BU Today spoke to Schmitt about monkey development, genes, and the joys of working with vervets in the field. The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
BU Today: Don’t anthropologists study humans?
Schmitt: Yeah, a lot of people wonder why I’m in an anthropology department studying monkeys, but biological anthropology is actually the study of human evolutionary history. We try to understand primate biology in order to understand more about what makes us human.
A lot of people would say vervet monkeys aren’t much like humans.You’d be surprised. My postdoc at UCLA is where I started working with the vervet monkeys, partly to study how they resist developing AIDS when infected with immunodeficiency viruses, something we found vervets have evolved to do in a few different ways. To do this, I traveled across Africa and the Caribbean, and we trapped, measured, and collected biological samples from hundreds of vervets.
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