Could an adorable chimpanzee raised from infancy by a human family
bridge the gap between species—and change the way we think about the
boundaries between the animal and human worlds?

Dubbed Project Nim, the experiment was the brainchild of Herbert S.
Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University. His goal was to teach a
chimpanzee American Sign Language in order to refute Noam Chomsky’s
assertion that language is an exclusively human trait. Nim Chimpsky,
the baby chimp at the center of this ambitious, potentially
groundbreaking study, was “adopted” by one of Dr. Terrace’s graduate
students and brought home to live with her and her large family in
their elegant browns...

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Could an adorable chimpanzee raised from infancy by a human family
bridge the gap between species—and change the way we think about the
boundaries between the animal and human worlds?

Dubbed Project Nim, the experiment was the brainchild of Herbert S.
Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University. His goal was to teach a
chimpanzee American Sign Language in order to refute Noam Chomsky’s
assertion that language is an exclusively human trait. Nim Chimpsky,
the baby chimp at the center of this ambitious, potentially
groundbreaking study, was “adopted” by one of Dr. Terrace’s graduate
students and brought home to live with her and her large family in
their elegant brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

But no one had thought through the long-term consequences of raising a
chimp in the human world, and when funding for the study ran out, Nim’s
problems began.
Over the next two decades, exiled from the people he loved, Nim was rotated in and out of various facilities.