Famous primates

The 10 Famous Monkeys* in Science page is hilarious. It also has some neat insights, including the description of a risk management approach by the US government in the 1950s:

Never send a man to do a female monkey’s job. That was the logic of the U.s. Army’s Medical Research and Development Department in 1959 when they wanted to gauge the body’s physical response to space travel. Instead of relying on fit, able-bodied Americans, researchers there turned to two highly patriotic gals named Baker (a squirrel monkey) and Able (a rhesus monkey). On May 28, the monkeys steeled their nerves, entered the nose cone of a Jupiter AM-18 missile, and embarked on a suborbital mission into space. It would take two more years before a human male, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, had the guts to attempt the same thing.

I also thought the Koko and Nim Chimpsky entries were funny, but you have to read number 10. Power supplies are such a drain…

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