Now Varya leads Luke toward a large steel door. ‘We share about ninety-three percent of our genes with rhesus monkeys. I was more comfortable working with yeast. But I realized that what I was doing with yeast would never matter as much to human beings – could never matter as much, biologically speaking – as a study in primates.’
What she does not say is that the year 2000, when she was approached by the Drake, was almost ten years after Klara’s death and twenty after Simon’s. ‘Think about it,’ the CEO said, and Varya said she would, while calculating how much time would reasonably pass if she were to do such a thing so that she knew how long to wait before declining. But when she returned to her lab at Columbia, where she was running a new study on yeast, she felt not satisfaction or pride but worthlessness. When Varya was in graduate school, her research had been groundbreaking, but these days, any postdoc knew how to extend the life span of a fly or a worm. In five years, what would she have to show for herself? Likely no partner, certainly no children, but this, ideally: a major finding. A different sort of contribution to the world.
She took the job for another reason, too. Varya had always told herself that she did her research out of love – love for life, for science, and for her siblings, who hadn’t lived long enough to reach old age – but at heart, she worried that her primary motivation was fear. Fear that she had no control, that life slipped through one’s fingers no matter what. Fear that Simon and Klara and Daniel had, at least, lived in the world, while Varya lived in her research, in her books, in her head. The job at the Drake felt like her last chance. If she could push herself to do this, in spite of what misery it would cause her, she could chip away at her guilt, that debt her survival had engendered.
‘Your gloves,’ she says, stopping outside the door to the vivarium. ‘Don’t take them off, either pair.’
Luke holds up his hands. His camera hangs around his neck from a strap; he’s left his notebook and tape recorder in the office. Varya opens the rubber-sealed door of Vivarium 1, another door opened only by a key code that Annie changes each month, and leads Luke into the blinding midday roar.
Vivarium, in Latin, means ‘place of life.’ In science it refers to an enclosure where living animals are kept in conditions that simulate their natural environment. What is the natural environment of the rhesus monkey? Human beings are the only primate more broadly distributed across the globe than the rhesus macaque, these nomads who have traveled across land and over water, who can live as well on a four-thousand-foot mountain as in a tropical forest or a mangrove swamp. From Puerto Rico to Afghanistan the monkey thrives, making homes of temples and canal banks and railway stations. They eat insects and leaves along with what food they can scavenge from humans: fried bread, peanuts, bananas, ice cream. Every day, they travel miles.
None of this is easy to simulate in the lab, but the Drake has tried. Because macaques are social creatures, they are caged in pairs, and each cage has the ability to open up into the next, creating a column the width of the vivarium. Enrichment activities ensure that the monkeys are stimulated: psychologically, via the puzzle feeders and mirrors as well as plastic balls and videos viewed on iPads (though recently the iPads were removed because the monkeys so frequently broke the screens) and jungle sounds played through overhead speakers. The lab is visited annually by a representative from the federal Department of Agriculture, who ensures their compliance with the Animal Welfare Act, and last year this person recommended that staff occasionally enter the vivarium wearing different clothing – hats or gloves in exciting patterns – to intrigue and entertain the animals, which they now do as well.
Varya is not deluded. Of course, the monkeys would rather be outdoors. Behind the vivarium is a larger caged area where the monkeys can play with tires or ropes and swing on netting, though in truth it should be larger, and each monkey receives only a couple of hours there each week. But the point is that her study seeks not to test new drugs or research SIV but to keep the animals alive for as long as possible. Where is the fault in that?
She turns to Luke and shares the talking points that Annie prepared. Without primate research, countless viruses would not have been discovered. Countless vaccines would not have been developed, and countless therapies would not have been proven safe for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and AIDS. Then there is the fact that life in the outside world is no picnic, full of predators and potential starvation. Nobody but a sadist, and perhaps Harry Harlow, likes the sight of a monkey in a cage, but at least, at the Drake, they are cared for and protected.
Still, she can see how a visitor could get the wrong impression. The cages are stacked against the walls, leaving a narrow center aisle for Varya and Luke. The animals face them, splayed against the mesh like geckos. Their pink bellies are stretched long, fingers hooked through the open squares. The dominant monkeys stare silently with their mouths open and their long, yellow teeth bared; the less dominant ones grimace and scream. They do the same thing to the Drake’s new CEO, a man who visits the lab once or twice a year for as little time as possible.
In her first year, the monkeys also reacted this way to Varya. It took all her self-control not to flee. But she did not flee, and though the former CEO had been right – most of Varya’s time is spent at her desk – she forces herself to visit the vivarium once daily, usually to administer breakfast. She does not touch the animals, but she likes to know how they are doing, likes to see the evidence of her success. She brings Luke’s attention to the calorie-restricted monkeys and then to the control monkeys, who eat as much as they please. Luke takes photos of each group. The flash makes them scream louder. Some of the monkeys have begun to shake the bars of their cages, so Varya shouts to explain that the controls are more prone to early-onset diabetes and that their risk of disease is almost three times higher than that of the restricted group. The restricted group even looks younger: their oldest members have lush, auburn fur while the controls are wrinkled and balding, their red rumps showing through.
This is the midpoint of the study, so it’s too soon to assess total life span. Still, it’s clear that the results are promising, that they suggest Varya’s thesis is likely to be proven, and in sharing this she feels such pride that she can ignore the screaming, the scrabbling, the scent, and face the monkeys, her subjects, with pleasure.