Current Soviet Psychological and Psychiatric Research with Nonhuman Primates

Abstract

Primate research has a long history in the Soviet Union. As early as 1913, at The Darwin Museum in Moscow, Ladygina-Kots was studying the comparative behavioral development of young chimpanzees and of children. In 1927, one of the world's oldest and largest primate research centers was established at Sukhumi. Now known as the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy, it makes available several thousand animals (including a dozen chimpanzees and two young gorillas) for study by several hundred scientific investigators. A second primate facility, which has been in use for more than three decades and from which a considerable number of interesting studies have come, is the Anthropoid House at Koltushi, a laboratory administered by the Pavlov Physiology Institute in Leningrad. Finally, just in the last two years, a new primate laboratory has been added to the Institute of Physiology in Tbilisi.