by Unknown
When Bier wrote his ground-breaking paper describing the experiment, he gave a blow-by-blow account of what Hildebrandt had endured. As far as Bier was concerned, the experiment was a huge success. He had shown that a tiny dose of cocaine could deaden sensation for long enough to perform a major operation. Spinal anaesthesia was far safer than general anaesthesia, and within two years surgeons around the world were using it. Bier put the headaches down to the loss of cerebrospinal fluid, and he was right—this was finally proved in the 1950s.
Hildebrandt, though, had gone right off Bier and became one of his most vehement critics. When a row blew up over who had really been first to invent spinal anaesthesia, Hildebrandt championed Bier’s rival, an American neurologist called James Corning. Hildebrandt never said why. Perhaps he was shocked by the zeal with which Bier had battered him. Maybe he was miffed because in the end Bier was recognised as a pioneering surgeon, while he was forever known as the man whose boss had tugged his testicles.
Some researchers, of course, prefer to put other people’s bodies on the line…
The fall guy
Mark Grabiner spent the best part of 15 years tripping people up. It wasn’t that he was a prankster. He’d simply been trying to solve a problem that all of us face from time to time: how to avoid falling when you trip.
It has been known for decades that older people fall more than younger ones, and falls are responsible for the majority of injuries to people over the age of 65. But to understand why, Grabiner reasoned, why not study those people who usually manage to avoid it: the youth? In 1986 Grabiner decided to study young, healthy people’s responses to being tripped. But first, he had a problem. If volunteers knew they were going to be tripped—and they had to so they could give their permission—how could he surprise them? Grabiner, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, worked out a way to do it.
For his experiments, he strapped the volunteers into a harness attached to a sliding track mounted in the ceiling. This caught them just before they hit the floor. ‘They have to be able to throw themselves as hard as they can at the ground—and miss,’ he said. Once the hapless subjects got used to their new outfits, the researchers warned them they were going to be tripped. But they didn’t say when or how. ‘We have to be pretty devious,’ he said.
An assistant uncoiled a rope, laid it across the lab and instructed the volunteers to walk over it normally. The victims approached the rope cautiously, but relaxed once they had passed it, thinking they were safe. ‘And then we trip them,’ Grabiner said. An aluminium box popped out of the floor, catching the unsuspecting victim’s foot as they swung it forward.
This work produced puzzling results. When people trip, the upper body pitches forward. Because older people have weaker muscles, they are less stable when they walk. So Grabiner expected to find that weak people would pitch further forward than stronger people. But this was not what his results showed. Weak or strong, people always tilted to about the same angle when they were tripped. He also found it as difficult to get strong young people to fall down as their weaker cohorts.
Unlike the younger participants, most of the elderly volunteers were easily floored. But there was a complication. The study found there were two categories of older faller: the slow and the fast. The first group knew they were weak, and tended to shuffle along slowly. In this way they gave themselves extra time to react after they tripped—though not enough, it turned out, to prevent a fall. More unexpected were the fast fallers. These were elderly people with strong back muscles and more confidence. They walked as quickly as young people, but were far easier to bring down. Why should this be?
The answer eventually came from Mirjam Pijnappels at the Free University, Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. And there seemed to be more to it than brute strength. Pijnappels improved on Grabiner’s set-up by hiding not one but 21 pop-up obstacles in the floor, making it easier to trip people up by surprising them more. She also measured the distance and height that her victims moved when they were tripped. From this, she found that people used the leg that had not been tripped to win them some extra time to recover. When one leg was tripped, they immediately pushed off with the other leg, as if hopping, but also bending their knee. This pushed them 40 per cent higher into the air than in a normal step, and gave them 63 per cent more time in the air before they landed again.
According to James Ashton-Miller at the University of Michigan, these studies pointed to one crucial factor: the importance of muscle power, particularly in the calf. By power he meant not merely the force a muscle can exert, but also how fast it can produce that force. Even allowing for differences in reaction time, calf muscles in elderly people take twice as long as to reach their maximum force as young people’s muscles do, which prevents them using their supporting leg in the same way.
And this observation could be put to practical use. ‘The good news is that at any age muscle is trainable,’ Ashton-Miller said. For older people in good health, the potential fast fallers, exercises like dancing and skipping can increase muscle power. Staying active should make it easier to push off on that supporting leg to recover from a trip. However, there was another important risk factor. In the labs, people who weren’t paying attention fell more often than people who were. You may have the agility of a spring lamb, but it won’t help you if you are too drunk or too engrossed in your mobile phone to react before you fall on your face.
Tripping people up, however, seems quite tame when you consider what they were up to in the 1960s.
Effects of hallucinogenic drugs in blind people
How do drugs such as LSD and mescaline produce their unusual psychedelic effects and visual hallucinations? These consist of brightly coloured lights, geometric designs and impairment of colour values and space perception. In 1961, Dr Adrian M. Ostfeld of the University of Illinois showed that hallucinogenic drugs produce abnormal changes in the retina, affecting the functions of the rod-cell light receptors of the retina, probably by interfering with their oxygen supply.
He then gave LSD to 18 blind people who had not been blind from birth. A number reported ‘seeing’ white lights and coloured flashes, similar to those described by sighted patients who had the visual area in the occipital part of their brain stimulated electrically under local anaesthesia. But when people who had been blind since birth were given LSD they did not experience these visual hallucinations, presumably because they had no appreciation of light or colour. They did, however, experience auditory, olfactory and tactile hallucinations. One made the comment that after taking LSD the Braille print he was reading seemed to jump off the page when he touched it.
We wonder if the volunteers were asked to sign a waiver? It seems difficult to imagine a similar experiment getting the go-ahead today. And pity the poor volunteer having to swallow this.
Keeping cool
In 1957, an experiment requiring a patient to swallow a balloon which was subsequently inflated in his stomach with cold water was carried out by experts who were studying ways of cooling the body sufficiently to allow operations within a dry heart. By lowering the body temperature, the oxygen needs of the tissues were reduced, and the veins leading to the heart could then be safely clamped for a short time, cutting off circulation.
The balloon of cold water worked by cooling a large volume of blood vessels in the abdomen. Recovery could be aided by circulating warm water through the balloon. Patients could not be cooled below 28 °C and the period of circulatory arrest could not exceed 10 minutes, which left about 8 minutes for running repairs inside the heart.
At a maximum of 8 minutes we can only presume that quite often one swallow doth not a recovery make. Now on to matters of great medical import. Tickling for instance…
It takes two
Tickling is a serious business. In the early 1970s, psychologists from both Oxford and Sheffield tried to find out just why tickling oneself isn’t funny. In a paper published in the journal Nature, they suggested that it wasn’t quite as simple as o
ne might have expected.
Charles Darwin was intrigued by the ineffectiveness of the self-administered tickle, but his interest was mainly in the biological value of ticklishness and laughter. The authors of the Nature paper (L. Weiskrantz and C. Darlington of Oxford, and J. Elliott of Sheffield), on the other hand, set out to analyse what mechanisms are actually involved. To do this they lined up 30 intrepid volunteers brave enough to be stimulated by a Heath Robinson-type tickle apparatus.
Three types of tickle were administered: the first by an experimenter, the tickled subject remaining passive; the next was self-administered by the subject who moved the handle of the tickle apparatus; the third was done by an experimenter, but with the tickled subject’s hand on the handle. The idea of this last method was to see if there was any effect on the ticklishness when the subject went through the motion of tickling but was not actually in command.
Sure enough, the efficacy of tickling was greatest when done by someone else, least when self-administered, and intermediate when the subject participated in arm movements. Clearly, this participation helped eliminate ticklishness, but not completely. Weiskrantz and his colleagues thought there might be two factors at play in self-tickling. One was a sort of negative feedback from the arm movements doing the tickling (or going through the motions, as in the experiment). The other was the ‘command signal’ generated when the subject decided to tickle himself.
Spectacularly smart
It was a once-prevalent myth that if you wore spectacles when you were 8 years old, you were going to develop phenomenal brainpower. No substantiation of the notion was ever forthcoming, yet an experiment in 1971 by Michael Argyle and R. McHenry of the Institute of Experimental Psychology, Oxford, confirmed the fact that many people still felt spectacle wearers were more intelligent than non-wearers.
The two researchers made videotapes of performers both wearing and not wearing glasses. They presented them to the audience either as a static 15-second picture or as a video clip in which performers talked on a basic, non-intellectual topic—how they were going to spend their holidays—for 5 minutes. Judges rated the spectacle wearers 12 points higher in IQ than the non-wearers, the question relating to IQ being buried in a mass of other camouflaging ones. This IQ ‘difference’, however, only existed when the viewers looked at wearers in static photographs. Once the ‘spectacles’ opened their mouths the magical effects disappeared. No real IQ differences existed.
And then there’s the doctor who looks at the intestines of bad guys.
He’s got guts
Francesco Aragona of the University of Messina in Sicily spent 30 years dissecting the victims of shoot-outs between mafiosos. In 1989, he said he could help police tell the difference between culprits and innocent bystanders just by looking at internal organs. In the gangsters, these were ulcerated, enlarged and otherwise showing signs of extreme stress. Aragona’s Roman predecessors predicted the future by looking at the organs of slaughtered animals. Were they on to something?
Of course, in the end, all medical science just boils down to a single, ultimate quest; the search for the perfect hangover cure. But that couldn’t be left to fancy-dan professors. In 1999 New Scientist got experimental itself and sent its own team of volunteers into action.
Desperate remedies
All but the saintliest of us have had them. Hangovers approaching near-death experiences. Raging thirst, thumping headache, wobbly limbs and nausea. Worse, there’s no magic bullet to make us instantly well. Thousands of years after the first ‘morning after the night before’, we can send people to the Moon and create computers of mind-numbing power, yet we are still far away from a science-based, experimentally verified hangover cure. Why? The simple answer is that in the eyes of most governments, doctors and industries, a hangover cure would trigger a catastrophic upsurge in alcohol abuse, tempting mild drinkers to overindulge. Hangovers are, after all, nature’s way of saying ‘don’t do this to yourself’.
So don’t expect to find the magic bullet nestling anywhere in the scientific literature. The research hasn’t been done nor is it ever likely to be done. But there is plenty of research on what alcohol does to the body. Armed with this knowledge, many alcohol researchers have speculated about the best hangover remedies.
In the interests of easing global pain, New Scientist decided to test some of the top tips to emerge from this research. A panel of a dozen or so intrepid volunteers agreed to overindulge on four successive weekends, trying a different ‘cure’ each time. The morning after, they recorded how lousy they felt by scoring a range of symptoms. Because dehydration is the most well-documented consequence of drinking, whichever concoction they tried, the volunteers drank a pint or so of water before going to bed.
And the truth of the matter? Overall, nothing worked 100 per cent of the time, highlighting just how complex hangovers are. ‘Hangovers are multifactorial,’ said Thomas Gilg, an alcohol researcher at the University of Munich’s department of forensic chemistry. ‘If you smoke, or haven’t had enough sleep, that can affect the hangover, too.’
So, we will have to keep waiting for that elusive magic bullet. Most sore heads will have to be soothed with the traditional remedies our researchers tried—plenty of water before bed, something sugary, plus cysteine-rich foods such as eggs, which help mop up any damaging chemicals. To take the edge off headaches, pop an aspirin or ibuprofen before bed. But avoid paracetamol, known in the US as acetaminophen, which according to the US Food and Drug Administration amplifies alcohol’s damaging effect on the liver.
The more adventurous could probably do worse than consider a combination of all the cures our volunteers tested—water, sports drinks, cysteine and, for real emergencies, a vodka-based pick-me-up. ‘It’s a bit of folk medicine, but it would probably do you no harm,’ said Waltenbaugh. But the best cure, of course, is not to drink at all. Cheers!
5 Blunders—big and small
‘To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’ So observed Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. It’s certain that neither the fictional Mr Worthing nor the equally fictional Lady Bracknell had ever met Stephen Myers, who worked with the Large Electron Positron Collider in Geneva. But presumably he’d empathise with the plight of Mr Worthing. After all it wasn’t just one, but two carelessly lost empty bottles of beer that caused his collider to, er, fail to collide after its very expensive upgrade.
Oh, it’s easy to mock, of course. Which is probably why we are devoting a whole chapter to the art. But if you let scientists do exactly what they want, sometimes things are going to go awry. And it’s not just discarded beer bottles left inside expensive scientific equipment that cause problems. Not knowing the difference between imperial and metric units can have serious consequences for your spacecraft and a liking for the taste of lead seemingly does not help you quit smoking.
While we’re on the subject of mockery, it is instructive to recall that the art has a long history in the field of science. Back in the 1890s, before the nature of electricity was truly understood, an aspiring student was sitting an oral exam at Oxford University. He was asked if he knew what electricity was. ‘I’m sure I’ve learnt what it is,’ stuttered the nervous candidate, ‘but now I’ve forgotten.’ ‘How very unfortunate,’ replied the unimpressed examiner. ‘Only two people have known what electricity is, the Author of the Universe and yourself. And now one of them has forgotten.’ Clearly the examiner was being a little unfair on his minion, which is perhaps what we’ll be accused of doing with this trawl through the pitfalls of any number of keen but ultimately unfortunate scientific endeavours.
However, a charge of ‘being a little unfair’ cannot be levelled at us when we consider the case of Pierre Pumpille, who provides one of the stories that fail to make it into this chapter. In a feature on the excesses that men will go to in order to prove their machismo, New Scientist told the story of the headstrong Frenchman who h
ad shunted a stationary car a distance of 2 feet by headbutting it. ‘Women thought I was a god,’ he explained from his hospital bed. We disagree, and despite using his head in a way that scientists usually do not in order to prove his point, he fails to make the grade. For while stupid, his research cannot be declared a ‘blunder’. He actually meant to headbutt the car.
We have also avoided mention of Pumpille’s fellow countryman Michael Fournier in this chapter. Monsieur Fournier has for many years been attempting to beat the record for the highest freefall parachute jump. His latest mishap occurred in 2008 when the balloon that was set to carry him to the world altitude record departed without him. That might, in most people’s books, constitute a strong case for inclusion in this chapter, but we are not so presumptuous. We are going to wait until the next edition before we pass judgement, by which time we are certain Michael will have achieved his lofty aim.
Scientists sometimes seem so clever that it’s perhaps more than just schadenfreude that makes us want to see them taken down a peg or two. Fortunately, there are plenty of examples of their failures around to make us feel a little better about ourselves. Interestingly, rocket science, that clichéd branch of all that is über-brainy, seems to suffer more than its fair share of calamities.
The trouble with rockets