| Earlier this month, forty-three monkeys drew national attention after they escaped from a research facility in South Carolina, where local police warned residents to stay inside as long as the animals remained at large. By this past Monday, all but four of the monkeys had been captured and returned; the C.E.O. of the company that operates the facility summarized their condition as “safe and sound and in good health.” The incident has largely been treated as a novelty, a premise for punch lines rather than a conversation starter about the ethics of animal testing. In 1993, The New Yorker’s Caroline Fraser wrote about a group of lab monkeys that had been intentionally freed. In a building in Silver Spring, Maryland, a researcher named Edward Taub had for years conducted experiments on macaques, small brown primates with expressive faces and highly social behavior patterns. Taub’s research focussed on the connection between physical sensation and movement, and involved “somatosensory deafferentation,” a surgical operation in which a monkey’s sensory nerves are cut in order to study its response. Earlier, related procedures carried out by a British scientist had produced breakthroughs in the mapping of the body, and had been awarded a Nobel Prize. Decades later, Taub was performing surgeries on monkeys in utero, in some cases also sewing the fetuses’ eyelids shut. As a graduate student at Columbia, Taub had earned praise but also made enemies on the faculty; his project in Silver Spring, supported by the National Institutes of Health, would prove even more polarizing. When a college student named Alex Pacheco showed up at his lab and asked to volunteer, Taub agreed to take him on, not realizing that the twenty-two-year-old was concealing an altogether different—and ultimately headline-making—agenda. | 
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