Collins and Kristof

For reasons best known to herself the odious Ms. Collins writes about ape research in Iowa (no, she doesn’t mean the caucuses).  Mr. Kristof has a piece on foreign aid and how to make it work better.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

“Des Moines is the most ape-literate city in the United States,” said Robert Shumaker proudly. “People come up to me on the street and start talking about bonobos.”

A bonobo is a small chimpanzee-like ape. Which you would know if you lived here.

Shumaker is the lead scientist at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, which houses seven bonobos, three orangutans and a number of researchers at a sanctuary just outside of Des Moines. The whole place has been underwritten by a wealthy Iowa businessman, Ted Townsend, to the tune of about $22 million.

The central concern here is ape-human communication. The apes seem to be able to understand quite a bit of English, and they talk by pushing symbols on a computer. The rock star of the compound is Kanzi, a 27-year-old bonobo whose mother, Matata, spent years with researchers struggling to learn eight basic symbols, without much success. One day the baby just climbed up on the computer and started communicating away, like a little Mozart bent over the keyboard.

It was a moment one of the staff members here compared to “the discovery of penicillin,” but it would actually be familiar to every middle-aged human who has wrestled helplessly with a TV remote and been rescued by a 6-year-old.

His sister Panbanisha is actually supposed to be the smartest bonobo, although she’s shy. Unlike Kanzi, she is not given to staring back at visitors and demanding, through gestures, that they provide some entertainment by chasing each other around the room.

“Can you see the swans?” asked one of the staff members, pointing to a pair of birds swimming in a lake. “Panbanisha is going to give them names.”

Not anytime soon. At the mention of the swans, Bill Fields, the senior research scientist who works with bonobos, looked pained. “They ate Kanzi’s yellow tomato plants,” he said. “They honk. They don’t care what anybody thinks. It was a shock to find out we don’t love them as much as we thought we were going to. Not. At. All.”

By “we” Fields means himself and the bonobos. The people-ape boundaries here are sometimes extremely fluid.

This has got to be one of the most interesting places in Iowa. The humans talk to the apes with welding masks over their faces to prove they aren’t cheating and sending signals. The apes’ conversations seem very much focused on things to eat, but they clearly have other concerns. Friends. Weather. Swans. Strange that in a state awash in presidential candidates, not one has ever come to visit.

Maybe they’re afraid of the theological implications. If Republicans believe it is politically dangerous to acknowledge that man descended from apes, they’d regard it as suicidal to admit that Iowa houses 10 nonhumans whose ability to remember and match symbols could win them valuable prizes on TV game shows. Kanzi, the staff members say, can also speak a few words of English. “He’ll say: ‘Rightnow,’ ” said Daniel Musgrave, a staff member. “Watermelon, pineapple, Perrier, thank you — he’s very polite.”

And what does it say about animal rights if animals can identify bottled water by brand name and have better manners than most American teenagers?

Everyone at the trust is passionately attached to the apes, and seemed horrified at the idea of doing medical research on them or treating them like … animals. But they also feel that apes are unique. No one I talked to was willing to advocate a ban on leather or hunting.

“There’s no reasonable comparison between great apes and dogs and cats and deer,” said Shumaker.

Human-ape conversation was a very hot topic back in the late 1960s, when researchers first taught a chimpanzee named Washoe to use sign language. It lost steam once it became clear that while the apes could put together simple statements and requests, they were not prepared to have discussions about their deepest feelings, hopes and dreams. The Great Ape Trust is the only place in America where this kind of research still goes on.

“It was difficult to demonstrate how this was applicable to human welfare,” said Fields. People frequently ask him if the money wouldn’t be better used on cancer research. This is a common question about almost any science not related to deadly diseases, but not a really good one.

You don’t want every scientist in the world working on a cure for cancer. And it’s almost always a mistake to discourage the ones who want to do basic research to push further into unknown territory where their hearts lie. You can’t predict where the next great leap in knowledge will emerge. Conversing with apes is probably at least as useful as the manned space program, and definitely cheaper.

Now that she’s out of the way, here’s Mr. Kristof:

Almost nobody has campaigned so energetically for the poor in Africa as Bono, but when Bono spoke at a conference in Africa recently, he was heckled. Several Africans scolded him for demanding more foreign aid, saying that’s not what Africa needs.

A handful of recent books and studies suggest that aid is sometimes oversold, including the superb new work called “The Bottom Billion,” by Paul Collier, the World Bank’s former research economist (it’s the best nonfiction book so far this year). A forthcoming book, “Farewell to Alms,” by Gregory Clark, a University of California economist, even argues that conventional aid can leave African countries worse off than ever.

And a study by two economists formerly of the I.M.F., Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian, forthcoming in The Review of Economics and Statistics, concludes:

“We find little robust evidence of a positive (or negative) relationship between aid inflows into a country and its economic growth. We also find no evidence that aid works better in better policy or geographical environments, or that certain forms of aid work better than others. Our findings suggest that for aid to be effective in the future, the aid apparatus will have to be rethought.”

So does this mean we should give up on foreign aid?

No, not at all. On the contrary, I believe there is an urgent need for more aid. But this is an important discussion worth having, and the critics (though a minority of the experts) make some fair points. Plus, there’s no doubt that aid can be made more effective.

Just to place this issue in context, consider a family I visited in a malarial jungle in Cambodia. The mother had just died of malaria, so the grandmother was left looking after five children — but she had only one mosquito net that could accommodate three children. So every night the grandmother had to decide which three children to put under the bed net and which to expose to malaria.

I left the grandmother money to buy another net. And since any of us would do the same to a woman in front of us, why shouldn’t we donate a net through a group like www.MalariaNoMore.org?

Critics of aid worry that aid can jack up a poor country’s exchange rate and thus undermine local businesses. That’s a legitimate concern, but private aid flows are typically too modest to have an impact.

Another concern is that when aid groups move into a country, they grab all resources — sometimes turning scarce doctors into managers of aid bureaucracies. That’s also a genuine problem.

But this is the 30th anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, and it’s worth considering that foreign aid project.

The U.S. invested $32 million over 10 years in the global battle against smallpox. That sum is recouped every two months, simply because Americans no longer need to get vaccinated against smallpox. So that investment has yielded a 46 percent annual return since smallpox was eradicated.

In addition, an estimated 1.5 million people used to die annually of smallpox. So eradication has saved around 45 million lives over the last three decades.

Smallpox was a great success but not a fluke. Among other historical foreign aid successes are immunizations, oral rehydration therapy and the green revolution.

More broadly, when we pay a few hundred dollars for fistula surgery so that a teenage girl no longer will leak urine or feces for the rest of her life, that operation may not stimulate economic growth. But no one who sees such a girl’s happiness after surgery can doubt that such aid is effective, for it truly saves a human being.

Look, it’s true that aid doesn’t always work — any more than other projects do. We spend billions on our military, yet it doesn’t always succeed. But the lesson should be to deploy military power more wisely, not to give up on it.

So how do we make aid smarter? Health and education spending has a pretty good record. Some interventions, like school feedings run by the World Food Program, address both areas: For just 10 cents a day, a child gets a lunch that reduces malnutrition and improves attendance.

And we should commit more aid to nurturing manufacturing and business development, so that countries can grow on their own.

One great U.S. program, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or A.G.O.A., does that and should be expanded. Another excellent U.S. aid program, the Millennium Challenge Account, nudges countries toward better governance — yet a stingy and myopic Congress is balking at funding it.

So let’s accept that getting foreign aid right is harder than it looks — but also remember that 4,110 people didn’t die today from smallpox. Aid can be cause for celebration, not embarrassment.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.