chimpanzee and baby experiment

This Guy Simultaneously Raised a Chimp and a Baby in Exactly the Same Way to See What Would Happen

When treated as a human, the baby chimp acted like one—until her physiology and development held her back

Rachel Nuwer

On June 26, 1931, comparative psychologist Winthrop Niles Kellogg and his wife welcomed a new arrival home: not a human infant, but a baby chimpanzee. The couple planned to raise the chimp, Gua, alongside their own baby boy, Donald. As later described in the  Psychological Record , the idea was to see how environment influenced development. Could a chimp grow up to behave like a human? Or even think it was a human? 

Since his student days, Kellogg had dreamed of conducting such an experiment. He was fascinated by wild children, or those raised with no human contact, often in nature. Abandoning a human child in the wilderness would be ethically reprehensible, Kellogg knew, so he opted to experiment on the reverse scenario—bringing an infant animal into civilization. 

For the next nine months, for 12 hours a day and seven days a week, Kellogg and his wife conducted tireless tests on Donald and Gua.

They raised the two babies in exactly the same way, in addition to conducting an exhaustive list of scientific experiments that included subjects such as "blood pressure, memory, body size, scribbling, reflexes, depth perception, vocalization, locomotion, reactions to tickling, strength, manual dexterity, problem solving, fears, equilibrium, play behavior, climbing, obedience, grasping, language comprehension, attention span and others," the  Psychological Record authors note.

For a while, Gua actually excelled at these tests compared to Donald.

But eventually,  as  NPR notes , Gua hit a cognitive wall: No amount of training or nurturing could overcome the fact that, genetically, she was a chimpanzee. As such, the Psychological Record  authors write, the Kelloggs' experiment "probably succeeded better than any study before its time in demonstrating the limitations heredity placed on an organism regardless of environmental opportunities as well as the developmental gains that could be made in enriched environments."

The experiment, however, ended rather abruptly and mysteriously. As the Psychological Record  authors describe: 

Our final concern is why the project ended when it did. We are told only that the study was terminated on March 28, 1932, when Gua was returned to the Orange Park primate colony through a gradual rehabilitating process. But as for why, the Kelloggs, who are so specific on so many other points, leave the reader wondering. 

It could be that the Kelloggs were simply exhausted from nine months of nonstop parenting and scientific work. Or perhaps it was the fact that Gua was becoming stronger and less manageable, and that the Kelloggs feared she might harm her human brother. Finally, one other possibility comes to mind, the authors point out: While Gua showed no signs of learning human languages, her brother Donald had begun imitating Gua's chimp noises. "In short, the language retardation in Donald may have brought an end to the study," the authors write.

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Rachel Nuwer is a freelance science writer based in Brooklyn.

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'Project Nim': A Chimp's Very Human, Very Sad Life

In the early 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim was plucked from his mother's arms and transported into human homes in the hopes that he would learn sign language and open a window into ape thoughts. Harry Benson/Roadside Attractions hide caption

In the early 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim was plucked from his mother's arms and transported into human homes in the hopes that he would learn sign language and open a window into ape thoughts.

Project Nim

• Director: James Marsh
• Genre: Documentary
• Running Time: 93 minutes

Rated PG-13 for some strong language, drug content, thematic elements and disturbing images

With: Nim Chimpsky, Herbert Terrace, Stephanie LaFarge, Laura-Ann Petitto, Joyce Butler

Watch Clips

Credit: Roadside Attractions

'Chimps Aren't Humans'

In 1973, an infant chimpanzee was taken from his mother's arms and sent to live with a human family as part of a Columbia University psychology experiment.

The goal of the project was to see if the animal, named Nim Chimpsky, could be conditioned to communicate with humans if he was raised like a human child in a human household. He learned some very basic words in American Sign Language, but Nim continued to act like a chimp — he bit the children in the house and didn't understand how to behave like a human child. It was decided that the family could no longer care for Nim, and he was shuffled from caretaker to caretaker for several years.

In 1977, Nim attacked one of the people taking care of him, and the experiment ended. At that point, researchers said he knew more than 125 ASL signs — but no one knew quite what to do with Nim. He was sent to a medical research facility, where he lived in a cage with other chimps for the first time in his life, before being rescued and sent to an animal sanctuary. He died in 2000.

Nim and the many people who raised him over the years are the subjects of James Marsh's new documentary Project Nim . Marsh and two of the people who worked with Nim join Fresh Air 's Terry Gross for a discussion about the film and about the controversial experiment.

"The premise of the experiment was to treat him as much like a human child as possible and to give him the nurturing of a human child in order [to see if] he would behave like one," Marsh says. "And it was quite striking that there wasn't an investigation into what chimpanzees actually were or what they're like. And the wild animal comes out in him very quickly, and [no one] was prepared for that."

Jenny Lee: 'He Was Just Included In The Family'

The first family to take Nim in lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a giant brownstone. Jenny Lee, who was 13 years old at the time, remembers her mom, Stephanie LaFarge, raising Nim alongside her and her siblings. She says her mother grew quite attached to the chimp, even breastfeeding him throughout his stay at their house.

"He needed diapers, he needed bottles, he needed feedings," Lee recalls. "And it was odd he was a chimp. But at the same time, there was kind of a normalcy about it in that he was just included in the family right away."

While Jenny and her siblings went to school, Nim learned sign language with researchers at Columbia University. The goal was to open up a window into Nim's thoughts and to see if he could develop real language skills. When he came home each night, Nim would play with the Lee children and mimic their behavior. But as he aged, he became more aggressive — and no one knew what to do.

"It was really the biting that became the big problem after maybe he was a year old, because it's painful and it can draw blood," Lee says, "and with human babies, you can teach them not to do that. And that was not something that Nim was able to learn to really control."

Nim left the family's house and moved in with a series of caretakers before going to a primate facility on the grounds of the University of Oklahoma.

Bob Ingersoll (left) spent nine years with Nim, the subject of an experiment to see if apes could communicate with humans using sign language. Ingersoll is now the president of Mindy's Memory Primate Sanctuary . Roadside Attractions hide caption

Bob Ingersoll (left) spent nine years with Nim, the subject of an experiment to see if apes could communicate with humans using sign language. Ingersoll is now the president of Mindy's Memory Primate Sanctuary .

Bob Ingersoll: 'Keeping Chimpanzees In Cages Is Torture'

Bob Ingersoll, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, was working as a research assistant at the primate facility and met Nim on his first day.

"You could read [fear and apprehension] through his facial expression and his body language," Ingersoll says. "It was very distressing to him and ... we were really worried about Nim and we spent quite a lot of time with him, making sure he was eating and drinking and not being picked on by the other chimps."

Ingersoll immediately began using sign language with Nim to comfort him. He says the chimp was never aggressive around him — and quickly became one of his good friends.

"It was easy to hang out with him," he says. "He did for me the same thing that I think that I did for him, which was make him feel comfortable and certain and familiar with the situation."

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While taking long walks around the grounds of the primate facility, Ingersoll occasionally smoked pot with Nim, who had been introduced to marijuana in New York City and even appeared in the magazine High Times in 1975.

"He actually signed 'stone smoke time now' to us first," Ingersoll says. "We were shocked. Although we were familiar with chimpanzees that did things like drinking and smoke cigarettes and that sort of thing, I'd never had a chimpanzee request weed from me. That was an eye-opener."

Ingersoll and Nim spent much of their time together, until Nim was once again moved, this time to a medical research laboratory. Ingersoll later helped rescue Nim from the research facility, and the chimp was moved to a ranch for abused animals.

"What he needed at that point was to be with other chimps," Ingersoll says. "Chimps don't need to be with humans. They need to have a chimp life. So my own personal need to hang out with Nim or walk with Nim wasn't as important to me as doing the right thing for Nim. ... Chimpanzees in captivity is just not where they ought to be. ... I would hope that one of the lessons that we learned from Nim's life is that keeping chimpanzees in cages is torture and really plays havoc on their mental health."

Psychology: When a Child and a Chimp Were Raised Together…

A recent item on X pointed to a story many of us hadn’t heard before about a couple’s effort to raise their infant son with a baby chimpanzee. Before you interrupt to offer condemnation, let me start by saying that the (true) story took place in the early 1930s when materialism seemed new and exciting to many. If anyone tried that in 2023, Child Protective Services and the SPCA would promptly be called.

But let’s climb into the time capsule (in our imaginations) and go back to 1931, when this kind of thing was still New and Cool:

When their son Donald Kellogg was ten months old, psychologists Winthrop and Luella Kellogg decided to raise him alongside a baby female chimpanzee (7 months), Gua, in their temporary home in Florida, near a primate research center. Winthrop Kellogg had written about the possibilities of humanizing the ape and the birth of a son was his chance. He would treat the two infants in the exact same way.

It was a confident time for projects like humanizing a baby chimp. But after nine months, the Kelloggs had to cancel the experiment. What happened? Different stories are told: Here’s one from Reuters in 1951:

The experiment was described by Sir Cyril Burt, former professor of psychology at London University in an article for The Family Doctor, the British Medical Association magazine. magazine. Raised by the professor and his wife, “Gua was treated, not as an animal pet, but as a member of the family, dressed exactly like the child, nursed and trained in the same way, rewarded, scolded or punished in the same way,” the article said. But early in the second year the child began to use words and phrases quite spontaneously, and to imitate the actions of its elders, in a way the animal never could manage. “Little ‘Chimp’ Proves Smarter Than Human Baby After 1 Year”. The Montreal Gazette. Reuters. July 27, 1954.

So there was a natural divergence of abilities. But a more nuanced story emerged later:

Rachel Nuwer writes at Smithsonian Magazine,

It could be that the Kelloggs were simply exhausted from nine months of nonstop parenting and scientific work. Or perhaps it was the fact that Gua was becoming stronger and less manageable, and that the Kelloggs feared she might harm her human brother. Finally, one other possibility comes to mind, the authors point out: While Gua showed no signs of learning human languages, her brother Donald had begun imitating Gua’s chimp noises. “In short, the language retardation in Donald may have brought an end to the study,” the authors write. Rachel Nuwer, “This Guy Simultaneously Raised a Chimp and a Baby in Exactly the Same Way to See What Would Happen, Smithsonian Magazine, July 28, 2014

Well, now that the journal authors mention it, if a child is raised with a chimpanzee who is treated as if she were another child, that would interrupt his development. Donald was supposed to be learning to speak from parents, sibs, and playmates during critical formative years, not from a primate ape. Ultimately, the chimpanzee would never go on to talk but the boy could end up with delayed speech.

The parents did get a study and a book out of it though, published in 1933:

The overall study, called The Ape and the Child, is of more historical than scientific interest. Gua developed, physically, a great deal faster than Donald did. Gua imitated adult behaviors, wearing shoes, opening doors using the door handle, and feeding herself with a glass and a spoon. The chimp also outperformed the human when it came to physical tests. Esther Inglis-Arkell, “The 1931 experiment that paired a newborn chimp with a newborn baby,” Gizmodo, December 5, 2013

In the end, the Kelloggs returned to Indiana. Gua was returned to the primate center where she died a year later of pneumonia. And several authors have felt it worth mentioning that Donald Kellogg killed himself in 1973, aged just 43.

Looking at the story from nearly a century’s distance, it’s hard to see what the experiment really demonstrated that could not have been observed by studying baby humans and baby chimps separately: Chimpanzees develop faster physically but then reach an intellectual plateau, relative to children, from which they never advance. Though there have been various attempts, no one has ever been able to give chimpanzees human minds — the real goal all along, surely — because the human mind is not a material thing. We cannot go around dispensing what we simply do not control.

And we can all be grateful for experimentation ethics committees today. At least it’s an effort.

You may also wish to read: But, in the end, did the chimpanzee really talk? A recent article in the Smithsonian Magazine sheds light on the motivations behind the need to see bonobos as something like an oppressed people, rather than apes in need of protection.

The human mind has no history. There is no good reason to assume that human intelligence evolved from mud to mind via a long slow history. When we look at the human past, we see lights flashing on suddenly. Technology evolves but not the mind as such.

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Kellogg’s Study: The Ape and the Child

• IQ, Intelligence and Brain Power
• Sue du Plessis
• September 15, 2022

Winthrop Niles Kellogg (1898 – 1972) was a psychologist best known for his study  The Ape and the Child , which involved his observations of raising a chimpanzee infant along with his son.

Gua and donald raised together.

Kellogg and his wife took into their Florida home a female chimpanzee, Gua, seven and a half months old when their son, Donald, was ten months old. Their purpose was to learn what similarities and differences would develop between Donald and Gua if treated alike in every detail.

The chimpanzee was dressed like an infant, in napkins and later in rompers. She was wheeled in a carriage, sat in a high chair, slept in a bed, and was kissed good night.

No special effort was made to teach Gua spectacular stunts but rather to teach her the same things a fond parent would do with a baby girl. The experiment was carried out with a careful day-by-day record of observations, films, and tests for a period of nine months.

Gua becomes like a human

Kellogg found that the chimpanzee was able to take on many human ways. Gua wore shoes and walked upright. She could eat with a spoon, drink from a glass, and open doors before the boy acquired those abilities. She imitated human gestures and ways of showing affection, like hugging and kissing Donald and the parents. Like most children, she made a fuss when the ‘parents’ went out and left them alone.

Gua’s rate of development was much faster than the boy’s, especially in the motor skills of climbing and jumping. She also learned to respond to ninety-five words and phrases such as ‘kiss Donald,’ ‘shake hands,’ and ‘show me your nose.’ However, she never learned to utter words or phrases other than to make known her wishes through grunts and squeals. Gua’s toilet training was appreciably slower than the control achieved by the boy.

“ Definite limits “ to Gua’s humanization

Although the chimp progressed faster than the boy in the earliest stages, it became evident toward the end of the experiment that she was falling behind, especially in the matter of intellectual adaptation to human demands. The early superiority is attributed to the fact that anthropoids generally mature earlier than humans. A monkey reaches puberty at about four years, whereas humans reach puberty between twelve and fourteen on average, with girls usually reaching puberty before boys.

The report of this experiment by Dr. Kellogg and his wife indicated that an animal could achieve a good deal of human socializing through training and human association. But it also was noted that “there are definite limits to the degree of humanization that can be achieved by non-human species regardless of the amount of socializing and humanizing effects.” .

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Baby and chimp raised together in warped experiment that ended in chilling death for both

Winthrop and luella kellogg raised their son donald with a chimp 'sister' called gua but ended up abandoning their experiment after noticing disturbing changes in their baby boy.

• 16:47, 31 Jan 2024

Married animal psychologists Winthrop and Luella Kellogg decided to raise a baby chimpanzee called Gua alongside their ten-month-old son Donald.

At seven months old, Gua was just three months younger than her 'brother', and the Florida-based scientists were interested in seeing whether sharing his upbringing could lead to her developing human behaviours, and even communication skills.

The experiment, which began in 1931, was intended to last for five years, but the Kelloggs had no choice but to pull the plug after just nine months, after seeing the chilling way it had affected young Donald.

Both babies were raised in the exact same manner, as per the Smithsonian Magazine, sleeping in similar beds, and playing with similar toys. All the while, Winthrop and Luella carried out a series of experiments of the 'siblings'. These included topics such as " blood pressure , memory, body size, scribbling, reflexes, depth perception, vocalization, locomotion, reactions to tickling, strength, manual dexterity, problem solving, fears, equilibrium, play behaviour, climbing, obedience, grasping, language comprehension, attention span, and others."

At first, Gua raced ahead of Donald in most areas, given that chimpanzees develop quicker than humans, and could even respond to phrases such as 'Don't touch!' and 'Get down!', as reported by NPR , but ultimately hit her limits when it came to human speech.

Psychological Record authors wrote that the Kelloggs' experiment 'probably succeeded better than any study before its time in demonstrating the limitations heredity placed on an organism regardless of environmental opportunities as well as the developmental gains that could be made in enriched environments." While Gua never learned to speak, however, Donald was greatly impacted by her way of communicating.

Little Donald began to imitate Gua's grunts and screeches when he wanted more food, and would even mimic Gua's movements, clambering around on all fours as though he was a chimp himself. The Kelloggs reported: "Whenever an orange or other desired food was observed and barked for by Gua. Donald would usually take up this imitative call." It's reported that clever Gua even taught Donald how to spy on people.

Donald's parents also noticed Donald wrestling with his 'sister', biting people, and generally behaving in an animal-like way. The reason behind the abrupt end of the experiment remains mysterious, although it's believed by some that the impact Gua was having on Donald's language development could have been cause for concern.

Authors of The Psychological Review expressed concerns at the time surrounding why the experiment ended far sooner than anticipated, writing: "We are told that the study was terminated on March 28, 1932, when Gua was returned to the Orange Park primate colony through a gradual rehabilitating process. But as for why, the Kelloggs, who are so specific on so many other points, leave the reader wondering."

OZY reports that mother Luella had become particularly concerned about Donald's behaviour, believing he was becoming more chimp than human. Another theory is that Gua had become significantly stronger than Donald, and the Kelloggs had begun to fear for their son's safety.

Sadly, after Gua was sent away, she died of pneumonia just one year later, at the age of three. Not much is known about the life of Donald, or the impact the experiment had on him. It is known however that he tragically died by suicide in January 1973, aged just 43, just one year after the deaths of Winthrop and Luella in 1972.

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