SOUTHBORO--Dr. Ronald D. Hunt, director of Harvard's New England Primate Center, smiles as his visitors confess to missing a turn on the tortuous back roads of Southboro--a New England town just over a half-hour's drive from Boston. Secluded in Harvard's 140 acres of forest, behind a sign advertising the Harvard Southboro Campus, the primate center is easy to pass. While drop-in visitors are not welcome, the Center is at times willing to give tours of the facilities.

Public relations are important to Hunt these days. Although Harvard's New England Primate center is physically isolated from the Cambridge controversy over laboratory animal care, Hunt says that he is aware of the movements to regulate animal research further.

Inside the center, a large glass-fronted cage in the main building's vestibule displays 10 young crab-eating macaques Macaca Fascicularis--the most common species at the center--playing triple leapfrog and swinging on a network of pipes.

Amidst the academic clutter of the labs, humans' decorations are interspersed with bags of monkey chow, manuscripts of journal articles, and cases of rubber gloves. One receptionist's cubicle seems to be a normal office, except for the battling stenches of disinfectant and monkey dung. And down the hall, a researcher's door bears the sober proverb, "Mortui Vivos Docent."

The laboratory provides subjects and facilities for Harvard studies of human disorders such as AIDS, heart disease, and drug addiction. It also hosts 116 researchers from about 40 institutions all over the world, and gives them technical help with primate experiments. Outside researchers' work is funded by grants for their specific projects, while the upkeep of the center itself is paid for by a separate multimillion-dollar "core funding" grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Hunt says that the center strives to provide the best care possible for its captive subjects.

"By having a center with veterinarians who are devoted to the full-time study and care of primates and an animal care staff devoted to the care of primates, we provide a more sophisticated program...than is possible at other institutions," he says, adding that the center's advantages include better care for animals than would be available at smaller labs.

Researchers study monkeys not only to compare them to humans, but also to learn how to keep captive primates healthy--particularly endangered animals which are losing their habitat, Hunt says.

Part of that includes raising most of the primates in groups, rather than in separate cages, to "socialize" them. If the monkeys do not meet other members of their species, Hunt says, "They haven't learned that they're monkeys--if you put the male and the female together, they don't know what to do."

The mortality rates of the center reflect the importance the center places on caring for the animal. According to Dr. Prabhat Sehgal, director of veterinary care at the hospital, there was "no mortality rate" among the macaques, although some marmosets had died at the lab. Says Hunt of the center's researchers, "An investigator wants his animal to be healthy and he wants his animal to live."

Hunt is quick to defend the animal research as humane as well, carefully controlled, and sparingly used at the center. He says many researchers now use tissue cultures, DNA studies, and other "alternative" methods rather than live monkeys in studies to study the effects of disease. In the 1960s, he says, it was far more common to infect a group of animals with a deadly disease to see how it progressed. "90 percent of our research really does use alternative methods," Hunt says.

But the center is still very concerned about its image and would not allow a photographer to take pictures of animals in wire cages. "If you publish it, it looks like somebody is behind bars," Sehgal says. "Pictures are funny--they let people see whatever they want," says Hunt.

And sometimes people see what Hunt doesn't want them to. Researcher John McArdle of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society (NEAVS), recalls that when he visited the center several years ago, the monkeys were kept alone in rows of single cages. He said that while the practice of housing the monkeys in groups is a definite improvement over the old single cages, it is not enough.

As the groups of monkeys placed together do not resemble family groupings that would be found in the wild, the animals suffer from psychological deprivation, says McArdle, suggesting that the monkeys should be given toys or other "behavioral aids" in their cages to compensate for their lack of kin. A few branches were seen in the larger cages. yesterday, but most cages contained only the monkeys and their food.

NEAVS opposes hurting research animals "for any purpose from which that individual animal will not benefit."