By Scott Graber
When I was 14 my father — who was then working at the Army’s Surgical Research Unit at Fort Sam Houston — suggested that I enter San Antonio’s science fair.
In those days a plaster of Paris volcano — or subjecting a hamster to a month-long dose of Jerry Lee Lewis — were typical science fair entries.
My father was then working on burns, and he suggested that I graft skin from a white Guinea Pig onto a black Guinea Pig. That experiment would eventually lead me to (a summer job) irradiating mouse spleens to see if the spleen would regenerate after most of the spleen had died.
All of these projects were designed to get me interested in medical school and, regrettably, they failed. But when I saw the Nov. 10 New Yorker article on runaway monkeys at Yemassee — “How forty three monkeys united animal rights activists and the right” — I could not resist diving into the topic.
Were it not for the Murdaugh murders in Hampton, America would know little about our low-lying geography or the people who live in Yemassee. Sure enough the New Yorker begins with your standard one-traffic-light, one-liquor-store description of the town.
“The region was once dominated by slave plantations; during the two World Wars, Yemassee was best known for its train depot, which welcomed recruits on their way to basic training. Today, many residents depend on the Monkey Farm for their livelihood. They work there, or they have family members who do, or they feed its employees. At lunchtime, especially on paydays, the local mini-mart is packed with Alpha Genesis staff. So is the liquor store.”
“The one traffic light town teemed with rumors about how the escape had happened. …”
But soon the author, Ava Kofman, moves to a sympathetic veterinarian who (apparently) described the smell — “feces shot through with ammonia” — as well as the “swarms of cockroaches” and “staff negligence.”
Kofman’s lengthy piece eventually gets round to the debate surrounding the use of monkeys in medical research.
These days it is impossible to write about any topic without somehow getting back to Donald Trump and his cost-cutting administration. in this regard, Kofman profiles Justin Goodman, who heads up an organization called White Coat Waste and who says that government should stop financing “monkey prisons.”
“We are bullish on the incoming Administration’s ability to stop animal testing. … It’s the perfect storm of conditions.”
“It is far from the only group, however, peddling the claim that an immediate end to animal research would not only be ethically justified but scientifically sound,” Kofman writes.
“This absolute framing elides the fact that, though non-animal methods are highly effective in certain areas — such as skin sensitivity and eye irritation — they cannot replicate the complexity of living, functioning organisms, especially in efforts to understand whole-body reactions, neurochemistry and progressive disease.”
Because monkeys are anatomically and genetically similar to humans — they have similar brains, muscle structure and immune systems — research with monkeys is more relevant to humans compared to information from mice or rats. Macaques are important when brain disfunction is the focus — Parkinson’s, Schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s Disease.
“The tau protein, found in neurons, is implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia and other dementias. Misfolded tau disrupts essential brain cell function, spreading through connected regions of the cortex that are crucial for memory and cognition,” (National Primate Research Centers, Aug. 14, 2024.)
Primate research related to the role of the tau protein and its relationship to neuron death is currently tracking the spread of tau over six months and allowing testing for “interventions targeting the tau protein.”
Notwithstanding the fact that 7 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease, and 1 million have Parkinson’s Disease; the National Institutes of Health, EPA and FDA are now implementing policy that will make all animal testing the exception rather than the rule.
“God did not make animals on planet Earth for us to abuse and torture,” Marty Makary, Commissioner of the FDA said in July 2025.
“People want the idea that we don’t need animals anymore to be true because they love animals,” says Heather Sidener, a former head of clinical medicine at the Oregon National Primate Research Center.
“They haven’t really had the hard conversation with themselves about, ‘What if it was my husband? What if it was my child?’ Would I really say to them, ‘I think you should die because I don’t think we should use animals to see if this new medicine is safe?’”
Editor’s note: For a number of years the author of this column, Scott Graber, represented Dr. David Taub and L.A.B.S., predecessors in ownership of the Yemassee Monkey Farm and Morgan Island.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
