For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back back to life in BL Classics. This Classic comes from a 2001 sidebar, which chronicles the brave chimponauts of Baylor and the faculty and administrators who brought their research to campus.
Few people around Baylor are aware that, almost forty years ago, a training facility for space flight was located in Baylor’s backyard. The place was a nondescript cinder-block structure behind the old Behrens building, now the site of a new parking garage. The trainees, however, weren’t your ordinary, aspiring astronauts. They were chimpanzees, or chimponauts.
John Glenn had piloted America’s first Earth-orbiting flight just a month before Baylor’s psychology department began work, in March 1962, on an eighteen-month, $40,000 contract with the U.S. Air Force in which three chimpanzees were to be trained to perform tasks for possible space flight.
A chimp named Enos had preceded Glenn into orbit in the fall of 1961, providing NASA-Air Force scientists with data regarding the effects that weightlessness, launch and reentry gravitational forces, and the inherent physiological dangers of space flight would have on one’s ability to perform complex tasks in flight. Even after the relative safety of astronauts had been established by Glenn’s pioneering flight, chimps such as the ones at Baylor were still being trained for possible future missions.
“I can remember their names perfectly after all these years — Clayton, Cindy, and Gail,” says Dr. Roger Kirk, who was one of the Baylor professors involved in the project. Now a distinguished professor of psychology and statistics at Baylor, Kirk notes that the primate laboratory was also eventually home to several Java monkeys, gibbons, and baboons.
How did Baylor get involved in the chimp-training business? The answer lies in the relationship between Dr. William D. Thompson, then a psychology professor at Baylor and the principal investigator in the Air Force contract, and someone well-known in Baylor circles—Dr. Herbert H. Reynolds. Now president emeritus, the former Baylor president and chancellor earned his master’s degree and doctorate in psychology from Baylor in 1958 and 1961, respectively. The chair of his doctoral committee was Thompson, and it was Reynolds who later negotiated the contract between Baylor and the Air Force.
In June 1961 Reynolds—who had studied and taught at Baylor as an Air Force officer—was assigned to the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico, as chief of the Training and Research Branch of the Comparative Psychology Division. In January of that year, the Holloman-trained chimp Ham had preceded Alan Shepard in suborbital flight. Then, in late November, the NASA-Air Force team sent chimponaut Enos into orbit. Like his predecessor, Enos had been trained under a NASA contract with the Air Force in the New Mexico laboratories—this time with Reynolds as part of the team.
That same fall, Reynolds traveled back to Waco on a mission—to create a safety net for the Holloman project. “The Baylor facility would be a back-up program in case an injury or a disease outbreak disabled our chimponauts at Holloman. I guess you could call it a mini chimponaut colony,” Reynolds says with a laugh. “I felt Dr. Thompson and the psychology department faculty would do a good job. He was an exceptionally well-qualified psychophysiologist.”
“All of the equipment and the animals were flown in from Holloman,” Kirk remembers. After the facility was finished in 1962, the Baylor group quickly put the chimps to work, training them to respond to simulated flight panels. “It was a breakthrough for Baylor and, specifically, the psychology department,” Kirk says. “It put us on the map.”
A second Holloman-sponsored Air Force contract followed in May 1963—an eighteen-month, $98,724 project studying the differences in autonomic nervous system reactivity between Java monkeys, chimpanzees, and men. Thompson again served as the principal investigator at Baylor, and Reynolds remained the Air Force’s liaison. The primate lab was expanded, and more faculty members and graduate assistants became involved. Thompson, Kirk, and Dr. John Flynn, who recently retired from Baylor, eventually used the research as the basis for several articles, reports, and professional presentations. In addition. Dr. Marvin Grunzke, PhD ’66, Reynolds, and Dr. Frederick H. Rohles co-authored an article published in the Journal of Comparative Physiological Psychology based on both of the Holloman-trained chimpanzees’ Mercury program flights.
Before retiring from the Air Force in 1968 at age thirty-eight, Reynolds had been selected for promotion to lieutenant colonel at age thirty-five and had risen to become deputy commander and director of research of the entire Aeromedical Research Laboratory in 1964 and 1965, respectively. During his years at Holloman, he oversaw several other NASA-contracted experiments. Prior to Ed White’s space walk in 1964, Reynolds’s group conducted experiments on chimpanzees to determine what would happen if an astronaut, due to an accident, experienced rapid decompression to a near-vacuum state during extravehicular activity. Once the experimental program and apparatus had been set up and the initial experiments had been conducted, Baylor doctoral student Alfred Koestler ’60, PhD ’71, carried out a new body of experiments for his dissertation under Reynolds’s direction. The two eventually co-authored an article on the decompression experiments, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
Reynolds’s last research project concerned the toxicity of the coolant ethylene glycol for the Apollo spacecraft. During the project, he called upon his friend and colleague Dr. John Belew, a chemistry professor at Baylor, who carried out independent research at Baylor to allow cross-validation of the Holloman results. Reynolds says their research gave NASA the hard data it needed to determine how to safely use ethylene glycol which, if allowed into the human body, produces crystals in the tubules of the kidneys, resulting in potentially fatal acidosis.
Noting that “we had a lot of different laboratories out there in the desert of New Mexico,” Reynolds says that “to have the opportunity to be involved in that kind of research for most of the 1960s was very exciting.” No doubt Reynolds’s colleagues at Baylor were equally excited, working in the heart of Texas, to be contributing to the space program in those heady days of the early 1960s.
As for Clayton, Cindy, and Gail—well, they never actually made it into space. But they could work those flight panels like true chimponauts.
