The successful launch of two polio vaccines in 1955 and 1962 represented a watershed in pharmaceutical science, demonstrating that animal models (specifically the bodies of rhesus monkeys) could help successfully engineer vaccines against dread viruses. Yet lost in the triumphant stories of biomedical success in the pharmaceutical revolutions of midcentury is a history of scientific failures arising from the construction of vivisected primates as almost, but not quite, human bodies. This presentation by Neel Ahuja (English & Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina) attempts to reconstruct the public fears and hopes invested in the bodies of rhesus macaques imported from northern India to the United States for polio research.

While scientific medicine of the 1930s-1950s increasingly viewed humans and monkeys as sharing a similar nervous system -- in the process positing shared capacities of vision, feeling, and mobility among primates -- this challenge to species barriers did not immediately bring enhanced protection for primate subjects. The development of experimental methods for polio research actually required harvesting the spinal fluid of thousands of monkeys who would serve as models and, later, as disposable sources of vaccine serum. By the 1940s, the failures of this experimentation made public images of spinal transplantations between human and nonhuman primates into a repeated trope in US horror films representing the excesses of scientific medicine. Ahuja argues that as the bodies of Indian rhesus monkeys became prized biocapital for the emergent US security state, they simultaneously underwent both a material and a fantasized domestication transforming them from racialized figures of the tropical jungle into kin who were conscripted into national ecologies of feeling and immunity. Based on these conclusions, Ahuja suggests an intersection between species critiques that undermine the anthropomorphic construction of the human body and theories of affect that help theorize how forms of nervous and immune interface become sites of biopolitical intervention.

This work is excerpted from Ahuja's forthcoming book, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species.

Organized by The Postcolonial Animal: Nature/Culture/Empire Research Cluster.