In 1973, a newborn chimp called Nim was ripped from his mother’s arms and raised by scientists, who attempted to teach him sign language. The head researcher, Herbert Terrace, saw Nim as a means to an end, a way of refuting Noam Chomsky’s assertion that language is inherent in humans. It is an interesting idea – but it all went horribly wrong.
Other researchers, including Stephanie LaFarge viewed Nim as an individual with needs, feelings and a personality; indeed, LaFarge became so attached to him that she breastfed him as if he were her child.
Abandoned after six years, this astonishing and at times unhinged project proved little about primates’ ability to acquire and use language, but much about human nature. A live version of a Rorschach test, Nim, like an inkblot, was what you saw. And how the scientists viewed him revealed just how barbaric the effects of human narcissism can be.

Using archived footage, revealing interviews and his trademark smooth eye, Man On Wire director James Marsh presents a fascinating insight into the self-aggrandising mentality of the researchers, whose approaches were at times far from scientific. In what amounts to a damning account of ‘70s hippie academia, Nim was passed between numerous homes and research assistants, many of whom didn’t even know sign language, and assumed that providing Nim with the full spectrum of human experience meant getting him drunk and stoned. His ‘teaching’ and ‘development’ were also frequently halted and disrupted due to complications arising from Herbert Terrace’s frequent dalliances with his much younger assistants.
But while the researchers apparently expected Nim to deal with the complications of human life, they seemed completely unprepared for the inevitabilities of primate life; when Nim occasionally lashed out, his assistants were astonished and, well, hurt. Their ludicrous indignation became a painful irony when Terrace abruptly declared the project over, and Nim was inevitably abandoned in a sub-par facility with wild chimps, before being sold to a medical research lab.
Project Nim wanted to see if we could teach a chimp to act like a human. By the end of this documentary, you’ll wonder why we’d ever want to. Because it clearly wouldn’t have made Nim any more civilised.