Yerkes National Primate Research Center

The Yerkes National Primate Research Center, located in Atlanta, Georgia at Emory University, is one of eight national primate research centers funded by the National Institutes of Health. The center, founded in 1930 by Robert Yerkes, the pioneering primatologist who specialized in comparative psychology, is a recognized leader for its biomedical and behavioral studies with nonhuman primates,

The Yerkes Main Station, located on 25 acres (100,000 m&sup2;) of the Emory campus in Atlanta, contains most of the center's biomedical research laboratories. The Yerkes Field Station, which houses 3,400 animals, specializes in behavioral studies of primate social groups, and is located 30 miles (50 km) north of Atlanta, on 117 acres (473,000 m&sup2;) of wooded land near Lawrenceville. The Center was relocated from Orange Park, Florida, in 1965.

Multidisciplinary research
Multidisciplinary medical research at the Yerkes research center is primarily aimed at development of vaccines and medical treatments. Research programs include cognitive development and decline, childhood visual defects, organ transplantation, the behavioral effects of hormone replacement therapy and social behaviors of primates. Yerkes researchers also are leading programs to better understand the aging process, pioneer organ transplant procedures and provide safer drugs to organ transplant recipients, determine the behavioral effects of hormone replacement therapy, prevent early onset vision disorders and shed light on human behavioral evolution.

Controversy
Jane Goodall, the noted field research primatologist, has decried the conditions of captive research facilities, including Yerkes, for their tiny, barren, sterile cages, contending primates suffer most terribly from being kept in isolation from others of their kind. Goodall notes that primates exhibit the same kind of clinical symptoms that depressed human children show.