History

The origins of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University can be traced to an article written by the center’s founder, Robert M. Yerkes, PhD, and published in Science in 1916. In the article, Dr. Yerkes called for the establishment of a primate research institute for the systematic study of the fundamental instincts and social relations of primates. Dr. Yerkes reasoned that primates, because of their evolutionary closeness to humans, could shed the most light upon the roots of human behavior.

He also wrote in Science, “I am wholly convinced that the various medical sciences and medical practices have vastly more to gain from the persistent and ingenious use of the monkeys and the anthropoid apes in experimental inquiry.”

Dr. Yerkes’ research on his first two great apes and the other animals he was able to study during the 1920s persuaded Yale University, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation to fund the establishment of the Yale Laboratories for Primate Biology. The center opened in 1930 in Orange Park, Florida.

Dr. Yerkes, who received a doctorate in psychology in 1902 from Harvard University, was a distinguished professor of psychobiology at Yale University when he established the center in 1930. The chimpanzee colony included four animals that Dr. Yerkes had in Connecticut, 13 chimpanzees that were donated by a prominent Cuban citizen and 16 apes that were a gift from the Pasteur Institute of France. The same year, the first chimpanzee birth occurred at the center; the offspring, named Alpha, provided Dr. Yerkes with the first detailed observations of a chimpanzee’s development and reproductive processes.

In 1941, when Dr. Yerkes retired, Yale University renamed the center the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology in honor of Dr. Yerkes’ leadership and contributions to science.

With Dr. Yerkes’ death in 1956, Yale officials decided the geographical separation of the university and the Orange Park facility was not conducive to the development and conduct of collaborative research and educational programs for Yale faculty and students. Emory University agreed, in 1956, to assume ownership of the center. The transfer occurred at a time of increasing scientific interest in the study of primates, in part as a result of the development of the polio vaccine through primate research.

In 1960, the U.S. Congress enacted the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Primate Research Centers Program to provide the scientific community with the specialized resources needed for primate research. The following year, Emory received NIH’s Regional Primate Research Center status for the Yerkes facility in Orange Park. NIH funding enabled the transfer of the center to the Emory University campus, which was completed in 1965. A 117-acre field station, located in Lawrenceville, Georgia, opened the following year.

The Yerkes facility was expanded in 1999 to accommodate the Emory Vaccine Center. This same year, Yerkes became the first home for the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience.

In 2002, the NIH renamed Yerkes and seven other primate research centers as National Primate Research Centers in recognition of their involvement with and impact on research programs throughout the United States and the world.

In 2004, the Yerkes Research Center opened a 92,000-square-foot neuroscience research facility with state-of-the-art lab and imaging facilities.

For more than seven decades, the Yerkes Research Center has been dedicated to improving human health and well-being and to advancing scientific understanding of primate biology, behavior, veterinary care and conservation.