Life’s Work Scattered: OSU Professor Laments Loss of Chimps, Colleagues
By Poh Si Teng, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
Aug. 16–For years, Sally Boysen was the darling of Ohio State University research.
She wrote for prestigious journals and traveled the world to discuss her work with chimpanzees, which she taught to understand numbers and letters.
She was the subject of documentaries and stories in magazines, including Discover, which in 2002 named her one of the top 50 women in science.
But in the past six months, the 57-year-old Boysen has lost everything except her teaching job. Her funding, chimps and research center are gone. The psychology professor and researcher has sued the university that gave her tenure and has moved out of her campus office.
A few weeks ago, she was auctioning items online to support her cause and enlisting students and animalrights groups for help. Tears come easily these days as she talks of how the university has turned its back on her.
Colleagues refuse to talk to her, she said. Many refused requests to talk about her.
“I feel like a leper in this whole town,” said Boysen, who rented a truck and moved boxes of papers and belongings to a donated office in a Downtown building.
“Sally simply doesn’t agree with the university’s decision, and she chooses to cate- gorize herself as the underdog,” said Earle Holland, an OSU research spokesman who used to call Boysen a friend.
A 28-inch chain and two padlocks hang from the door handle at her new office.
Boysen used them in February to chain herself to the gate outside the OSU primate research center the day her chimpanzees were shipped to a Texas refuge.
“My chimp work is gone,” she said.
Boysen cared for chimpanzees at Ohio State for more than two decades. But when federal research funds dried up, the university closed her lab and shipped her nine chimps to Primarily Primates, a refuge near San Antonio.
OSU said other groups, including NASA and the National Institutes of Health, also are looking for homes for research chimpanzees.
Although the university told her in 2002 that it would pull the plug on her lab if funding continued to slide, Boysen said the move caught her by surprise.
Two of the chimps, Kermit and Bobby, suffered heart attacks and died after they were shipped by truck to Texas. Boysen, who has called Primarily Primates a “cesspool,” sued the university to move the remaining chimps somewhere else.
Boysen paid $14,000 for Bobby as a young chimp, mortgaging her house to raise the money.
While she waits for a court date, Boysen has created a Web site, hearmytears.com, where she asks for donations and for supporters to write protest letters to the university.
She’s selling antique furniture and glassware on eBay to support her cause and new research center, temporarily based in offices on the fifth floor of Southeast, Inc., a mental-health, chemical-dependency and health-care organization.
Boysen is a Southeast board member.
“Given the trauma that she’s experienced at OSU, she feels very good to be at a place that people respect her as a woman scientist,” said Sandra Stephenson, the agency’s executive director.
While many OSU colleagues and officials declined to talk about Boysen, research spokesman Holland said she has always had support there.
In fact, the research department used to issue news releases about her work, the documentaries and the magazine articles. But in recent months, it shut down her center’s Web site and now issues statements about the closing.
Thomas Zentall, a psychology professor at the University of Kentucky and a colleague of Boysen’s, said Ohio State handled the situation poorly.
He said Ohio State should have asked Boysen to relocate the chimps. And in March, he urged other members of the Comparative Cognition Society to write letters to OSU officials in support of Boysen.
“We’re all in shock about it and dismayed,” Zentall said.
Shortly after Patty Kirwan arrived at Ohio State in 1998 with her husband, Brit, who was president of the university until 2002, she found Boysen and her chimp center.
The two became friends. Mrs. Kirwan visited twice a month, and Boysen named a chimp Harper, for Mrs. Kirwan’s maiden name.
“I miss (the center) tremendously, and I miss Sally,” Mrs. Kirwan said. “I was so amazed at what she’s doing and I’m still amazed.”
In 2002, Boysen gave her a pastel portrait of Harper as a farewell gift. It hangs in the Kirwans’ house in the western Maryland mountains. Brit Kirwan is now chancellor of the University System of Maryland.
Mrs. Kirwan said she is “terribly saddened” by the closing of the OSU chimpanzee center.
“I thought it was wonderful advertising for the university. I’m just so sorry that it’s no longer there.”
Boysen said her colleagues are envious of her success.
“They get jealous. I’m on TV. I can talk, and I make science accessible,” she said.
Boysen said she looks forward to teaching in the fall. Many former students support her.
Brad Weghorst, 23, a psychology major who graduated in June, said he took Boysen’s Psychology of Monkeys and Apes class during winter quarter.
“She didn’t really act like a professor. She didn’t have a superiority complex,” Weghorst said.
He said that after the chimps were sent to Texas, Boysen distributed yellow plastic chain links in class.
“It was just like listening to someone who loves her work so much,” Weghorst said.
Still, Boysen said she has had enough of Ohio State.
“Don’t think I don’t want to leave. I will and I can,” she said. “I just lost my whole identity with the chimps.”
She said she has plans to move to Texas.
“I was treated with so much respect everywhere except my own university,” Boysen said. “We were the best thing the university ever had.”
msomerson@dispatch.com
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
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