Suomi – NIH primate studies

Well, the laboratory, the primate laboratory that NICHD helped me build is in rural Maryland about 40 kilometers outside of Washington, D.C., in the countryside, where there’s plenty of space. And so we’re able to have some of our colony of Rhesus monkeys housed outdoors in multi-acre enclosures that simulate their natural habitat and allow us to have them grow up in social situations that are equivalent to what you find in the wild. We also have monkeys growing up in smaller housing pens but that still allow for relatively normal socialization. And we have a neonatal nursery where we hand rear infants from birth onward and then socialize them with peers or our artificial mothers and peers before integrating them into the larger social group. We have our own self-sufficient breeding colony so that we can basically, through selective breeding, control the genetic background of our animals and we’re able to control various aspects of their rearing environment. For example, whether they grow up with their own biological mothers or whether they are foster reared by unrelated adult females or where they grow up with no parents but with access to peers.  

And we’re able to study these animals longitudinally, essentially throughout their entire lifespan, which for Rhesus monkeys in captivity can go as long as 30 years or more. And we also, because it’s essentially a captive colony, we can sample biologically either saliva samples or blood samples or cerebral spinal fluid samples, at any point during development for all individuals. And before and after certain environmental events such as introduction to a new social group, removal from an existing social group, exposure to novel toys or things such as that. So we are able, basically, to control the genetic and backgrounds in environmental histories of our subjects and this gives us an enormous advantage over those who are trying to do parallel work at the human level. Because we can watch these animals essentially every day of their life, rather than only periodically, such as every three or six or nine months that’s typical in most human studies, we can actually see developmental changes occur before our very eyes, rather than having to guess what’s happening in between sampling periods. This also is an enormous advantage over most human development studies.  

And finally the fact that our monkeys grow up four times faster than do humans allows us to see a generation in four or five years instead of having to wait 15 or 20 as would be the case for humans. So these advantages allow us to address directly questions that are of considerable importance at the human level but which for practical and ethical reasons are often difficult to study directly with humans and that’s the mission of our laboratory.  

We also, I may add, have access to two field sites. That is, sites where Rhesus monkeys are free-ranging in wild or semi-wild conditions. One of them is an island off the coast of Puerto Rico where 50 years ago a group of Rhesus monkeys were brought over from India and their descendents have been thriving ever since. These monkeys are essentially undisturbed except for an annual roundup by the veterinary staff at the Caribbean Primate Centre who runs that operation. It’s at that point we can get biological samples from these monkeys and we can watch them as we do with our own colony throughout the year. And we have access to another semi-free ranging colony that lives on a sea island off the coast of South Carolina.  

So we are able, with this range of environments, to study monkeys in natural habitats, in our best efforts to replicate a natural habitat where we have some control over who’s in that group, and under somewhat more restricted circumstances in the lab that still are able to provide certain essential components of what a Rhesus monkey’s world is normally like.