Nick Pyenson

Things changed for me because up to that point I thought it was cool and everything was cool.

That day I realised everything's not cool and everything is not good and I was determined to do something about it.

The institute closed.

Bill Lemon was aging out.

He was in his 60s.

And he also lost funding from the university.

So he had 35 or 40 chimps to feed.

Didn't have the funds to be able to do that.

And so he signed a contract to sell all of the IPS chimps to LEMSA, the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates.

And even NEM got sold.

Yeah, he was lost.

Like, my friends are gone.

I am in a strange room.

It's like prison, but worse.

Thrown in the back of a truck, driven to New York.

You wake up in that room.

The one thing that did happen to him, he got a tattoo on his chest, number 37.

But Nim wasn't there very long because I raised a big stink and some friends of mine and I contacted the New York Times and the Boston Globe and 60 Minutes and any other news outlet.

And Nim was famous.

And so using Nim's fame got him out.