Grateful Dead show.

Pretty close.

I don't even know which one I'd...

Actually, being with Nim...

I'd rather be with Nim than jerry,

and, for me, that's saying something.

That's real.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a banana?

Wanna eat the shoe?

That's a shoe, this is a berry.

And that's when Mahoney

started showing up.

He was standing around,

looking at chimps and writing on his pad

and whatever.

When someone...

When I found out who he was,

and I'm sure it didn't take long

for me to figure it out, I was...

Obviously he was checking out

the chimps for the lab.

LEMSIP is best known by its acronym,

L- E-M-S-I-P,

which is Laboratory for Experimental

Medicine and Surgery in Primates.

He represented the devil to me.

Most of the work that we did

with the chimpanzees, for example,

was

testing various

candidate vaccines

for, like, hepatitis B, hepatitis C,

HIV, AIDS.

I think it's very difficult

to fund the kinds of research

that I happen to be

very much interested in.

It's been difficult to fund

social research in general.

We heard about Dr Lemmon's

problems, which were financial.

It was finally arranged that, yes,

we would take a very large part

of their colony.

I thought Lemmon was trying

to scare the university.

I thought they would go,

"Oh, gosh, you can't sell them

to a medical lab.

"We've got to do something. "

I thought the community

would rise itself up.

Bob and I tried so hard

with public appeal

for something for the chimps,

and there was no response.

And then, shortly after that,

the chimps were indeed sold.

Of the chimps that are

being sent off to the lab today,

how many of them were subjects

of the signing research?

Only one

was restricted to signing research.

This is Nim.

As a chimp, you've got no way

of knowing what's happening to you.

You're just suddenly cut off

from seeing everything outside.

Suddenly, after a day and a half

of constant driving,

you get out the other end

and you're in another sort of room.

I wouldn't say

they were jumping with joy

to find themselves in a new place.

Come on. Come here. Come on.

One more time. One more time!

It's over. It's all right, it's over.

I took on the role of being

the one who chose

which animals would go into

which types of study.

And I hated it.

Spike, Spike,

come over here, Spike.

Spike, come on over here. Come on.

You want to go away with Spike?

These animals will be used

on hepatitis vaccine safety tests.

It is a federal law that before

a new batch of vaccine can be released

on the American market,

it must be tested in four chimpanzees.

There's no way, in all honesty...

There's no way

you can carry out research on animals

and for it to be humane.

It can't be humane,

because you already put them in a cage.

That was already the first step,

and from there on, it's downhill.

We realised that certain

of the Oklahoma chimps

could use sign language and were trying

to sign with us.

What we did was,

we wrote down on sheets of paper,

which we posted all over the place,

on doors and walls

and everywhere we could find,

certain signs,

and it was hoped that, as time went by,

everyone would pick up at least

a certain amount of sign language.

I didn't see

Nim as special,

above anyone else in the group,

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