We all owe it to these monkeys Georgia - 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 center 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 tumours, leukaemia, 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, said, “Many of the looters were boys wielding Kalashnikovs. “Some would later bring dying monkeys back.” Only 303 monkeys remain now at the institute, many of them old and dying.
