Дуглас Престон - Jennie

So, despite outstanding results and excellent peer reviews, the funding was killed. Losing our NSF funding wouldn’t have been the end of the world, except that after Proxmire no private foundation would even touch the project. All our funding was withdrawn. We were the lepers of science. It was that fellow at Penn, Craig Miller, who was behind it. Miller got ahold of some videotape of Jennie signing on some pretext and then analyzed it. They concluded that everything she said was cued. They felt that almost every sign of Jennie’s was a repeat of a sign that had just been made by the trainer. Then there was that absurd syntax business again. No language without syntax. Well, what about Latin! These assholes didn’t even know Latin! Where did these guys go to school?

Anyway, these conclusions came from people who had never spent any time with chimpanzees. You can’t tell anything from a two-hour videotape. I spent five years with five chimpanzees. There are so many modes of communication between human and chimp that can’t be quantified. Body language. Vehemence and speed of gesture, facial expression. You had to be there with Jennie to understand the depth of communication. With our enemies out there, and a Senator against us, we got hammered.

This research had been extremely expensive. Maintaining the Barnum estate, paying for teachers, trainers, and keepers twenty-four hours a day for the colony chimpanzees, my time teaching Jennie, and the thousands of hours spent analyzing and processing the data. A humane research environment for chimpanzees is very, very expensive. I’m sure Miller would have been much happier if we’d locked all the chimps in four-by-five cages. When we lost our funding, we had to shut down the project immediately.

This was a terrible loss to science. I can’t even begin to tell you. But it also affected Jennie. It was the beginning of the end.

Every year, Congress and the public eagerly await Senator William Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece” awards. Sen. Proxmire, the watchdog of the scientific community, has tracked down and reported taxpayer-financed scientific research that is redundant, unnecessary, or just plain silly. Those projects that represent an egregious waste of taxpayer money are given his highest award, known as the Golden Fleece. Many of the projects that win the award seem amusing, until one examines the cost.

This year Sen. Proxmire gave his uncoveted award to a project going on right here in Boston, a joint effort sponsored by Tufts University and the Boston Museum of Natural History. Over half a million dollars of National Science Foundation monies have supported this project since its inception in 1967. The nature of the project? Teaching chimpanzees to “talk” using American Sign Language.

The question is, do we really need talking chimpanzees? The supporters of the project tell us they are unlocking the secrets of human language. But Sen. Proxmire — backed up by an eminent-scientist from the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Craig Miller — has called that idea into question. The project has yielded nothing more than elaborate imitative behavior on the part of the apes. Nothing approaching real communication — that is, language — has resulted. And all this after spending half a million dollars of public money. When our inner cities are crumbling, when children go hungry, and when people shiver in freezing tenements because they can’t afford to buy heating oil, surely there are better ways to spend a half million dollars.

So we say to Sen. Proxmire: Bull’s-eye! Or should we say, Chimp’s-eye!

Dear Editor,

So you think the world doesn’t need talking chimpanzees. Well, have any of your smart-aleck editorial writers bothered to come here to Kibbencook and see our “talking” chimpanzee? Her name is Jennie and she’s a member of our family and communicates with those around her a lot better than most human children her age. I open your paper in the morning and I can hardly wade through all the gobbledygook that you try to pass off as “news.” If you call that “communication” then you deserve a Platinum Fleece. As for Craig Miller, not once — not once — has he ever met Jennie! So what does he know? Or as Jennie would say, “Phooey to you!”

I think what the world doesn’t need are talking editorial writers.

Sincerely,

At the age of fifteen and a half, Sandy got his learner’s permit. God save us. Of course, he had to have an adult in the car until he was sixteen, or something like that. That didn’t stop him. He began taking the car out when he wasn’t supposed to, and Jennie of course went with him. Jennie loved to ride in the car. She would hang out the window and make big vulgar noises and give people the “finger.” I just cringe when I think about it. Hugo was not a stern disciplinarian, and I had more than I could handle.

That winter, the winter of 1973, the big “event” occurred. That was what made Jennie famous all over again. There was an ice storm and everything was covered with a layer of ice. I was out shopping and Hugo was holed up in his study, where he always was. Sandy snuck out the Falcon, and they went down to the high school parking lot. Well, I came home and the car was gone. I thought, That’s funny, Hugo didn’t say he was going out. And just then Hugo came out of his office. I said, “Where’s Sandy and Jennie?”

He said, “Why, aren’t they right here?”

As if on cue, the telephone rang. Oh my goodness. It was the Kibbencook town police. They were in an uproar down there. We were told to come down immediately. I could hear in the background this appalling sound that could only be simian in origin. The policeman was hopping mad. He started yelling at me over the telephone, all about how I was going to get a big bill for damages and the animal control people were there because Jennie had bitten a policeman and she would have to be destroyed.

Oh my goodness, you can imagine what we were thinking. We rushed down there. The whole place was in a shambles. The dogcatcher had arrived to get Jennie. The poor man was scared to unlock the jail cell where Jennie was shut in. Jennie was tearing up the place. Oh dear. Forgive me for laughing. It seems funny now but at the time we weren’t at all amused.

It seems that Sandy had been skidding around the parking lot, I think they called it “doing donuts.” Making the car spin around in circles on the ice. The police arrived and this one officer ordered Sandy out of the car. The man was angry and acting like a bully, as policemen do. His name was Russo. Bill Russo. Well, I’d known Bill Russo for years, and he was a bit, shall we say, limited. He knew Sandy, or should have known him, but I guess he didn’t recognize him with the long hair. Thought he was some kind of crazed hippie. So he ordered Sandy up against the car with his arms out, and started searching him. Well, you know how protective Jennie was. She tumbled out of the car with a scream and gave Russo a good bite on the leg, really opened it up. That chimp was strong.

Like the complete ass that he was, Russo drew his service revolver and pointed it at Jennie. Sandy, of course, went berserk, screaming and grabbing at the gun and wrapping himself around Jennie. He called Russo the most horrid names, fascist pig and that sort of thing. It must have been just awful, thinking this moron was going to shoot Jennie. I’m sure he would have if Sandy hadn’t stopped him. Sandy saved Jennie’s life.

So they threw Sandy and Jennie in the back of the car and brought them down to the Kibbencook police station over there on Washington Street. Even though Sandy quite reasonably asked that he and Jennie be put in the same cell, they were separated. And Jennie — who hated cages — Well! she just destroyed that cell, tore open the mattress, broke the toilet, unscrewed everything and busted the sink. The dogcatcher arrived and he was this horrid fat thing who was afraid to open the door. He was getting ready to shoot Jennie with a tranquilizing dart. Sandy told him Jennie was part of a secret government scientific project and that if they did anything to her the FBI would put him in jail. Can you imagine? Honestly, it was so funny. I don’t know whether this idiot of a dogcatcher believed it, but the police chief had read about Jennie and the research, so he asked the man to wait until we came down.