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| Eyes on the future:Will
Duke still be her home? |
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a typical sunny day at the Duke Primate Center, a steady stream of
visitors find themselves charmed and captivated by the exotic lemurs
that live in its cages and range through its forested open enclosures.
Led by volunteer guides, tour groups may witness the long-limbed acrobatic
sifaka leap soaring from branch to branch. Among these agile animals
might be Zoboo, the stage name for Jovian, the wide-eyed Coquerel’s
sifaka that is animal host of the popular PBS children’s series
Zoboomafoo.
A sudden wave of raucous barking
might roll across the facility, as the ruffed lemurs launch one of
their periodic cacophonous choruses. In the darkened chambers of the
nocturnal rooms, visitors might make out the constantly pacing aye-aye—ugly-cute
animals with eerie names such as Nosferatu and Poe that look like
a cross between raccoon, beaver, and bat. The tours also include skulls
and skeletons of lemurs, and lectures about the peril of extinction
faced by the animals on their native island of Madagascar. Tours complete,
visitors may visit the gift shop to buy stuffed animals, books, and
other souvenirs.
Such is the alluring public face of the Primate Center,
as seen by some 13,000 visitors a year, including school classes,
alumni, parents, journalists, and academics. As important as such
outreach programs are, public education has never been among the center’s
primary missions. Rather, the center’s major objectives—besides
conserving endangered animals—are basic research and educating
undergraduates and graduate students. Such objectives are potentially
invaluable to science and science education because the center constitutes
the world’s most extensive collection of endangered primates
and primate fossils—more specifically, such “prosimians”
as lemurs. But many who are familiar with the Primate Center believe
it has become an institution out of balance—its research and
teaching achieving neither the quantity or quality expected from a
component of a twenty-first-century research university.
Says Provost Peter Lange, “We
certainly recognize that the Primate Center is an attractive place
where schoolchildren and others can learn, but Duke does not have
a zoological mission in and of itself. Rather, our core missions are
research and teaching. Our service to society is linked through those
missions, and all of our facilities need to make a substantial contribution
to teaching and to advanced research.”
In fact, he points out, the center originally began purely
as a research facility. The departure from this historical mission
was emphasized by the report last winter of an internal review committee
led by biology professor James Siedow, now vice provost for research.
According to Siedow, that committee, as well as outside experts, concluded
that because research and education were apparently not receiving
the priority given conservation, they had lost ground in recent years.
After interviewing a range of scientists, the committee concluded
that the problem was partly due to a discouraging of research at the
center. “Many people who tried to use the facility told us that
the atmosphere had become less conducive to research, so some just
abandoned their attempts to do studies there,” says Siedow.
As a result of the report, Lange and the other senior
administrators launched an initiative to attempt to strengthen those
missions. The initiative—under which the center will report to
the provost through Vice Provost for Research Siedow—includes
continued funding of the university’s 70 percent share of the
Primate Center’s annual $1.2-million budget. To jump-start research,
the initiative includes $300,000 in seed money for new research initiatives.
A HISTORY OF MANY MISSIONS
Research was the central purpose of the original
field station—later to become the Duke Primate Center—established
in 1960. That year, Yale anthropologist John Buettner-Janusch
moved his collection of eighty prosimians, including both lemurs
and bushbabies, to cages in Duke Forest.
The concrete-block building—which now houses
the Primate Center’s staff, administrative offices, gift
shop, kitchen, veterinary rooms, tissue and cadaver storage,
indoor animal quarters, and fossil collection—was originally
built in 1968 to house the behavioral research of two scientists.
At that time, the center was partially supported by federal
funding, and the university continued to contribute heavily
to its budget. In 1974, university budgetary shortfalls caused
by a declining economy led to plans to close the center. However,
a campaign against the closure led by Duke faculty brought about
a foundation grant to support operating expenses, allowing the
center to remain open.
In 1977, Yale primatologist Elwyn Simons became
director. Under his leadership, the center secured facilities-support
funding from the National Science Foundation, which currently
provides about $300,000 per year toward the budget. The animal
colony grew in size to more than 600 animals, while Simons and
his colleagues developed an extensive fossil collection during
decades of expeditions to Egypt and Madagascar. Under Simons,
James B. Duke Professor in Biological Anthropology and Anatomy,
the center also received research support from the National
Institutes of Health and NSF.
In 1991, Simons became scientific director of the
center—a title he held until 1998—and Kenneth Glander,
biological anthropology and anatomy professor, was named director.
He was charged with spending 15 percent of his time directing
the center, in addition to his teaching duties and research
on the dietary habits of monkeys.
During his tenure, Glander became known among the
staff and university development officers as a champion of the
center. As director, he sought to balance the center’s
research, teaching, and conservation missions, while accommodating
its growing popularity among the community school groups and
the public. This explosion of interest saw visitor numbers more
than triple from about 4,000 annually in 1991 to the current
13,000. Besides increasing income from the paid tours, entrepreneurial
staff members expanded the gift shop to augment revenues from
the “captive” audience of visitors.
Laboring under diverse missions of hosting visitors,
educating students, and conducting research, the center has
been described by Duke officials and external reviewer as efficiently
managed and the animals meticulously cared for. Reviewers include
Duke’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and
the U.S. Department of Agriculture—the federal agency charged
with monitoring zoos and other animal facilities. Administrators
also praise the staff’s dedication to the animals’
welfare, which goes beyond basic husbandry needs. For example,
staff members recently launched an “environment enrichment”
program in which novel objects, from surplus fire hose to children’s
play houses, are introduced into the animals’ cages to
engage them mentally and physically.
Such high-quality care and management has resulted
in “squeaky clean” reviews, says center operations
manager Dean Gibson, who was hired in 1997. Under Gibson’s
management, the center has also shown budget surpluses during
the last two years. And, as directed by the administration,
the colony size has been reduced from about 450 to 280 animals,
with many animals loaned or donated to zoos, and many in the
colony put on birth control. |
As current Primate Center Director
Kenneth Glander concluded his second five-year term on July1, William
Hylander, professor of biological anthropology and anatomy, assumed
the directorship and will guide the initiative. Hylander, whose research
explores the function and evolution of the jaw in humans and higher
primates, has agreed to a three-year term devoting half-time to directing
the center. Under the agreement, Hylander is to develop a long-term
strategic plan for the center by November 15, 2002, that will “ensure
its contributions to the research and teaching missions of the university,”
says Lange.
The university will also monitor the center’s progress,
using as indicators renewal of the center’s National Science
Foundation facility grant, which contributes about $300,000 per year
to its budget; formation of an internal advisory committee; and growth
in research and undergraduate educational use of the center. Duke
will evaluate the center’s progress and decide on the future
of the center in the late winter of 2003-2004, says Lange. “I
hope the evaluation will be positive,” he says, “but if
the evaluation is not positive at that time, we will move toward closure
of the Primate Center.”
According to Lange, the initiative is necessarily limited
in time by the need to decide over the next three years whether to
invest the estimated $5 million to $10 million required to modernize
buildings and construct new winter barns for the animals. “A
central challenge of the initiative will be to obtain enough information
relatively soon about the long-term prospects for the center to contribute
to the core university mission to enable us to make a coherent decision
about a strategic investment.”
Lange emphasizes that in making such a long-term investment
decision, the Primate Center must be seen in context of the other
major efforts to strengthen science and engineering, as described
in the university’s strategic plan, “Building on Excellence.”
These programs include a $200-million university-wide Institute for
Genome Sciences and Policy and a $100-million Fitzpatrick Center for
Photonics and Communication—both of which faculty and administrative
leaders see as exemplifying programs critical to the Duke’s leadership
in key fields of twenty-first-century science and engineering.
“Just as we expect faculty in those disciplines to
work at the forefront of their fields, we want to ensure that the
Primate Center can make special and unique contributions to knowledge
in its field,” says Lange. The basic criterion for research facilities,
he adds, is intellectual and educational return on investment. The
significance of a research field is usually reflected in its ability
to attract funding, he says, quoting the strategic plan’s directive
that “If we are to make the investments that significantly strengthen
science and engineering at Duke, we must increase our presence in
areas that are both at the research frontiers and sustainable through
external support.”
Of the center’s university funding, Lange says, “It
is our responsibility to ask whether the approximately $800,000 per
year that supports the Primate Center—as well as the considerable
infrastructure investment—could support other scientific enterprises
that would have a higher return in terms of our teaching and research
missions.”
The enhancement initiative, besides helping launch new
research, includes up to $350,000 for stopgap improvements in winterization
of the center. Frostbite injuries and the death of animals during
the winter of 1996 led the center to establish a policy that animals
will be protected from the cold without having to take refuge in the
electrically heated boxes provided them. For the last five years,
the center has relied on interim measures, including draping cages
with plastic and heating them with propane and kerosene burners—a
heating system that has tended to leak propane, created exhaust fumes,
presented a fire hazard, and required constant monitoring by staff.
The initiative also seeks to increase educational use
of the center. While the center currently sees about a hundred students
from Duke and other universities each year, who conduct research for
primatology courses and independent-study projects, Dean of Arts and
Sciences William Chafe says, “We would like to develop a broader-based
constituency for courses. The students who are able to take advantage
of the Primate Center benefit enormously, but there needs to be greater
use of the center to help students understand primate evolution, physiology,
and other areas.”
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