Like oceanography, neurology was in its infancy in the 1950s, the brain as uncharted and unexplored as the ocean depths. Lilly’s training in neurophysiology, combined with his aptitude for electronic engineering, placed him in the front ranks of neuroscientists who were parsing the boundaries separating the brain, the mind, and the psyche. To prepare himself for what he called his “implorations” of human consciousness, Lilly underwent psychoanalysis and earned his certification as a psychoanalyst.
During a decade of neurological research at the National Institutes of Health, Lilly created the first atlas of the primate central nervous system. While Munk was deconstructing ocean wave patterns, Lilly was inventing the first electrical waveform that could stimulate brain cells. He also engineered a narrow-gauge stainless-steel sleeve that could penetrate a primate skull without anesthesia. By inserting a thin tungsten electrode through this guide, Lilly could stimulate the deep structures of the brain—specifically, the brain of the macaque monkey, Lilly’s animal model for cortical mapping.
Lilly strapped the monkey into a chair and clamped its head securely in place. With a single strike of a claw hammer, he pounded the sleeve guide through the monkey’s skull, and then lowered the tungsten electrode through the cortex and into the deeper regions of the brain. Once the electrode was in place, Lilly delivered an electric pulse to the “primitive” areas controlling pleasure and pain, evoking telltale expressions of excitement or fear. While the image of a monkey with hundreds of wires protruding from his skull was ghoulish in the extreme, Lilly took pride in how little pain and risk of infection his insertion technique caused.
Within two years, he had completed a blueprint of the neural pathways of pleasure, pain, sex, hunger, thirst, aggression, and fear in the primate brain. But Lilly was frustrated by his finding that the monkey brain seemed to be nothing more than a fuse box of on-off switches for pleasure and pain. What good was mapping the primate brain, he wondered, if it didn’t reveal the secrets of consciousness that lay hidden inside the folds of its gray matter? Lilly was eager to explore a more expansive brainscape.
When Lilly arrived at Marineland in the spring of 1957, he wasn’t interested in dolphins’ prodigious talent for echolocation. He’ d come in search of a big-brained mammal whose cortex he could chart with the same precision that he’ d applied to the brains of cats, rabbits, and monkeys. At a time when scientists considered brain weight to be the primary measure of intelligence, the dolphin appeared to be an Einstein-like species. Compared to the paltry mass of a macaque monkey’s three-ounce brain, the bottlenose dolphin’s gray matter weighed almost four pounds—heavier than a human brain and essentially equivalent to human brain weight in relation to total body mass. The biggest-brained mammal of all, the sperm whale, boasted a brain weight of nearly 20 pounds. But there were no captive sperm whales available for experimentation.
The first several dolphins that Lilly anesthetized drowned when the respirator he designed malfunctioned.5 After refining his sleeve-guide technology to penetrate a nonanesthetized dolphin skull, Lilly eventually succeeded in implanting an electrode into a dolphin’s deep brain. As he gradually increased the electrical current to the probe, the animal began vocalizing in what Lilly called “a dolphinese fashion.” Deeper penetrations and increased voltage evoked “more exuberant vocalizing than ever I’ d heard before. Whistles, buzzings, raspings, barks, and Bronx cheer–like noises were emitted . . . One time, he mimicked my speaking voice so well that my wife laughed out loud, and he copied her laughter.”
Lilly constructed a lever that the dolphin could push with its rostrum to activate the electrical charge itself. After pushing the lever faster and faster, the dolphin went into an epileptic seizure and died. Lilly later reported, “This death made us very sad, and we went through a period of mourning for this delightful animal . . . Despite the disappointment and sadness, we had to go on with the research: our responsibilities lie with finding the truth.”
The “truth” Lilly uncovered in the course of his experiments was that dolphins not only learned the reward response much faster than his monkey subjects. They were also able, when properly stimulated, to mimic human speech—a response never evoked in his macaques, and to which Lilly assigned great significance. Lilly left Marineland convinced that he had tapped into the whispering chamber of interspecies communication. Listening to the whistles, laughs, and barks of the electrically neurostimulated dolphin, he heard a voice calling to him across what he termed the “air-water boundary” separating humans from their cetacean cousins. Lilly had come to Marineland in search of a big brain of humanlike complexity. What he discovered was “a mind in the waters.”6
Lilly presented his findings at the 1958 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco. Just six months after the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the first satellite, Sputnik, as the superpowers embarked on outer-space exploration, Lilly chose this gathering of consummate inner-space voyagers as the first audience for his proclamation that dolphins offered us a gateway to what he termed “cosmic consciousness.”
Sputnik had fixed everyone’s sights on the sky and on the unseen world of outer space. For some, it raised the specter of Soviet missiles raining down from the heavens. For others, it heralded the opening of a new age of space exploration and possible contact with extraterrestrials. The science-fiction realm of interplanetary travel and first contact with extraterrestrials was suddenly being presented as scientific possibility on the covers of newsweeklies—and from the podiums of scientific conferences.
As he rose to make his predinner address, Lilly felt like an explorer reporting back to the members of a geographical society. Dolphins, he began, were true extraterrestrials from our unexplored oceans and from the black lagoon of our untapped consciousness. Unlike our primate cousins, they didn’t look human. But their brain was human sized, and their convoluted frontal cortex was ripe with language and communication hardware that dwarfed our own. Might not a capacity for language, he proposed, indicate that dolphins were also endowed with logic, thought, and a sense of self—perhaps even a soul?
If we are ever going to communicate with a nonhuman species of this planet, the dolphin is probably our best present gamble . . . Before our man-in-space program becomes too successful, it may be wise to spend some time, talent, and money on research with dolphins; not only are they a large-brained species living their lives in a situation with attenuated effects of gravity, but they may be a group with whom we can learn basic techniques of communicating with really alien intelligent life forms.
His San Francisco speech marked Lilly’s debut in the popular press, a forum that would outlast his tenure as a neuroscientist. Newspaper editors across the country were quick to translate Dr. Lilly’s pronouncements into tabloid headlines: “Scientist Has Shaggy Dolphin Tale.” “Psychiatrist Wants to Make Dolphins Talk.” “Shock-Happy Porpoise Laughs with Scientist . . . Dies.”
Only a month after making a big splash at the San Francisco convention, Lilly landed a contract to write a book about his work with dolphins. When Doubleday published Man and Dolphin in 1961, it inspired a generation of young marine mammal researchers and military engineers, while providing the Age of Aquarius with its first aquatic emblem of peace, love, and understanding. Man and Dolphin proclaimed, “Within the next decade or two, the human species will establish communications with another species: nonhuman, alien, possibly extraterrestrial, more probably marine.”
In hopes of speeding the advent of interspecies dialogue, Lilly began promoting what his grant proposals described as “the world’s first laboratory devoted to the study of the intellectual capacities of the small, toothed whales.” He conceived of an aquatic research center—far removed from the sterile confines of academic labs and marine parks—where he could bridge both the “air-water boundary” and the linguistic divide separating mankind from dolphins.
By 1963, Lilly had raised the money to launch his Communications Research
Institute in the Virgin Islands. Lilly’s first funder was the Office of Naval Research, which sent a Navy demolition team to Saint Thomas to blast a dolphin cove out of a rock and coral promontory overlooking Nazareth Bay. His other funding came from the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Once installed at his Virgin Islands research center, Lilly enjoyed his first flush of mass media celebrity. He was featured in a Life magazine photo-essay alongside his dolphins, interviewed on The Tonight Show by host Jack Paar, and courted by the literati and glitterati of the day, many of whom traveled to Saint Thomas to visit his now-famous dolphins. To shore up the linguistic credentials of his communication research, Lilly recruited British anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, and semiotician Gregory Bateson from Stanford University to help deconstruct dolphinese.
During this same period, Lilly consulted with producer Ivan Tors on a dolphin movie shot mostly at the newly opened Miami Seaquarium. When it was released in 1963, MGM’s Flipper—and the TV series of the same name that ran from 1964 to 1967—cemented the dolphin’s status as a boy’s best friend. With Flipper, the dolphin completed its redemptive journey from nuisance “herring hog,” to adored performer, to neoclassical helpmate.
In 1964 producer Ivan Tors’ wife turned Lilly on to LSD. After an injection of 100 milligrams, Lilly found himself hot-wired to a party line of Guides and Beings that would redirect the trajectory of his dolphin research and his career as a New Age apostle. When Lilly began including LSD in the research protocols for his NIH grant proposals, nobody inside the federal bureaucracy raised any objections. At the time, LSD was still legal and widely used in research. Since the 1950s, the CIA had deployed LSD in its clandestine Project Artichoke as an interrogation tool and espionage countermeasure. And in the early 1960s, researchers were investigating the therapeutic potential of LSD and other hallucinogens as a treatment for alcoholism and other social ills.7 During the same period, the Navy and other federal agencies were funding communication research involving gorillas, dogs, and fish dosed with LSD.
During his years at NIH, Lilly had invented the isolation tank to study the effects of sensory deprivation on the human brain and consciousness.8 To simulate the buoyant environment in which dolphin consciousness had evolved, Lilly built an isolation tank and suspended it over a dolphin pool in Saint Thomas. When he dosed both his dolphins and himself with LSD, Lilly soon found that ingesting hallucinogens both expanded and distorted the traditional boundaries of scientific inquiry. “During a session in an isolation tank constructed over a pool where dolphins were swimming,” Lilly wrote, “I participated in a conversation between dolphins. It drove me crazy, there was too much information, they communicated so fast.”
Another notable experiment studied the effect of long-term cohabitation of a male dolphin and a young female researcher in a flooded compartment. For months on end, the young woman spent all her waking hours in the water interacting with the dolphin and slept in a hammock suspended just above the pool. With Lilly’s encouragement, her interactions included responding to the dolphin’s sexual overtures with an underwater hand job.9
As news of Lilly’s unconventional experimentation bubbled up from the Virgin Islands, the marine mammal research community began pushing back. Thanks to ONR’s support of basic research, marine mammalogy was finally gaining traction as a bona fide scientific discipline. The First International Symposium on Cetacean Research convened in Washington, DC, in 1963. The next year marked the inaugural “Conference on Biological Sonar and Diving Mammals” at the Stanford Research Institute. Navy-contracted researchers were successfully applying metrics to dolphin biosonar and hydrodynamics, and marine mammalogy courses were now being taught as part of standard marine biology curricula. By throwing scientific method to the winds, they complained, Lilly undercut his colleagues who were working inside rigorous research protocols. Where, they asked, were the data to support his grandiose claims of interspecies communication? Instead of submitting his research to peer review for publication in serious journals, Lilly’s wild pronouncements appeared in the boldfaced headlines of tabloids.
When Lilly began adding ketamine, another powerful psychotropic drug, to his LSD regimen, he went off the deep end—at least as far as his institutional funders were concerned. ONR repossessed the advanced computers they’ d loaned him. His five-year National Science Foundation grant was in danger of being revoked. His second marriage—to the former wife of a psychiatrist he’ d met at the San Francisco conference—was foundering. In 1968 Lilly abruptly denounced captive dolphin research, proclaiming to the press that his dolphins had “deprogrammed” him. He released his animals into the Caribbean and walked away from his institute. Soon he had relocated to California, where he preached the gospel of better living through chemistry and Zen Buddhism.10
Lilly continued to write and publish his metaphysical musings for a loyal following of New Age enthusiasts. But he remained persona non grata among his former peers in the research community. While some grudgingly acknowledged his groundbreaking “early work” in neurology and cetology, most marine mammalogists considered Lilly an embarrassment who had undermined the credibility of their fledgling discipline.
Despite the opprobrium of his fellow cetologists, Lilly’s legacy resounded for decades on both sides of the emerging divide between the Navy and environmentalists. His exalted vision of cetacean intelligence and cosmic consciousness helped kindle the global movement to Save the Whales. Meanwhile, his speculations about the potential for deploying dolphins as wartime combatants would shape the Navy’s Marine Mammal Training Program for decades to come. These opposing waveforms, which Lilly set into motion in the 1960s, would collide on the beaches of the Bahamas, and in American courtrooms, 40 years later.
18
The Killer Turned Tame
DAY 30: APRIL 14, 2000
Smugglers Cove, San Juan Island, Washington
Ken Balcomb cut the engine on the skiff and let it glide to a stop. Just as he mounted a long lens onto his Nikon, a group of orcas emerged as if on cue from the early-morning fog that shrouded the still surface. Their black barreled bodies rose and fell in graceful arcs. He counted seven dorsal fins, one as tall as a man, knifing through the water.
The orcas passed within a stone’s throw of Balcomb’s boat, columns of mist whooshing out of their blowholes with each exhalation. They were part of J Pod, one of the three distinct pods of the Southern Resident Community of killer whales, or orcas, in greater Puget Sound. L Pod and K Pod were still migrating back from their winter hunting grounds on the Oregon and California coastlines. By June, they’ d all be assembled in the strait to intercept the Chinook salmon returning to spawn in the inland rivers. He knew each of the 88 killer whales intimately, having photographed them continuously over the past 25 summers of surveys. He knew every scratch and scar on their dorsal fins, every distinctive mark on the gray saddle patch behind their fins. He knew the family dynamics of each maternal group, the sound signature of their calls, their hunting habits, and favored prey. They were his extended family, and their annual reunion filled him with renewed hope each spring. Especially this spring.
Orca from L Pod breaching in Smuggler’s Cove, San Juan Island, Washington.
For the first time in a month, Balcomb felt like he could finally clear his head of all the turmoil back in the Bahamas. Smugglers Cove was his home port, the safe harbor he returned to each summer to continue his survey of the Southern Resident Community of orcas. His house, perched on the bluff above the beach, was the repository of his most prized possessions. Whale skulls adorned the walls. Bones and fossils lined the shelves. His photo archive of slides and prints going back decades filled a wall of cabinets on the lower floor. And outside, stashed in sheds around the yards, were a half dozen antique cars he’ d collected since his teens.
Balcomb had arrived the day before to open up the house and flush out the
boat engines in advance of the summer orca survey. No one else was up here yet—not the summer interns or staff, not the Earthwatch volunteers, not even the whale-watching boats that would be clogging the inland strait between San Juan Island and Victoria, Canada, by early summer. For a few more days, before he returned to Abaco to help Claridge shut down their winter station, it would be just him and J Pod.
The archipelago of the San Juan Islands, tucked into the extreme northwest corner of the country, was the perfect antipode to the Bahamas. Unlike the flat, dry, and ceaselessly sunny Caribbean, the San Juans were wet, green, and lush, their rocky shorelines swathed in cool clouds and fog. While the beaked whales were elusive deep divers, orcas hunted near the surface and close to shore, making them much easier to observe and photograph. And they had undeniable magnetism, drawing tens of thousands of whale watchers to the Pacific Northwest each summer. Balcomb’s various wives and girlfriends had come and gone over the many summers, along with the research assistants, the volunteers, and the project funders. But the orcas always came back. And they were always spectacular.
• • •
In 1976, following his Navy undercover assignment in Japan, Balcomb returned with Camille to the Northwest. They arrived on the scene just as an aroused public was rallying to the defense of the orcas of Puget Sound. A decadelong spree of wild captures—some of them grossly illegal and highly publicized—had depleted the local population of orcas. When the regional office of Fisheries solicited proposals for a census of the local whale community to assess its sustainability, as it was required to do under the recently passed Marine Mammal Protection Act, Balcomb applied for the contract.
The contagion of orca captures had begun, by accident, in 1964. The Vancouver Aquarium considered orcas too violent to display alongside its dolphins and performing seals. But it wanted to acknowledge their central importance to indigenous cultures. So the aquarium director, Dr. Murray Newman, commissioned a local sculptor to collect an orca specimen as a model for a life-sized courtyard sculpture. Whatever his talents as an artist, the sculptor was a lousy gunner. He set up a harpoon gun on Saturna Island, south of Vancouver, and managed to shoot a young orca at the base of its dorsal fin. He reeled in his catch and tried to finish it off with several rounds of rifle shots. But the animal wouldn’t die. Dr. Newman ordered the wounded animal towed back to the aquarium, using the line attached to the harpoon as a towline. He housed the animal in a concrete tank and named the first-ever captive orca “Moby Doll,” a revealing hybrid of Melville’s feared white whale and a child’s plaything.
War of the Whales: A True Story Page 24