Charlotte Uhlenbroek

In Oklahoma, another baby chimp was about to be born who would also be taken from its mother.

Lily had become pregnant with Sheba, and Sheba's father was none other than Nim.

Elise Moore remembers the day Sheba was born.

Just a few weeks after Sheba was born, she was separated from her mother and sold.

The Oklahoma Institute was closing, so Elise had to find Lily a new home.

Sheba was now alone at Columbus Zoo.

And events were about to take a drastic turn, as we'll discover in a few moments.

Welcome back.

I'm Charlotte Unenbrook, a zoologist, and you're listening to Sheba, just like us, on the BBC World Service.

Sheba is a chimpanzee.

Her story reflects our conflicted relationship with the animal world.

At this point, she's two years old, having been sold as a baby to Columbus Zoo.

Her mother Lily is dead, and her father Nim is in a biomedical research laboratory.

But her life is about to change.

During the 1980s and 90s, it was still thought that chimps were so like us they would make perfect models for experimentation.

Thousands of chimps ended up in invasive biomedical research labs.

Aisha Akhtar was a medical officer for the US Food and Drug Administration.

She's now president of the Centre for Contemporary Sciences.

She explains why she believes that primates don't make good research subjects for human diseases.

You had a fantastic analogy, Aisha, about how despite a big genetic similarity between ourselves and, say, non-human primates, there's still huge amounts of differences in how that DNA is actually expressed.