Jennie

by Douglas Preston

  When she heard the clatter of the dishes, and smelled the food, and saw the place crowded with people, she broke into excited screams of joy, and so loud and piercing! All conversation in the dining room ceased. Jennie had arrived! Those who knew Jennie, of course, were amused. But more than once I saw visiting curators or new employees spill food on themselves when Jennie screamed her arrival.

  Jennie sat in a high chair at the curators’ table, where she ate with impeccable manners. Well, perhaps not quite so impeccable. When we finished eating, many of the curators took out their cigarettes. Jennie loved to light cigarettes. She went around the table with a box of kitchen matches and lit each curator’s cigarette. These were the days, mind you, when everyone still smoked. One day a curator offered Jennie a cigarette, and she tried to smoke it while sitting in his lap, but it didn’t agree with her. The curator paid for his poor judgment with a lapful of ape vomit.

  During that first year and a half, I found myself observing Jennie with growing interest, I mean scientific interest. Simia quam similis. She was so very human-like. She appeared to understand at least as much as a human child her age. She showed astonishing intelligence. I’ll give you two examples. There was a woman who came in three days a week who did “public relations” for the museum. She was really quite marvelous, a real type, with the bouffant hairdo, high heels, long red nails, lots of makeup. When she first saw Jennie she screamed, which frightened Jennie and made her scream, which made the woman scream even louder. It was not a felicitous beginning!

  Jennie knew right away this woman disliked her. Whenever she passed the woman’s office on her trike, she would stop, quietly open the door, and issue a sudden hoot. You could hear the woman inside give a big shriek, and then her voice yelling, “Get out of here! Stop that noise! Somebody get that animal out of here!” When the woman began locking her office door, Jennie gave the door a kick on her way by.

  Now I can see you think this is very funny. And it was. But stop for a moment and think, if you will, about what this behavior involved. Let us dissect what Jennie had to know in order to torment this woman. First, it showed Jennie had the ability to impute a state of mind to another human being. Forgive me, I mean a human being. She knew this person disliked her presence. This was sophisticated reasoning, my friend! This was not a dog biting an unfriendly man. Jennie deliberately tormented her, making her startled and angry. It showed that she had the ability to manipulate a human being’s state of mind. It showed a mastery of human psychology that I found extraordinary.

  The second incident was even more unusual. It occurred after Jennie had been at the museum a year. For a while she had a Barbie doll which she carried around, dressed, undressed, fed, kissed, and so forth. Sometimes she would hand you the doll for a hug, and then take it back. One day, Hugo called me down to his office. Jennie was there, sitting in her wing chair, apparently cradling her doll. Only there wasn’t any doll. She’d forgotten it, left it at home. Instead, she was cradling an imaginary doll, chattering to it, stroking it. Hugo said, “Jennie, hug.” Jennie got up, still cradling the doll, and came over to Hugo. Hugo hugged her and then Jennie offered Hugo the imaginary doll to hug. Hugo hugged it and Jennie took back the pretend doll.

  Do you see the significance of this? I saw it immediately. I felt my skin crawl. You see, ethologists had always believed that one of the traits distinguishing humans from animals was the ability to imagine and to create. Creativity was supposed to be one of the defining characteristics of what it means to be human.

  What we had just witnessed was nothing less than the toppling of this grand idea.

  Let me get a little technical here. If it’s too much for your readers you can edit this out.

  There are people who continue to insist on the uniqueness of the human animal, who continue to feel that man stands in isolated splendor. They come in two types: religious zealots and ethologists. The religious bigots can be dismissed out of hand, but the ethologists require a serious response.

  These ethologists—I will name no names—have criticized much of the research done on chimpanzees. They say that by using words like “imagination,” we are anthropomorphizing the animal’s behavior. We are attaching human traits to an animal’s behavior. Their argument goes like this: How can you know the animal is using “imagination” or “creativity,” when you can’t really know the animal’s state of mind? It could just as easily be elaborate imitative behavior. And besides, how do you define the word “creativity” anyway? Aren’t you imposing human assumptions on an animal’s behavior? Thus, they brand us with the sin of anthropomorphization, one of the egregious sins of ethology.

  These objections came from people who were (and still are) insecure about the “hardness” of their science. They are afraid of the “softness” of ethology. They want to be like the physicists. Of course, the physicists have abandoned pure objectivity, but the social scientists always seem to be twenty years behind everyone else anyway.

  These objections are absurd. I get so tired of these people and their whining objections. For heaven’s sake, we don’t know what “imagination” or “creativity” is, in humans or in chimpanzees. And do these ethologists really think we can know our own state of mind? Shows how little they know about human psychology. The point is this: Jennie’s behavior looked exactly like imagination as it would operate in a human child. If it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, well then, what the hell is it if it isn’t a damn duck? Aha! We can even turn their argument around and say that perhaps human imagination and creativity are “elaborate imitative behaviors.” You see my point?

  What I’d ask these ethologists is: show me the sharp line between the human and the ape. Show me precisely how the two species differ qualitatively, rather than just quantitatively. The more you study chimps, the more you realize it can’t be done. They use the label “anthropomorphization” as a cover, because they’re scared that maybe we’re all just animals after all! [At this point Dr. Epstein laughed for an extended period of time.]

  Oh my. I am getting ahead of myself. In the mid-sixties, everyone believed there were profound differences between humans and all other species. When I saw Jennie with that imaginary doll, I knew I was witnessing an event of profound scientific importance. I knew that chimpanzees must be closer to human beings than I or anyone else had thought. “I felt like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken”!

  What I also saw at that moment was an extraordinary opportunity for research. Here we had a perfect subject. An animal perfectly socialized as a human being. Can you appreciate what an outstanding scientific opportunity this was? To me—a cultural anthropologist—it seemed a miracle. A chimpanzee that had never come in contact with its own kind, never been exposed to its own heritage; a chimp that believed it was a human being in every way. A chimpanzee imprinted—to use Lorenz’s term—as a human being. Why, not even Yerkes had such an animal to work with!

  That was how the Jennie project began.

  Let me make two points right now. First, Jennie gave to us, and to science, information of incalculable value. What we learned from Jennie not only caused us to reevaluate what it means to be an animal, but it caused me, personally, to reevaluate what it means to be human.

  The second point is this: Jennie loved every minute of the research. It was conducted in a spirit of kindness and fun, without stress or coercion. The atmosphere the Primate Center researchers created for Jennie was equivalent to the atmosphere in, say, a playroom or kindergarten. Did you read that Esquire article on the research? It was a libelous piece of trash. Scratch-and-sniff journalism. Well, what can one expect from a fashion magazine for men. Good lord.

  It was after seeing Jennie with the doll—I think it was February or March of 1967—when I first called Pam Prentiss at the Center for Primate Research. Prentiss was the director of the center, and I wanted to know if she had any interest in studying Jennie.

  She was excited. Excited is
n’t the word; she was beside herself. I then talked to Hugo about my idea. He found it intriguing, but he was skeptical. I said, “Hugo, you’re the one who talked about this being an experiment.” Well he’d forgotten all about that. Being a physical anthropologist, he did not see the full implications. I explained to him that it would be like the kind of psychological and cognitive testing done on, say, a gifted child. Lots of fun and games. Jennie would learn ASL—that’s American Sign Language—and participate in a variety of interesting learning situations. I said it would be like sending Jennie to school.

  He was still skeptical but agreed to meet with Dr. Prentiss. He was genuinely concerned about Jennie. He laid down two conditions: no matter what, Jennie would continue to live at home. And then he said that he didn’t want Jennie subjected to anything that I wouldn’t be comfortable subjecting my own children to.

  Looking back these years, I can say quite comfortably that Jennie experienced nothing that I wouldn’t have my own children experience. Just the opposite. A rich and rewarding environment was created for Jennie.

  Now this is important. Back then, there was still a strong feeling that nurture, rather than nature, is what determines what we are. Environment, not genes, determines the course of our lives. There was still the heady notion that we could remake ourselves and the world, that biology was not limiting. The field of sociobiology was in its infancy, and it was considered shockingly reactionary, a throwback to the social Darwinism of the nineteenth century. E. O. Wilson’s great work wouldn’t be published until 1975. We thought that because Jennie was socialized as a human, and had this astonishing intelligence approaching that of a human child, that she would always be human. We forgot that Jennie was not human. There were impulses and desires and aggressions programmed into her genes that neither we nor she had any control over. Biology is destiny.

  So what happens when you’re raised to think you’re something you’re not? I guess we found out, didn’t we?

  five

  [FROM Recollecting a Life by Hugo Archibald.]

  In April of 1967, Dr. Pamela Prentiss met Jennie for the first time. Jennie was an astute judge of human nature. When she first met a person, it did not take her long to make up her mind: either she liked him or she did not. She was particularly suspicious of overdone heartiness, pompousness, repressive people, and an excessive “niceness.” Her ability to humiliate people who showed these qualities never ceased to amaze me.

  We were therefore quite interested to see Jennie’s reaction to Dr. Prentiss. We trusted Jennie’s judgment even more, in some ways, than we trusted our own. In our minds, how Jennie reacted would be the determining factor as to whether we would allow her to participate in the research project.

  We were playing with Jennie on the lawn when she arrived. Dr. Prentiss made a rather dramatic first impression. She whipped up in a mud-splattered Jeep, blond hair spilling over her shoulders, and a battered hat on her head that looked the twin of Jennie’s old Borsalino. She was wearing blue jeans and a work shirt, and I immediately respected her for that. If she had appeared in a dress I would have been skeptical of her experience with chimpanzees.

  Ignoring us, she came over to Jennie and crouched in front of her.

  “Hi, Jennie,” she said. “My name’s Pam. Do you want a hug?” She had an easy, self-confident, unhurried way about her with Jennie that was exactly right, and Jennie responded by opening her arms wide. She took Jennie in and gave her a big hug. And then Jennie kissed her, an unusually affectionate gesture to a stranger—especially a woman. Jennie usually preferred men.

  Only after introducing herself to Jennie did Dr. Prentiss shake our hands. I liked her priorities. She was awkward and even a little defensive with us, and I suspected that she was one of those animal behaviorists who related better to her subjects than to her fellow human beings.

  We retired to the living room. Sandy joined us, since the entire family would have to be involved. Dr. Prentiss outlined what their research goals and methodology would be for Jennie. The Center for Primate Research at Tufts had a captive colony of chimpanzees, all of whom were learning American Sign Language for the Deaf, or ASL. They needed a “control”; and Jennie would be that control. They wanted to see if Jennie, who was species-isolated and thoroughly socialized as a human being, would learn ASL differently from the colony’s chimps.

  The focus of the research project was more in the area of linguistics than primate behavior. The actual linguistic problems being posed were quite esoteric and are beyond the scope of this memoir. Indeed, they were difficult even for me to understand.

  I was impressed by the careful way that Dr. Prentiss and her team had framed their research objectives. This was no fuzzy, open-ended plan, no woolly-headed idea to “teach a chimp sign language and see what happens.” They wanted to explore precisely how chimpanzees acquire “language” and how this compared to the theory of language acquisition in human children.

  It was a fascinating idea and Lea and I saw the value of including Jennie in the project. I had my own hypothesis: I felt that Jennie, being raised in a warm, loving human environment, would learn much faster than a group of caged chimpanzees who were not socialized as human beings. After all, language, whether it is ASL or English, is a human invention.

  I remember voicing my opinion to Dr. Prentiss that day.

  She glanced at me with surprise. “Dr. Archibald,” she said rather crisply, “in our research, we try to avoid forming premature hypotheses. There is always the danger of a biased observer skewing the data.” This was a rather typical response from Dr. Prentiss. She was a scientist through and through, sometimes even at the expense of people’s feelings.

  Dr. Prentiss explained that both Lea and I would have to learn ASL. Then she turned to Sandy. Did he also want to learn ASL?

  Sandy was more excited about the project than any of us.

  “Yeah!” he cried out. “Does this mean me and Jennie’ll be able to talk to each other?”

  “Yes, if you both work hard,” said Dr. Prentiss.

  “Wow, cool,” Sandy said.

  Sarah was only two at the time, and we felt that she would probably pick it up naturally as she grew older. It would be a valuable experience for all of us.

  Learning ASL would not be difficult, Dr. Prentiss explained, because Jennie would probably learn only five or ten signs in the first year. Over the course of the five-year project she could be expected to learn perhaps one hundred signs. She would never be able to communicate as well as a deaf person, she explained, and her signing would not be as crisp or as rapid.

  Dr. Prentiss proposed to visit our home three days a week, where she would take complete charge of Jennie. They might play in the crab apple tree, they might go for a drive in the Jeep, they might take walks on the golf course or down by the brook. She would need a room in the house—we offered her the basement playroom—where she and Jenny could play and study. Our privacy would be respected and the rest of the house would be off-limits while she was here. Finally, she said, the Primate Center would furnish us with a stipend to defray some of our costs in taking care of Jennie.

  Lea and I talked about the proposal. We were surprised to discover that we both longed to be able to communicate with Jennie. Jennie understood in a vague sort of way quite a few English words, but her inability to respond often left her frustrated. If she wanted something, she would tug on my pant leg, scream, point, and in extreme cases drum on the floor with her hands and feet. Her needs were not complex—food, toys, tickling, and hugging were her main concerns—and we felt that even a few signs would open up a whole new world to her, and to us. Our feelings were probably not very different from those of the parents of a deaf child.

  The idea was appealing for another reason: Lea found Jennie to be an exhausting charge, and having a professional baby-sitter three days a week would be most welcome. Jennie seemed genuinely fond of Dr. Prentiss and we knew they would get along well.

  Before making our final d
ecision, however, we visited Dr. Prentiss’s chimpanzee colony. We wanted to see how she was treating their other animals.

  The Primate Center was a large estate in Hopkiln, Massachusetts, given to the university by, of all people, the circus impresario P. T. Barnum. The colony was unofficially called the “Barnum colony.” It consisted of forty acres of gardens, fields, woods, and ponds, surrounded by an electrified, chain-link fence. The four chimpanzees lived in an enormous, heated barn, formerly a dairy barn. It had been converted to spacious and comfortable living quarters built into the biggest jungle gym we had ever seen, where the chimpanzees slept high up on shelves. In addition to having free run of the estate, the chimps had access to the first floor of the old Barnum mansion, where they met with their teachers every day in a classroom setting of sorts. There were no cages.

  The animals were visited regularly by the doctor, dentist, and nutritionist. The chimpanzees themselves were so obviously happy that all our lingering fears were laid to rest. I doubt there was anywhere a happier or more luxuriously pampered group of animals. A human being would be content to pass his life in such a place.

  Dr. Prentiss was a new kind of primate researcher. She abhorred the intrusive and cruel psychological testing done by primate researchers such as Dr. Harry Harlow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Dr. Prentiss insisted on human standards of decency and kindness to her chimpanzee subjects.

  Dr. Prentiss also explained to us that when the project was over, her colony chimpanzees were going to be sent to an island in Florida where she had founded a “rehabilitation” program for once-captive chimpanzees. One of the cruelest aspects of primate research, she pointed out, was that when the researchers were finished with them the animals were simply shunted to labs or zoos, to live the rest of their lives miserably caged. In the case of her project, she felt a responsibility to the chimpanzees for life.