Response to Focus Section

If Cold War competition between the US and the Soviet Union, decolonization of African range states, new international conservation treaties, and changing Indian policies around primate exports determined much of the twentieth-century history of the colonial biomedical primate trade, in the twenty-first century the importance of China as a supplier of the cynomolgus macaque and the rise of Chinese research influence in the life sciences – including in a fast-growing extractive trade of Southeast Asian primates to China – has reshaped the geography of the international primate trade.7 Although Musk made a media splash with a video of a rhesus macaque playing the video game Pong using a Neuralink implant in 2021, more recent media attention has been about growing competition in the sector.8 The experiments of Neuralink at the captive rhesus macaque research facility in California were one step in a growing tech battle between US startups and Chinese technology corporations, who have now overtaken the US firms in the numbers of human trials of brain-machine interfaces.9 As both the US and Chinese companies have publicly indicated, the goals are not only in rehabilitation for patients with paralysis, but in broader development of everyday implanted technologies that could advance virtual reality, surveillance, and transportation technologies. The fact that competition involving nonhuman primate research coincides with a growing techno-libertarianism and emergent techno-fascism in the US signals the continuing importance of the colonial primate trade in understanding how the racial and colonial histories of science and technology inform our present. Fascistic dreams of technological supremacy and industrial progress also embed within them nostalgic visions of nature. The history of primate importation, which ambivalently invoked both the risks of transspecies touch and the possibilities of domestication, may provide a useful reminder that new knowledge and technologies are embedded in complex geopolitical realities, colonial enterprises, and environmental connections that cannot be easily transcended through universalizing visions of progress.