The Lies That Scars Tell

Macaque trainers in Bangladesh are often bitten by their monkeys, but rarely infected by a particular simian retrovirus.

kerry grens
| 4 min read

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TIGER STYLE: Melia, a trained macaque adorned with stripes of dyed fur, grooms her Bedey owner.LYNN JOHNSON

About a decade ago, Lisa Jones-Engel was traveling through rural Bangladesh in a caravan of colleagues she calls “Team Monkey,” a band of international researchers comprising a veterinarian, her husband (a physician/epidemiologist), zoologists from Jahangirnagar University, her daughters/field assistants, and others. The group had been collecting macaque feces as part of a project with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to understand how picornaviruses may be moving between humans and monkeys in the region. As the travelers turned off a paved road to head toward the village of Dhamrai, they drove past a man walking a monkey painted with tiger stripes.

“I thought, ‘What the hell was that?’” Jones-Engel, an anthropologist and primatologist at the University of Washington, recalls. The caravan stopped and ...

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Meet the Author

  • kerry grens

    Kerry Grens

    Kerry served as The Scientist’s news director until 2021. Before joining The Scientist in 2013, she was a stringer for Reuters Health, the senior health and science reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, and the health and science reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio. Kerry got her start in journalism as a AAAS Mass Media fellow at KUNC in Colorado. She has a master’s in biological sciences from Stanford University and a biology degree from Loyola University Chicago.

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