Georgia's lab apes languish in post-Soviet limbo

By Dmitry Solovyov

SUKHUMI, Georgia (Reuters) - In the capital of Georgia's breakaway province of Abkhazia, cracked steps lead up to a battered 1970s monument featuring a baboon.

"Polio, yellow fever, typhus, encephalitis, smallpox, hepatitis and many other human diseases were eradicated thanks to tests on primates," the inscription reads.

Once the pride of Soviet science, Sukhumi's Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy is now a shadow of the pioneering centre that helped defeat polio and saved countless thousands of lives in World War Two with penicillin treatments.

At its peak the institute boasted 2,500 monkeys, used in experiments on cancerous tumors, leukemia, pathologies of the nervous system, a range of infectious diseases and the effects of ageing.

Then came the breakup of the Soviet Union and a brief but bloody separatist war in Abkhazia which saw its leading lights gradually abandon the Black Sea coastal resort for the relative stability of Russia.

Staff still recall the dark days of the early 1990s when Georgian troops waging war with separatist and Georgian forces clashed in and around Sukhumi. Both sides engaged in looting, taking away monkeys.

"They drove in here on tanks. Armed looters took away all the young animals," said Nina Rudi, chief animal technician at the institute who has worked there for more than 20 years.

Nina Roman, another employee, continues the story. "Many of the looters were boys wielding Kalashnikovs," she said. "Some would later bring dying monkeys back."

It was a far cry from the institute's heyday, when academics, cosmonauts and Soviet statesmen mingled with the up to one million tourists who flocked to the institute each year.

The monkey colony was created with the arrival of two olive baboons and two chimpanzees in 1927, the only survivors from a batch of primates sent from a Pacific island.

SOVIET MONKEY BUSINESS

They flourished in Sukhumi's sub-tropical climate and were soon joined by scores of others from India, China, Southeast Asia and Africa.

"Back in 1927, this was the only centre of its kind in the world," said Rudi. "Monkeys and apes are close to humans, but at that time they were still poorly studied."

Under the auspices of the Soviet Union's Academy of Sciences, Zinaida Yermolyeva came during World War Two to test the first Soviet penicillin on monkeys.

It was then sent to the front lines and helped save the lives of many thousands of wounded soldiers.