ROBERT KRULWICH: Three, a two, a one.

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: Wow, that was a big, heavy ...

JAD: Sorry, I was feeling it. I was feeling it.

ROBERT: [laughs] I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. We shouldn't be laughing because we've been listening to a really, really sad story about a chimp named Lucy, who ...

ROBERT: Who was born as a chimp, raised as a human, and died in—well, under—because she ran into a human that she trusted and probably shouldn't have.

JAD: Yeah. And so the question that we want to ask now—and we asked this question to Charles Siebert, you know, a guy who wrote a lot about chimps—is what's the lesson that we should draw from this?

CHARLES SIEBERT: It's a good question. I think what it says, it points back to something I said earlier, that the only option now, and the best way to dignify and honor, like, what they are—who they are, they're more than what—is to fence them—ourselves off from them, in little pockets of their home that we leave alone. That would be coexistence.

ROBERT: Or if you can't do it that way—and there's a very good reason why you couldn't do it that way, because there are what, six now 6.8 billion people in the world, soon to go up to nine billion.

JAD: Too many of us.

ROBERT: Too many of us.

JAD: So what do you do?

ROBERT: Well, one thing you might try—I mean, it's a kind of a far out notion, but you could go back to the Lucy experiment, the one we just described.

JAD: It ended very badly.

ROBERT: Yeah. But this time you do it—how shall I put this? You do it differently.

SOREN WHEELER: Test, test, test.

JAD: There's a place in Iowa where this is kind of happening. Kind of. We sent our producer, Soren Wheeler, to check it out.

SOREN: Getting ready to go visit Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

JAD: So to set things up, what was the name of this place?

SOREN: The Great Ape Trust, although I think the name is kind of in flux. But anyway, the Great Ape Trust, which is this place in Des Moines, Iowa, where—it's kind of like a compound where they keep a very special group of bonobos.

JAD: Is it bonobos or bonobos? How do they say it?

SOREN: I think they say bonobos.

JAD: Hmm.

BILL FIELDS: Hey, the microphone started working again.

SOREN: So when I got there, Bill Fields, who is the director of the place ...

BILL FIELDS: Director of scientific research.

SOREN: That's him right there.

BILL FIELDS: In bonobo studies.

SOREN: Bill took me inside, and then there's this place where they keep the bonobos. But Bill had to kind of go in there ahead of me.

BILL FIELDS: Without his authority.

SOREN: And ask ...

BILL FIELDS: Kanzi?

SOREN: ... if they are ready to see me.

BILL FIELDS: Do you want the visitor to come see you?

[Kanzi screeching]

BILL FIELDS: That's Kanzi. [laughs] Okay. All right, we're gonna—we're gonna bring the visitor to see you.

SOREN: And I walk into this room, which is this kind of big concrete room.

BILL FIELDS: Here comes Kanzi. He'll be coming right through here.

SOREN: The rules are, when there are visitors, that the bonobos are kind of kept behind this fence.

JAD: Oh, there's a fence in the room?

SOREN: Yeah. And just on the other side of the fence is Kanzi.

[Kanzi screeching]

JAD: Whoa! What does he look like? Is he big?

SOREN: He's pretty big. Maybe if he stood completely upright, he'd be a little bit shorter than I am, but he's built. And more than that, he's just got this kind of presence. I mean, he looks at you, like, directly in the eye. He was standing there with his arms just kind of swinging.

SOREN: His fingers are amazing.

BILL FIELDS: Oh, they're so soft and sweet.

SOREN: It's not like going to a zoo.

SOREN: Yeah, they're long.

SOREN: It's a little bit more like there's another person on the other side of that wire. So here's one of the first things that Kanzi does when I come in. Like, there's these two—you know, like a big plastic salad bowl?

JAD: Mm-hmm.

SOREN: He would take these two big plastic salad bowls face down on the concrete, and put his hands on them and run them around the room. Around and around in a circle. And then he just slams himself up against the wire.

JAD: Wow! Why? What do you think he was doing?

SOREN: [laughs] I didn't know what to think.

BILL FIELDS: Can you say your name? Do you like him? You do. I like him, too. I like him. He likes you.

[Kanzi screeching]

BILL FIELDS: You see the microphone?

SOREN: So here's Kanzi's story. Sue—you remember Sue from the last story?

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

JAD: Oh, yeah!

SOREN: After she worked with Lucy—this is about 30 years ago, she got Kanzi. And she raised him. I mean, she ...

JAD: From a little bitty ...

SOREN: Bonobo.

JAD: Wow!

SOREN: She would, you know, carry Kanzi around with her all the time.

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: Loving him as much as I love my son.

SOREN: She becomes like ...

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: We'd watch movies when we went to bed at night.

SOREN: ... a mother to Kanzi. This sounds a little bit like the Lucy thing, but the difference here is that ...

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: With Kanzi, we never wanted to take him away from his mother, Matata.

SOREN: Kanzi also has a bonobo mother.

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: Matata was born in the Congo, so she carried the knowledge of the bonobo's culture as best she could across to Kanzi. I was a member of a different species. I had a different kind of language, a human kind of language.

SOREN: Sue says that the whole idea of the experiment was to create kind of an emotional bond between her and Kanzi that would fill Kanzi with an ...

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: An innate desire to understand what I was going to say, to understand how I felt, to want to communicate with me.

SOREN: And so pretty soon, Kanzi is using this—they have a kind of a special keyboard with these symbols. And you can touch the symbol, and it makes a computer voice as a word.

COMPUTER: Egg.

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: Good! Can you find 'milk?'

COMPUTER: Milk.

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: Good!

SOREN: He's using this symbol keyboard to communicate with Sue.

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: How about 'Sue?'

COMPUTER: Sue.

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: Very good!

SOREN: This is the two of them sitting in front of the keyboard, practicing.

JAD: And how many words can he do?

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: How about 'chow?'

SOREN: Over 600.

JAD: Really?

SOREN: Yeah.

COMPUTER: Chow.

JAD: Wow!

SOREN: And then—this is where to me it just gets—Kanzi, as he got older, started being able to communicate without the keyboard. She would talk to him, and he would talk back.

JAD: What?

SOREN: I'll give you an example. When I was there, there was one point where we were outside.

BILL FIELDS: We're here, Kanzi. Where are you?

SOREN: Like, Kanzi has this outside space. And we're outside too, but he's still fenced in like before. And Bill and Kanzi are having this kind of back and forth.

BILL FIELDS: What's out there? Do you see something?

SOREN: Kanzi seems to be saying, "There's something I want to show you, or there's something you need to see." It's not quite clear what's going on.

BILL FIELDS: I don't see it yet.

SOREN: And Bill can't quite figure it out either. So Kanzi takes us then, from the tool site over to this other place where there's—out in the yard, there's this big pit that we can't see into because we're behind this fence. But Kanzi is basically pointing down in the pit.

BILL FIELDS: There's something down in the hole.

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: There's something down in the hole. We have to go in to look at that, Bill.

SOREN: And according to Bill and Sue, saying there's something there.

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: There's water.

JAD: How is Kanzi saying this?

SOREN: I mean—well, I mean, to you and me, it would sound like [screeching].

JAD: [laughs]

SOREN: I mean, like, I—I could tell that Kanzi was gesturing at something.

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: You got it. You got it. And here. And here.

SOREN: But ...

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: Is it dangerous?

BILL FIELDS: What is it?

SOREN: ... Bill and Sue are hearing ...

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: Does it live under the mud?

SOREN: ... words.

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: Has it got teeth? It's got teeth. It's got big teeth.

BILL FIELDS: And you want us to get rid of it?

[Kenzi screeching]

BILL FIELDS: Are you scared of it?

[Kanzi screeching]

BILL FIELDS: Not too much. [laughs] You can handle it.

[Kanzi screeching]

BILL FIELDS: Well, I can't come in there right now, but I can in a little bit, and we'll check it out.

JAD: We were so interested in this situation that you're hearing right here ...

BILL FIELDS: It's too cold out here. I'll come and look. I'll come and look.

JAD: Like, what is—like, are they really talking? So we decided to call up Bill Fields.

JAD: Hello?

BILL FIELDS: Hello? Hello? Hello. This is Bill.

JAD: Hey, Bill. So we heard a bit of tape that Soren recorded where you guys were outside, and Kanzi was pointing in a hole or something. And it just sounded like you guys are having some kind of real bilingual exchange. I mean, is that really what was happening?

BILL FIELDS: Yes, that's what was happening. We have begun to be able to decode his speech. If you say, "Kanzi, what do you want for breakfast?" he'll point on the lexigram keyboard he wanted ...

COMPUTER: Grapes, onions, tofu.

BILL FIELDS: Say, "Okay, I'm gonna go tell everybody. We're gonna have grapes, onions, and tofu." And he will just respond with, "Right now."

JAD: Like, vocally?

BILL FIELDS: Yes.

JAD: What does that sound like?

BILL FIELDS: I'm gonna see if I can do it. [whispers] Right now.

ROBERT: So it's in English?

BILL FIELDS: Yes.

ROBERT: Oh, man!

BILL FIELDS: Yes. When he speaks to me, and I understand it, it's in English.

JAD: The first time it happened, says Bill, he was a grad student, and he and Kanzi were outside.

BILL FIELDS: I was sitting on a stump.

JAD: And Kanzi was sort of in a field nearby. But at a certain point, he says, Kanzi stopped what he was doing, turned right to Bill ...

BILL FIELDS: And I'll do my best to reproduce it for you. He said to me, "ch-ase." Like that.

JAD: He said what?

BILL FIELDS: He said, "chase." But it was very hard for him to say it.

JAD: But don't you just ask yourself, like, "Really? Am I sure that's what I heard?"

BILL FIELDS: Not anymore.

ROBERT: [laughs]

BILL FIELDS: I used to. It is such a common occurrence in our lab. And it's not just my experience, it's my staff's experience. It's Sue's experience.

JAD: And Soren, what about you? I mean, you were there. Do you buy what he's saying?

BILL FIELDS: Kanzi speaks words.

SOREN: I still don't know.

JAD: Yeah.

SOREN: I mean, the science isn't there, but what I do buy is that there's real communication going on. And I think it may be, like, a new kind of communication. Like, this is something I don't think has happened anywhere else. Bill and Sue have literally created a third culture, a culture that is neither just bonobo or just human. It's something in between. And I think that that culture and those relationships are real.

JAD: Yeah.

SOREN: Now the weird thing about that is that with all the—all the great things that come out of that, there are also moments of real confusion.

JAD: Like what?

BILL FIELDS: Well, one time we had a principal investigator who was visiting the lab at that time, and she was having a very strong disagreement with Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh about method. And this really upset Kanzi.

JAD: Why? Was the investigator screaming at Sue? Or what was she doing?

ROBERT: Why do you call him an investigator? Is that, like—is this some kind of—some kind of academic visitor? Is that what we mean?

BILL FIELDS: That's how scientists are referred to. You have the principal investigator, the co-investigator.

ROBERT: But it's not Columbo with a gun, packing a gun. This is, like, just some guy from some college somewhere.

BILL FIELDS: Yeah. It's a scientific investigator.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: So just to fill out the scene, you've got Sue, Bill and this investigator in one room. And Kanzi in a different room behind some glass.

BILL FIELDS: Very thick, clear glass.

JAD: So Kanzi can actually see what's happening in their room. You can see that this investigator is getting angry with Sue, his human mom. It's getting more and more animated.

BILL FIELDS: It was professionally aggressive and loud.

JAD: And what was the—what was the argument about, do you remember?

BILL FIELDS: Oh, yes. It was about the format that we were going to use for archived video.

JAD: That's it?

ROBERT: [laughs] Well, you know, wars have been fought over stupider things. [laughs]

JAD: And as Sue and this lady are arguing, what was Kanzi doing?

BILL FIELDS: He was banging on the window. So I went to speak to him.

JAD: He walked into Kanzi's room. Kanzi then went to the keyboard and told him, "You have to punish that investigator for screaming at Sue."

BILL FIELDS: He didn't want—he wanted me to go in there and stop her from doing this. It was my responsibility to take care of things, and that if I didn't do it, he was going to bite me.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: So were you being told, "Man up! This woman is being attacked, and you're supposed to pound or bite that investigator. And if you don't bite her, I will bite you." Is that essentially ...

BILL FIELDS: Yes. And I defaulted to human culture. I said, "Kanzi, I really can't go argue. I can't interfere." I just defaulted to the way things would happen in the human world. And so later I told Sue that Kanzi told me he was gonna bite me. And Sue said, "Kanzi's not gonna bite you." And 24 hours later, after he threatened to bite me ...

JAD: He says that Sue was putting Kanzi back in his enclosure, but Kanzi pushed past her, ran down the hall, found Bill in his office ...

BILL FIELDS: He came and found me, and he bit me.

JAD: He bit you?

BILL FIELDS: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Where did he bite you?

BILL FIELDS: On the hand. It was really serious. I lost a finger.

ROBERT: [gasps]

JAD: Jeez!

BILL FIELDS: What happened was the hand was bitten, and they had to reattach all of the ligaments so that the rest of my hand would work.

JAD: Wow!

BILL FIELDS: I had three surgeries that week. The first one was 14 hours, the next one was about eight hours, and the third one was about three hours. But the problem was I apparently had sensitivities to drugs we didn't know about, and they had given me morphine, and I arrested.

JAD: God!

BILL FIELDS: It stopped my breathing and my heart.

JAD: You almost died?

BILL FIELDS: Yes.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: But do you think if you'd bit her, then he wouldn't have bitten you?

BILL FIELDS: I'm certain of it, yeah.

JAD: So what did you do then? I mean, did you just come back to the lab and pretend nothing happened, or ...

BILL FIELDS: I came back to the lab about 14 days after the event. I was not ready to, but I didn't know what else to do. But for eight months, I didn't speak to Kanzi. And he kept trying to make up with me.

JAD: How would he do that? Would he type in his keyboard, "Sorry?"

BILL FIELDS: He never—he would—he refused to tell me he was sorry. But he would keep calling me.

JAD: Bill says he'd use the keyboard to ask the other researchers to get Bill. "Get Bill!"

BILL FIELDS: And what he wanted me to do is just come down and renew my friendship with him and just act like nothing had happened. And I simply wouldn't go and see him. And Sue came to me, and tried to talk me into going to see him, and I said, "When Kanzi's ready to apologize." But she'd come back and say, "No, Kanzi's not gonna apologize. He doesn't think he should." And I just stood on my ground, you know, Kanzi's gonna apologize to me.

JAD: Finally, one afternoon eight months later, one of his colleagues came up to him and told him ...

BILL FIELDS: Kanzi wants to tell you he's sorry. And as soon as I got down there, he threw his body up against the wire, pressing up against me. And he just screamed and screamed in my mouth, which was this very submissive scream. It was very clear he was sorry, and he was trying to make up with me. And I asked him on the keyboard, "Are you sorry?" And he told me, "Yes."

[00:15:00.07]

ROBERT: And when you say he threw himself against the wire—you mean, against the separating device between you and him?

BILL FIELDS: Yes. He just pressed his body up against that wire. And so I put my body up against him, and we just pressed up against each other.

ROBERT: Do you see what's happening here? You're telling us a story which reads more and more and more like a soap opera between a community of beings. The fact that one of them is a little bonobo and the other one is a guy is almost incidental to the story. It's like, I could put this on channel five if I wanted.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "All the Same" - Annie Moses Band]

BILL FIELDS: It's just primates.

SOREN: Currently, the Great Ape Trust is not just Kanzi. There's about seven different bonobos there, and a dozen or so kind of staff and researchers. And while they're certainly not the same, they have created, at the very least, some middle ground. And for Sue, that's not about a solution to any conservation problem or some scientific breakthrough. It's something deeper and more personal.

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH: When I am with bonobos, I feel like I have something that I shared with them long ago, but I forgot. As we've clothed ourselves and separated ourselves, we've gained a wonderful society, but we've lost a kind of soul-to-soul connection that they maintain. And it sometimes seems to me as though we're both a kind of a disadvantaged species. They have things that I've lost. I have things that they don't have. I feel like if I could have their abilities and keep mine, I would be whole.

JAD: You can find more information about anything that you heard in this hour at our website, Radiolab.org. We've also got Lucy pictures and Janis and Kanzi pictures there. And you can subscribe to our podcast. That's at Radiolab.org. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Abumrad? Abumrad.]

[LISTENER: Our staff includes Michael Raphael, Soren Wheeler, Ellen Horne and Lulu Miller.]

[LISTENER: With help from Abbey Narayan and Tim Howard.]

[LISTENER: Special thanks to David Garland.]

[LISTENER: This is Bill Fields signing off. Bye bye.]

-30-

 

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