In her essay (Sept. 12), Jennifer Schuessler concocts a peculiar mash-up. The pairing of a fictional account of bonobos (Sara Gruen鈥檚 ) with a nonfiction book on apes (Jon Cohen鈥檚 鈥淎lmost Chimpanzee鈥�) makes some sense; Gruen grounded her novel in visits to real-life bonobos at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, a place also visited by Cohen.

But lest readers be led astray, we wish to clarify that the Great Ape Trust is in no way connected with Marc Hauser, the Harvard scientist mentioned in the essay who has been accused of falsifying data in his primate studies. For those with serious interest about the research into the language abilities of bonobos, extensive video documentation is freely available on the Internet, including material at .

We are scientists who have worked closely with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues at the , and/or have observed and interacted with the bonobos. We teach and write about the work impugned in the Book Review 鈥� because we respect its scientific integrity, because it has powerfully transformed our understanding of what apes are capable of, and because, through it, we grasp more fully what it means to share our world with other sentient creatures.

Benson and Greaves, members of Glendon鈥檚 , traveled to the United States to meet with earlier this year.

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The team is engaged in聽the multi-location, multi-year (BHD) research project, ongoing since the summer of 2009 in Glendon鈥檚 (CRLC) and funded by (RAY). Greaves and Benson are the principal investigators for the聽project, which is聽striving to produce a searchable database of video clips of -human conversations to document the language capacities of the bonobos, a type of ape, and to extend scientific understanding of how language has聽evolved.

For the 2009-2010 academic year, the team included five student participants, some paid and some volunteers聽鈥� second-year undergraduates Charlotte Petrie, Maria Wong, Laura Guecha and Meng Yang, as well as fourth-year undergraduate Lidia Giosa, who has been accepted into a PhD program for speech pathology at the University of Louisiana partly as a result of her participation in聽the BHD聽project. Two additional participants are recent Glendon graduate Daniel Byrnes (BA Hons. '09), who has continued to work on the project since graduating, and mature student Bruce Anderson.

Left: Senior scholars Jim Benson and Bill Greaves with the Bonobo Human Discourse research team members

The current project has emerged from past cooperation among a number of scholars from different countries, including , a scientist with special standing at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa,聽linguistics and media communication Professor Paul Thibault of University of Agder in Norway and Meena Debashish, phonetics & spoken English professor at the English & Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad,聽India, along with Benson and Greaves.聽This international team had worked together in 2005 on a project based at Glendon and funded by the and has been actively collaborating ever since.

For this project, Savage-Rumbaugh has made available 400 hours of video footage filmed by聽the聽 (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) representing a corpus of spontaneous interaction between researchers at Geogia State University and the bonobos. In the videos, the humans use spoken language to communicate and the bonobos use a lexigram keyboard of 450 symbols that produces spoken English words.

Right: A bonobo

Benson explained that this project provides many types of learning opportunities for participating students. 鈥淭he international dimension of the students鈥� training has been present from the beginning.聽Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh is based in Des Moines, Iowa, and the data she has made available to us was assembled in Georgia.聽At the same time that we were initiating these undergraduates into the linguistic analysis of bonobo-human discourse, Dr. Rumbaugh was engaging students from Buena Vista University, Simpson College and Missouri State University in work that was based on the bonobos.聽The US students were looking at the bonobos in terms of psychology and anthropology, rather than linguistics, and it became very clear that much was to be gained by bringing these young people together.鈥�

For this international collaboration, Benson and Greaves have incorporated US professors involved at different institutions (Savage-Rumbaugh, psychology Professors Carl Halgren and Don Evans聽of Simpson College in Iowa, anthropology Professor Margie Buckner of Missouri State University, and psychology and computer science Professor Kenneth Schweller of Buena Vista University in Iowa) as 鈥渢eachers鈥� in the Glendon Moodle Bonobo Human Discourse Web聽site. Their students will also be included shortly on the Web site.

鈥淏ut interaction on a Web site has its limitations,鈥� said Greaves. 鈥淭he best possible way to launch this joint venture is through a face-to-face collaboration. Bringing the 91亚色 team to meet with the others at Simpson College in Des Moines over the weekend of April 29 will provide an excellent opportunity for personal interaction.鈥�

Greaves said this research experience provides students with a multi-dimensional experience, including practical career training and international networking opportunities. 鈥淥ur long-term strategy is to give a group of undergraduates an exceptional apprenticeship in research extending over three years and, at the same time, to build for them聽鈥� and for us聽鈥� a base of scholarly interaction that binds student researchers in the US with our student researchers in Canada.鈥�

Submitted by Marika Kemeny, Glendon communications officer

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