Medicine: The Ape Trade

Dr. Russell L. Holman and a visitor were putting their heads together at Louisiana State University School of Medicine, pondering problems of heart-and-artery disease, when an assistant offered Holman a gory gift—an aorta, nearly 2 ft. long, full of diseased areas. It had been sent to Holman in a fine Macy’s-tells-Gimbels gesture by his opposite number down the street, Dr. Charles E. Dunlap Jr. of Tulane University.

The aorta looked almost human. But Pathologist Holman knew that Pathologist Dunlap had been getting specimens from New Orleans’ Audubon Park Zoo. Was it possible that here at last was an animal that developed atherosclerosis of the human type? The answer was yes. The aorta had come from a 16-year-old female baboon.

8,000-Mile Reaction. This discovery, made in April of 1956, set Holman and his visitor, Dr. Nicholas T. Werthessen, jumping like baboons with excitement. Its importance lay in the fact that previously (except for rare cases in monkeys and expensive great apes) no animal had been known to develop arterial disease like a human being’s, despite ingenious laboratory tricks. Researchers have learned much from rabbits, rats and chickens, but findings from these lower forms of life cannot be applied simply and directly to human diseases. The baboon, despite its lousy pelt, its foul temper and its embarrassingly lurid hind quarters (brilliant scarlet in the female when she is in heat) seemed the answer to a researcher’s prayer.

The zoo baboon’s aorta touched off a chain reaction of feverish activity, extending over 8,000 miles from Texas to

Kenya. Dr. Werthessen, from San Antonio’s Southwest Foundation for Research and Education, made an aerial trip to Kibwezi, on Kenya’s equatorial highlands. There he joined four of Hoi-man’s associates, led by Dr. Henry C. McGill Jr., on the happy hunting grounds of the dog-faced baboon (Papio anubis). They hired a trapper with native bushwhackers to collect baboons.

The baboons, their long snouts armed with powerful teeth, fought ferociously when first trapped, had to be maneuvered into squeeze cages, where they were compressed into stillness long enough for a doctor to inject an anesthetic. Soon they were on the autopsy table where pathologists removed all vital organs for preservation and shipping to the U.S. Of 163 animals thus examined, about half were found to have atherosis in the aorta. Strangely, although the disease was commoner in the older apes, it was by no means confined to them. Many young ones had it. Also strangely, although atherosis of the coronary arteries is so common in humans, no evidence has been turned up to suggest that any baboon ever had a heart attack or coronary disease.

The Old Men. It would have cost too much to ship many adult baboons (up to 60 Ibs. each) to the U.S., but luck was with Dr. Werthessen. He learned by chance that a Texas zoo had a surplus stock of dog-faced baboons—they had been bred in the zoo for 20 years, and the pack had had only two “old men” to sire all the offspring. This line breeding gave them a start toward genetic purity—a most desirable quality in research animals.

Last week the Southwest Foundation’s baboonery, on the rolling, Kenya-like plains eight miles west of downtown San Antonio, resounded to the barks and squeals of the baboon colonies. They were housed in the end sections of a Quonset-shaped structure of diamond wire. In one end was the pack of 30 Texas-bred baboons, with its single overlord adult male, his harem of a dozen females of reproductive age, a few adolescents and two tiny, three-month babies. At the other end was the pack of 70 young, imported baboons trapped in Africa.

Physiologist Werthessen was doing experiments with baboons and their aortas to answer a host of questions about the effect of fats in the diet on the amount of fats (especially cholesterol) in the blood. In one especially tricky procedure he hooked up a baboon’s freshly removed aorta with a heart-lung machine and used radioactive sodium acetate to find out how much fat is manufactured in the walls of the aorta itself. With a small branch baboonery at L.S.U., Dr. Holman was tackling related problems. Both hoped to get vital information with a direct bearing on human heart-and-artery disease. The unfriendly dog-faced baboon thus becomes elevated to the ranks of man’s best friends.