On an overcast day this spring, a blue-canopied motorboat slowly navigates the 110-kilometer stretch of the Amazon that divides Colombia and Peru. At the fore stands Manuel Elkin Patarroyo. The aft contains his research subjects—30 individually bagged owl monkeys, each no bigger than a small housecat.
The captain guides the boat toward the bank. Patarroyo, head of the Bogota-based Fundación Instituto de Inmunología de Colombia, disembarks, and begins offloading the animals. Owl monkeys are reportedly difficult to capture, but releasing them takes no time at all. “They are excited to go home,” Patarroyo says, beaming. Investigators the world over occasionally use wild primates for medical research, but Patarroyo says he is the only one who returns them.
Anti-malaria genes give mosquitoes an edge
Back on the boat, Patarroyo and his shipmates toast the monkeys’ successful liberation with plastic glasses of rum. ...
