The New Yorker:

When activists accused the behavioral scientist Edward Taub of needlessly torturing captive primates, a long legal battle called into question the motives of crusaders on both sides.

By Caroline Fraser
April 11, 1993

Their names were Chester, Adidas, Sisyphus, Haydn, Montaigne, Domitian, Big Boy, Augustus, Titus, Nero, Charlie, Hard Times, Brooks, Billy, Paul, Allen, and Sarah. They were monkeys. Over a decade ago, an animal researcher performed an experiment on some of them, crippling their arms. The monkeys lived in one room in a cinder-block building in Silver Spring, Maryland—a building that the researcher called the Behavioral Biology Center. In October of 1981, he was charged with seventeen counts of animal cruelty and became the only researcher ever tried and convicted on that charge in this country. Twelve of the seventeen Silver Spring monkeys are now dead. But they are arguably the most famous experimental animals in the history of science.

A few chimps were launched into orbit during the race into space, and thousands of rhesus monkeys were sacrificed in the search for the polio vaccine. But none of the millions of animals—mice, rats, dogs, cats, rabbits, fish, and fowl—experimented on since the dawn of modern research have leaped into the public consciousness quite as the Silver Spring monkeys have. Millions of Americans have seen the monkeys’ faces on posters and pamphlets, and on the evening news. To hundreds of thousands more, the monkeys became individuals with names and personalities, political prisoners to be sprung from their laboratory jail. They became famous not for what they did for us—not for any data or cure or vaccine they provided—but for what was done to them.

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