Abstract

"Constructing Chimpanzee Value: The Improvement of Nature in Robert Yerkes' Anthropoid Laboratory, 1913 – 1938"

Brigid Prial, University of Pennsylvania (brigidp@sas.upenn.edu)

In June of 1925, psychologist Robert Yerkes argued with an IRS tax agent that his two laboratory chimpanzees were business expenses, not personal expenses. While the chimpanzees’ status as business costs was unprecedented for the tax agent, Yerkes’ career was predicated on the transformation of chimpanzees from curious pets to valuable scientific commodities. In the early 20th century U.S., scientists like Robert Yerkes and chimpanzees themselves constructed, negotiated, and co-created chimpanzees’ ambiguous value to science. This paper explores the commodification of nature by examining the establishment of the first chimpanzee laboratory in the United States. While the prospect of a chimpanzee laboratory had garnered thousands of dollars of funding, chimpanzees once in the laboratory were far less productive than scientists had imagined. The economy of the lab relied on chimpanzee breeding, a little-understood process, with births seen as massive financial boons and untimely deaths representing huge financial losses. Scientists struggled to manage the breeding and experimental productivity of their expensive laboratory subjects as they expended grant funds and produced little scientific data of applicable value. This paper suggests that science’s role in the commodification of nature is not always rational or efficient, instead, scientific demand has led to the commodification of ecological resources with dubious value and entangled human institutions and finances with animal lives in the process.