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  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 actual
ly 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

  *The Following account of Elliot's persecution draws heavily on J. A. Peebles, “Infringement of Academic Freedom by Press Innuendo and Hearsay: The Experience of Dr. Peter Elliot,” in the Journal of Academic Law and Psychiatry 52. no. 12 (1979): 19—38.

  referring to the unpublished paper. But the University Information Office was now “too busy” to issue the release.

  On June 11, the Berkeley faculty scheduled a meeting to consider “issues of ethical conduct” within the university. Eleanor Vries announced that the PPA had hired the noted San Francisco attorney Melvin Bell “to free Amy from sub­jugation.” Bell’s office was not available for comment.

  On the same day, the Project Amy staff had a sudden, unexpected breakthrough in their understanding of Amy’s dreams.

  Through all the publicity and commotion, the group had continued to work daily with Amy, and her continued distress—and flaring temper tantrums—was a constant reminder that they had not solved the initial problem. They persisted in their search for clues, although when the break finally came, it happened almost by accident.

  Sarah Johnson, a research assistant, was checking prehistoric archaeological sites in the Congo, on the unlikely chance that Amy might have seen such a site (“old buildings in the jungle”) in her infancy, before she was brought to the Minneapolis zoo. Johnson quickly discovered the pertinent facts about the Congo: the region had not been explored by Western observers until a hundred years ago; in recent times, hostile tribes and civil war had made scientific inquiry hazardous; and finally, the moist jungle environment did not lend itself to artifact preservation.

  This meant remarkably little was known about Congolese prehistory, and Johnson completed her research in a few hours. But she was reluctant to return so quickly from her assignment, so she stayed on, looking at other books in the anthropology library—ethnographies, histories, early accounts. The earliest visitors to the interior of the Congo were Arab slave traders and Portuguese merchants, and several had written accounts of their travels. Because Johnson could read neither Arabic nor Portuguese, she just looked at the plates.

  And then she saw a picture that, she said, “sent a chill up my spine.”

  It was a Portuguese engraving originally dated 1642 and reprinted in an 1842 volume. The ink was yellowing on frayed brittle paper, but clearly visible was a ruined city in the jungle, overgrown with creeper vines and giant ferns. The doors and windows were constructed with semicircular arches, exactly as Amy had drawn them.

  “It was,” Elliot said later, “the kind of opportunity that comes to a researcher once in his lifetime—if he’s lucky. Of course we knew nothing about the picture; the caption was written in flowing script and included a word that looked like ‘Zinj,’ and the date 1642. We immediately hired translators skilled in archaic Arabic and seventeenth-century Portuguese, but that wasn’t the point. The point was we had a chance to verify a major theoretical question. Amy’s pictures seemed to be a clear case of specific genetic memory.”

  Genetic memory was first proposed by Marais in 1911, and it has been vigorously debated ever since. In its simplest form, the theory proposed that the mechanism of genetic inheritance, which governed the transmission of all physical traits, was not limited to physical traits alone. Behavior was clearly genetically determined in lower animals, which were born with complex behavior that did not have to be learned. But higher animals had more flexible behavior, dependent on learning and memory. The questio
n was whether higher animals, particularly apes and men, had any part of their psychic apparatus fixed from birth by their genes.

  Now, Elliot felt, with Amy they had evidence for such a memory. Amy had been taken from Africa when she was only seven months old. Unless she had seen this ruined city in her infancy, her dreams represented a specific genetic memory which could be verified by a trip to Africa. By the evening of June 11, the Project Amy staff was agreed. If they could arrange it—and pay for it—they would take Amy back to Africa.

  On June 12, the team waited for the translators to complete work on the source material. Checked translations were expected to be ready within two days. But a trip to Africa for Amy and two staff members would cost at least thirty thousand dollars, a substantial fraction of their total annual operating budget. And transporting a gorilla halfway around the world involved a bewildering tangle of customs regulations and bureaucratic red tape.

  Clearly, they needed expert help, but they were not sure where to turn. And then, on June 13, a Dr. Karen Ross from one of their granting institutions, the Earth Resources Wildlife Fund, called from Houston to say that she was leading an expedition into the Congo in two days’ time. And although she showed no interest in taking Peter Elliot or Amy with her, she conveyed—at least over the telephone—a confident familiarity with the way expeditions were assembled and managed in far-off places around the world.

  When she asked if she could come to San Francisco to meet with Dr. Elliot, Dr. Elliot replied that he would be delighted to meet with her, at her convenience.

  3. Legal Issues.

  PETER ELLIOT REMEMBERED JUNE 14, 1979, AS A day of sudden reverses. He began at 8 A.M. in the San Francisco law firm of Sutherland, Morton & O’Connell, because of the threatened custody suit from the PPA—a suit which became all the more important now that he was planning to take Amy out of the country.