When Penny Patterson, a young graduate student in psychology
at Stanford, first saw a tiny, undernourished baby gorilla named
Hanabi-Ko at the San Francisco Zoo, she had little inkling that
the sickly ape would become her constant companion - and the
subject of the longest continuous experiment ever undertaken
to teach language to another species. But within a year, Project
Koko was underway, and in two weeks the gorilla was using correct
signed gestures for food, drink, and more. Today, more than
25 years later, Koko - the world's most renowned gorilla - is
drawing on a vocabulary of more than 1,000 words.
