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He Shoots, He Scores
Jungle Wisdom
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ROBERT SAPOLSKY is breathing hard, partly from the sheer physical exertion of sliding on his back into the cavern where a tranquilized baboon has dragged a dying impala, partly from the anxiety of not knowing if he is going to have to tangle with a drugged 70-pound beast with three-inch canine teeth. Once inside the tiny cave, he is relieved to see that the baboon he darted is out cold. But from outside the cave he hears the angry screams of other baboons who want that impala, who are willing to fight and even kill to get it. These shrieking primates don’t know what’s happening in the cave and are hesitant to enter, but they won’t be for long. Sapolsky sees shadows flick across the light from the cave entrance; when the entrance goes dark he shouts, temporarily scaring the intruders away. He has to work fast.
Unsheathing a hypodermic needle, he is reaching to take a quick blood
sample from the baboon when—whack!—a blow slices his forehead
and knocks him backward. The impala is mortally wounded from the jagged
hole in its gut, but still alive enough to make itself noticed. The panicked
animal’s sharp hooves fly about the enclosed space in a blur, and
Sapolsky realizes he is “about to be killed by Bambi.”
He leaps on the impala, struggles with it (later he thinks he must have
strangled it) and then the impala is dead and the baboons outside are
venturing more deeply into the cave. The sweaty, bloody Sapolsky has no
option but to push the deadweight of the beast toward the cave entrance,
straining to bulldoze the impala across the dirt until soon the offering
is sliding faster than he’s pushing and is then whisked away by furry
hands. Sapolsky gets the baboon’s blood sample and waits until the
screams of fighting and feasting die down outside.
Thus ends what the Stanford neurobiologist calls his worst darting ever.
But in the best of circumstances, darting wild and wily baboons with a
blowgun is not easy, “even with a college education,” Sapolsky
says. More than a quarter of a century ago he fulfilled a childhood dream
by “joining a troop of baboons.” Since then he has made an annual
pilgrimage to the Kenyan savanna to study the same group of primates,
most years living alone for three months in a pup tent, sustained by little
but tins of Taiwanese mackerel in tomato sauce and the desire to understand
how stress affects the health and well-being of social animals like baboons—and
humans.
His work on the savanna, supplemented by the laboratory work he does at
Stanford, has led to a new understanding of how the social slights and
struggles of everyday life can raise stress hormone levels, and how chronically
elevated stress can contribute to disease (see sidebar). He has received
a number of awards for his scientific advances, including a MacArthur
“genius” grant in 1987.
Sapolsky is well-known around campus for his fascinating lectures in human
behavioral biology. To the public at large, he is best known for three
books: Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (1994), The Trouble
with Testosterone (1997) and A Primate’s Memoir (2001).
The earlier books concentrate on his scientific work, but A Primate’s
Memoir is a more personal look at his life in Africa, introducing
us equally to the baboons and the human primates he encounters. As with
most of his writing, the book is very funny. New York Times reviewer
Patricia Leigh Brown called Sapolsky a cross between Jane Goodall and
a Borscht Belt comedian, but most of his stories are closer to Woody Allen’s
than Henny Youngman’s—incisive (and sometimes tragic) comedies
of manners, topsy-turvy struggles across hierarchical lines for power
and romance.
In most of these stories, Sapolsky is happy to use the time-honored narrative
device of playing the buffoon: the rube who gets conned repeatedly the
first day in Nairobi, the guy who year after year makes the nauseating
mistake of stocking mackerel as his sole protein source on the savanna
because he is in a rush to get there. He compares himself to a favorite
baboon in the troop, Benjamin, who has “beserko” hair, stumbles
over his feet and always manages to sit on the stinging ants.
Sapolsky himself has cascading hair and a full beard, which sometimes
gives him a resemblance to Tom Hanks as a third-year castaway. In person,
he is pleasant, soft-spoken and self-deprecating, someone you might easily
imagine living happily alone in a tent in Africa. Watch him in action,
however, or read between the lines about what he actually does in the
field, and you get a completely different picture.
Whether you see him tearing up the turf around campus in pick-up games
of soccer (at which he professes to be “not very good”) or hunting
baboons on the savanna with a blowgun, you get the image of a man who
exudes adrenaline and has a reservoir of intensity deep enough to spin
the turbines at Hoover Dam. Here is a man who took a side trip to Uganda
in 1979 just to see the fall of Idi Amin; he spent a night under a truck
to avoid falling artillery shells. About that experience Sapolsky writes:
“In a weird way it was cleansing to have those moments of sheer absolute
terror and, when the shelling stopped, to feel the relief.”
His parents probably never imagined he would get himself into such a situation.
Sapolsky, however, had his own plans. Born to Russian immigrants in Brooklyn,
N.Y., he used to beg them to take him again and again to the Museum of
Natural History, where he yearned to crawl into the African dioramas and
live there. As an Orthodox Jewish kid “with no proclivities toward
athletics or gang violence,” Sapolsky spent a lot of time reading
and imagining living with silverback gorillas. By age 12, he was writing
fan letters to primatologists; by high school, he was reading textbooks
on the subject and teaching himself Swahili.
As a Harvard undergraduate, however, he began to focus on scientific questions
that could not be answered by studying mountain gorillas. Sapolsky wanted
to know how and why stress is bad for the body and, perhaps more important,
why some people resist stress better than others. That is why, in 1977,
he began studying neuroendocrinology as a graduate student at Rockefeller
University, and why the following summer, at age 21, he joined the baboon
troop as “a young transfer male.”
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| Courtesy Robert Sapolsky |
Baboons—singular-looking primates with a wild hairdo, close-set eyes, a long muzzle and permanent leathery pads covering their rear ends—are great subjects for studying social stress, Sapolsky says, because they live in large, complex groups. Those who inhabit the open Serengeti Plain find plenty of food and few predators. They therefore must devote only about four hours each day to feeding themselves and have a half-dozen hours of daylight to make life miserable for each other. “Baboons, like humans, have the luxury of making themselves sick with purely psychological stress,” Sapolsky says.
To measure the effects of social stress, Sapolsky observes the baboons’
interactions, then takes blood samples to record how stress-hormone levels
correlate with various behaviors. Tranquilizing the baboons to draw blood
is more difficult than it sounds. Sapolsky uses a blowgun—a metal
and plastic tube that he loads with an anesthetic dart, aims and blows
through—because, he says, it is more mechanically reliable than an
air rifle. Its range is about 30 feet, barring wind, so he has to get
quite close to the selected target. (Sapolsky darts only males, because
females are most often pregnant or caring for their young.) The darting
must take place at the same time each day to allow for daily cycles in
stress hormones, and the subject mustn’t know what’s coming
because that in itself would raise stress levels.
As the baboons gained experience with his technique, they learned to distinguish
between the sounds of Sapolsky inhaling to sneeze or inhaling to blow
a dart. He has to resort to all sorts of subterfuges to keep them off
their game: borrowing other people’s vehicles, getting others to
drive him around, even wearing Halloween masks. Once an animal is darted,
Sapolsky follows him until he’s asleep. Then he covers the animal
with a burlap sack to keep the other baboons from going crazy—as
humans would if we saw one of our own abducted by an alien—and carries
him away to take a blood sample.
“There’s nothing I enjoy more in the world,” Sapolsky says
of darting. He loves stalking the animals, sneaking up close enough to
blow a dart into them and pursuing them afterward until they feel drowsy
and drop off to sleep. Sapolsky admits to savoring a delicious irony:
he is a liberal who opposes guns and hunting but knows intimately the
joys of the hunt.
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After a time it became clear to Sapolsky that the baboons saw him as one of the troop, albeit the lowest, most pathetic member. There is a certain look, a certain set of signals, that one baboon will give another when he is about to be mauled by a more dominant baboon. That look tells the bystander, “Hey, can you help me out here?” Occasionally, when no other potential saviors were around, a desperate baboon would give Sapolsky such a signal. “I think they were hoping I’d run the other baboon over with my jeep,” he says.
The hirsute scientist was also regarded as an oddity by the local Masai,
the fierce, spear-carrying warriors of East Africa who live mostly by
drinking milk and blood culled from the cattle they herd. “I think
the Masai see me as somehow herding the baboons,” Sapolsky says.
“Taking blood they can understand more. They don’t think I drink
the blood, but I imagine they think I make my living off it, that I use
it in some shamanistic fashion.” Which, he admits, is true in a way.
The Masai are generally friendly with Sapolsky, although two of them once
got wildly upset and pointed their spears at him when he kidded them that
a baboon sleeping in his arms was his brother.
Closer to home, some colleagues have taken jabs at his popular writing.
“Everyone at Stanford has been very supportive, but people like [biological
sciences professor] Paul Ehrlich have warned me that I risk being saganized,”
Sapolsky says, referring to the dismissive treatment astronomer Carl Sagan
received from the scientific community after he became famous for his
television appearances and his writing. “Some scientists seem to
think if you have time to write about your work in a popular, humorous
way, you can’t do serious science.”
Ehrlich himself chalks that response up to the “ancient training”
of scientists. “They know that the public needs to understand science;
but when someone really smart who can really write comes along, many of
them say, ‘Shoemaker, stick to your last.’”
Others have criticized Sapolsky for anthropomorphizing the behavior of
the baboons. For instance, instead of assigning his subjects numbers,
Sapolsky gave the baboons Old Testament names, like Uriah, Bathsheba and
Nebuchadnezzar. He also writes about his troop for the public in a very
colloquial way. But Sapolsky categorically rejects the idea that he is
assigning human attributes to baboons. Although he admits to some obvious
exaggerations for humor (“. . . no doubt Saul was beginning to contemplate
the building of grand commemorative cathedrals”), for the most part,
he says, he is “primatizing human behavior,” writing about qualities
we share with them as fellow primates.
Sapolsky sees applications of primatology in everyday life—for example,
in the struggle for dominance at faculty meetings. His strategies for
academic survival borrow from the baboons’ diplomatic skills: “I’ve
learned to make coalitions and occasionally stick my rear in the air in
a subordinate manner,” Sapolsky says.
He has also taken to heart his finding that the healthiest, least stressed
baboons have strong social connections. While he was not a complete hermit
in Africa, Sapolsky typically spends a lot of time alone. “I have
always been able to be with people, and to enjoy it,” he says. “But
I fairly regularly need to be alone for long periods, and seem to have
a much higher threshold than most people for really extended periods alone.”
Sapolsky began to spend less time alone after he met his future wife,
Lisa. That was in the mid-1980s, while he was doing postdoctoral work
at the Salk Institute. “I can tell you from my own blood pressure
data that this is a much saner way of living,” Sapolsky says. When
he first took Lisa with him to his camp in Kenya, he also saw himself
in a different light. As local kids and adults kept stopping by to socialize—something
they had never done before—Sapolsky realized that on his solo visits
he must have seemed like a “forbidding weirdo.”
More recently he and his wife have strengthened their social network by
having two children, Benjamin, 4, and Rachel, 2. But here his knowledge
of baboons has been surprisingly little help. “When I became a father
I thought, ‘This is going to be a primatology blowout; I’m going
to be great at this.’ The truth is I was lousy; I had to learn how
to be a father,” Sapolsky says. “Somewhere around the time that
an infant finds a stuffed animal popping up to be funny, that just struck
me—you’re in a whole different territory here.” He also
notes that the emotionally engulfing experience of parenthood is very
different from being a detached observer. “There is an element of
chaos, an inability to pull yourself back and turn the whole thing into
a lecture for a class.”
Now, with an absorbing social network at home (and a close-knit group
in his laboratory at Stanford), Sapolsky spends only about 21 days a year
with the baboons instead of three months. And when he is in Africa, he
is much more careful than before about getting smeared by a buffalo or
stomped by an elephant or shot by an AK-47. Probably more often than not
there is some member of his domestic social unit giving him a look that
says, “Can you help me out here?”
It looks as though Robert Sapolsky has settled into a human troop at last.
Christopher Vaughan is a science writer in Menlo Park.
I LEARNED HOW to dart baboons in a dormitory room in Manhattan. It was on my first break back in the States after I had joined the troop. I practiced relentlessly in my room. Angled shots, pointing down, pointing up, fast spinning shots, over the shoulder, in the wind (with the fan turned on). Allan, a stolid graduate school friend with a low center of gravity who had been a standout lineman on his Fredonia, Kansas, high school football squad, consented for me to practice wrestling him as if he were a darted baboon.
Time went by and I improved. I could have darted a baboon anywhere in
my room, in or out of Groucho Marx’s pajamas. Two fantasies dominated
my darting then. I wanted to dart Fritz Lipmann. Lipmann was an incredibly
famous biochemist, got the Nobel Prize decades ago, and now was an august
octogenarian who would spend his day shuffling around the campus in his
running shoes, endlessly passing my first-floor dorm window. I would get
him in my blowgun sights from behind my biochemistry textbooks (which
were half about him), choose between his rear end and shoulders, try to
calculate his body weight for a proper dosage. I refrained from darting,
however. The other fantasy was to sneak into Central Park and dart some
random people. While they were down, I would quickly Magic Marker some
Mayan hieroglyphic on their bellies and leave them to wake up soon thereafter
underneath the Alice in Wonderland statue. I figured three such cases
and the newspapers would be screaming, TV pundits would lecture on Mayan
rituals of sacrifice, Jimmy Breslin would beg for me to give myself up,
frenzied angry crowds would form around police stations in which jobless
PhD archaeologists would try to come up with feeble alibis about how they
weren’t the Mayan Darter.
The months passed and it was time to return to the field.
From A Primate’s Memoir by Robert M. Sapolsky. © 2001
by Robert M. Sapolsky. Reprinted by arrangement with The Free Press, a
division of Simon & Schuster Inc., New York.
SAPOLSKY'S FIELD OBSERVATIONS on stress in male baboons can be
summed up in one dictum: don’t be at the bottom of a very hierarchical
society. Baboons’ pecking order is based on who can beat up whom.
Weaklings are picked on, they are the last to get food and they stand
little chance of winning mates—all of which contributes to high stress
levels.
Working at the cellular level in his Stanford lab, Sapolsky has shown
that chronically high stress levels weaken immune systems and can harm
or destroy other cells throughout the body. His team was among the first
to show that elevated levels of stress hormones can kill cells in the
hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for forming new memories.
Other pieces of advice arising out of the work of Sapolsky and others
are more broadly applicable:
Have an outlet for stress. Beaten baboons usually rip into even
weaker baboons to make themselves feel better, but this is not a great
choice for humans. We can shed stress through physical activity like running
or other exercise.
Take control where you can. Top baboons have the most control of
their environment because they decide whether to pick a fight, when to
seize food from others and which mates they want. Low-ranking baboons
have little control and are constantly worried (usually with good cause)
about being dumped on. Humans can counteract anxieties by concentrating
on the things they can control. For instance, you can’t make everyone
on the road drive safely, but you can pick where and when you drive, and
you can be extra-careful behind the wheel. Once you take those steps,
try to accept that driving involves some risk but you are unlikely to
have an accident.
Know when threats are real. Baboons who freak out every time the
top baboon comes toward them have higher stress levels than those who
are able to see that the head honcho is only passing them on the way to
the water hole. Similarly, there is no reason to let your blood boil because
some jerk is yelling at you on the highway, and it’s especially pointless
to stress about it for hours afterward. Stay calm unless the jerk is physically
threatening—trying to drive his car into you, for example.
In short, much of what stress researchers are finding is reflected in
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s trite-and-true prayer: “God grant
me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change
the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Sapolsky
says advice like this, or “Don’t worry, be happy,” might
sound platitudinous, but its effect on our mental and physical health
in the face of psychological stress can be significant.
—C.V.