Yerkes National Primate Research Center
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The Yerkes National Primate Research Center, located in Atlanta, Georgia at Emory University, is one of eight national primate research centers funded by the National Institutes of Health. The institute, named after Robert Yerkes, the pioneering primatologist who specialized in comparative psychology, engages in controversial behavioral and biomedical studies with non-human primates. The Yerkes Main Station, located on 25 acres (100,000 m²) of the Emory campus in Atlanta, contains most of the center's biomedical research laboratories. The Yerkes Field Station, which houses 3,400 animals, specializes in behavioral studies of primate social groups, and is located 30 miles (50 km) north of Atlanta, on 117 acres (473,000 m²) of wooded land near Lawrenceville. The Center was relocated from Orange Park, Florida, in 1965.
Multidisciplinary medical research at the Yerkes Institute is primarily aimed at development of vaccines and medical treatments. Research programs include cognitive development and decline, childhood visual defects, organ transplantation, the behavioral effects of hormone replacement therapy and social behaviors of primates.
Jane Goodall, the noted field research primatologist, has decried the conditions of captive research facilities, including Yerkes, for their tiny, barren, sterile cages, contending primates suffer most terribly from being kept in isolation from others of their kind. Goodall and other animal rights advocates have deplored the conditions at Yerkes and similar primate research facilities, noting that primates exhibit the same kind of clinical symptoms that depressed human children show.
External links
- Emory.edu (http://www.yerkes.emory.edu/) - Yerkes National Primate Research Center
- IDAusa.org (http://www.idausa.org/endprimatetorture/pdf/yerkes.pdf) - In Defence of Animals Report: Yerkes Institute
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