The chimp they tried to turn into a human: An extraordinary experiment in which scientists raised a chimpanzee as their child... with chilling results
A helpless pawn ripped — quite literally — from his mother’s breast, Nim was a victim of the naïve, hippy- culture-infused world of early-Seventies New York.
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Terrace, a small, mustachioed man with a huge ego, had named the little creature Nim Chimpsky — a pun on Noam Chomsky, the famous thinker who insisted that only humans have the capacity for language.
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But it was a disastrous decision — Stephanie never bothered trying to discipline Nim. She did not take any notes on the experiment and did not keep a log of Nim’s progress, but she did breastfeed him and give him alcohol and puffs on her cannabis joints.
He was encouraged to lay waste to their expensive home and wind up his rival for her affections, Stephanie’s husband. Home movie footage shows the little creature, a blur of black and white in his romper suit, charging around as Stephanie recounts dreamily how she let him explore her naked body as he moved into puberty.
‘I never felt sexually engaged with him,’ she recalls, which is a blessing at least. Yes, it certainly was the Seventies.
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If any of ‘his people’ showed the slightest signs of vulnerability — even just accidentally turning their back to him too quickly — the hair would rise on his arms and, Laura-Ann recalls, he’d ‘go into attack . . . he had to draw blood’. She still has the scars, running down her arms, to prove it.
