The lost appetites

摘要

Ronald Fisher must have been relieved when a chimpanzee at Edinburgh Zoo took a sip of water, looked him in the eye and spat at him. It was August 1939, and Fisher was testing whether chimps could taste water laced with a chemical called phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) that some humans find nauseatingly bitter and others can't taste. Fisher and his colleagues Edmund Ford and Julian Huxley had been worried that the apes wouldn't make their preferences known, rendering the experiment pointless.