A couple of months ago, my roommate Kade approached me in the kitchen and asked:
KELLEY: Have you heard about the monkeys that are living underneath the sidewalks right outside Kellogg?
What? Of course, it doesn’t seem unlikely that a top research institution would have monkey labs. But still, why hadn’t I heard this before? I asked around at one of our WNUR meetings, and a few members had heard the same rumor, but no one could confirm it. So I started digging.
AMATO: I study how gut microbes affect the health and the biology of the organisms that they live in. And a lot of the work that I do in that area is in wild non-human primates.
Katie Amato is a non-human primate researcher at Northwestern.
She studies gut microbes of howler monkeys in Mexico.
[Nat sound of monkeys]
I went to her first to learn about her work and ask if there were any on-campus primates other than us, of course.
AMATO: Most of the work that I do is still with wild primates. A lot of it is done through collaborators that have their own long-term field sites. I do work with the Lincoln Park Zoo still on projects here and there. And then I do also work with some kind of captive research centers as well, to get certain types of data.
For Amato’s work, a lab on campus isn’t a reasonable choice.
AMATO: We know in terms of the microbiome, that it changes in captivity because there’s not the same sort of exposure to environmental microbes that are in like dirt and things like that. I believe there are some non-human primates on campus. There are not very many, is my understanding. I think there’s maybe a handful, and I’m not sure in terms of how they are distributed between campuses.
With no clear answer, I went searching to see if I could find any indication that there were monkeys in building basements. I went to the Pancoe Building, where I had been told the rumored monkeys might be.
BRADSHAW: Irad- Iraddiated laboratory animal diet. It has a rat-mouse and rat-diet. Does that mean it’s for mice? Complete diet for rodents. Okay. Not primates.
Several bags of rat food and some awkward conversations with lab technicians later, and no non-human primates to be found. I did find some business cards with links to an animal science website, but I didn’t have the credentials to access any of the pages.
But Amato did give me information on another nonhuman primate researcher. Unfortunately for the great monkey mystery, Dr. Mark Segraves retired in 2021.
He wrote QUOTE, “currently there is no non-human primate research being done on the Evanston campus.”
So although there were a few monkeys on Northwestern’s campus in the past, there aren’t now; at least … not in Evanston.
I had basically given up any hope of locating these rumored monkeys. That’s when I did one final Google search through Northwestern’s primate researchers. A name popped up: Lee Miller. We set up a Zoom call.
BRADSHAW: I’ll just start with the basics. Could you talk a little bit about yourself, what type of research you do?
MILLER: Sure. My primary appointment is at the neuroscience department down at the medical school. And I’ve been studying the way the brain controls limb movements, which means reaching and grasping movements, with monkeys for quite a long period of time. They’re all macaque monkeys, and they’re almost all rhesus.
BRADSHAW: And they all live on the Chicago campus?
MILLER: Yes.
Well, that answers part of the question: there are monkeys but on Northwestern’s Chicago campus.
But why are they there? How are researchers studying them?
Essentially, Miller and his team implant a very small electrode array to monitor monkey brain activity.
In a lab in downtown Chicago, Miller and his team surgically put these electrodes into monkeys’ brains.
Once they’ve recovered, the researchers sit them down in high chairs and give them video games to play. That’s when the lab is filled with this noise:
[Nat sound of neurons firing]
These are the sounds of a single neuron firing inside a monkey’s brain as it reaches for food. By studying the responses in these neurons when stimulated by electricity, Miller tries to better understand the signals created as the monkeys move.
MILLER: So you know, we’ve, we’ve done a surgery to implant this, this array which he didn’t give consent to. But the kind of work that we do is necessary, on one hand, to understand the brain, and on the other hand, to develop technologies that, that can be used to– not to treat spinal cord injury, but in fact, to remediate the deficits that are the result of spinal cord injury. My own specialty is to restore the movement of the monkey’s own limb and, ultimately, a human’s limb through a process that we call functional electrical stimulation.
A few years ago, Miller’s lab had about a dozen monkeys. Now he’s ramping down his work with them and only has about six at a time.
At the end of their time in the lab, some of the monkeys are euthanized to look closer at their brains.
Aside from Miller’s lab, no other onsite monkey researchers are established on campus, and these six monkeys that reside on the Chicago campus may be Northwestern’s last.
For WNUR News, I’m Helen Bradshaw.
