SUKHUMI/Georgia, JULY 16 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The hilltops surrounding Sukhumi, the capital of the Georgian breakaway region of Abkhazia, holds a disturbing Soviet legacy.

This is where, in 1927, the Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy opened. It was the first primate-testing centre in the world. Its pioneering medical and behavioural experiments set it at the forefront of revolutionary scientific discoveries, such as the creation of a polio vaccine in 1961.

And in the frenzied years of the Space Race the institute became directly involved with the training of cosmonaut monkeys. Six of the institute’s primates made it into orbit.

Then came Perestroika and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then the Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy has become known instead as the Monkey Colony. It’s as if the monkeys have taken over the asylum.

A war between forces loyal to Georgia’s central government in Tbilisi and Abkhazian separatists took a heavy toll on the institute and its inhabitants. Scientists left, wages were simply discontinued and most of the monkeys either died of cold and malnutrition or managed to escape and try their luck in the lush Abkhaz forests.

Stories even popped up in newspapers of monkeys attacking pensioners as they scavenged for food.

Nowadays the institute’s cages have been slowly repopulated with sad-looking ill-nourished chimps and baboons. Past the decrepit entrance and surrounded by the crumbling buildings of abandoned laboratories a Soviet-era statue, a proud metal figure of a giant baboon, appears to be the only reminder of the institute’s former glory.

A bronze plaque lists the groundbreaking scientific achievements of the institutes. The count stopped in 1986.

ENDS

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(News report from Issue No. 240, published on July 16 2015)