Elephants on Acid

by Alex Boese

  Alex Boese

  Elephants on Acid

  The Most Outrageous Experiments from the History of Science

  PAN BOOKS

  Once again, to Beverley

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1. FRANKENSTEIN’S LAB

  2. SENSORAMA

  3. TOTAL RECALL

  4. BEDTIME STORIES

  5. ANIMAL TALES

  6. MATING BEHAVIOR

  7. OH, BABY!

  8. TOILET READING

  9. MAKING MR HYDE

  10. THE END

  Acknowledgments

  References

  INTRODUCTION

  In the following pages you will encounter elephants on LSD, two-headed dogs, zombie kittens, and racing cockroaches—to name just a few of the oddities that await you. Some of these oddities might shock you. Others might amuse you. Still others might make you think, “That can’t be true!” However, I assure you, unless stated otherwise, it’s all true. This is definitely a work of nonfiction.

  All of these strange phenomena share one thing in common: They have all played starring roles in scientific experiments. What you’re holding in your hands is a collection of the most bizarre experiments ever conducted. No knowledge of science is needed to appreciate them, just curiosity and an appreciation for the odd.

  The criteria for inclusion: Did an experiment make me chuckle, shake my head in disbelief, grimace with disgust, roll my eyes, or utter a shocked exclamation? Did it force me to wonder what kind of imagination, twisted or brilliant, could have dreamed up such a thing? If so, it went on the must include pile. As for the question of scientific worth, some of these experiments are brilliant examples of the scientific method; others are not. Mad scientists, geniuses, heroes, villains, and fools all rub shoulders here.

  I first encountered the bizarre-experiment genre in the mid-1990s as a graduate student studying the history of science at the University of California, San Diego. My formal studies focused on all the usual suspects—Darwin, Galileo, much fun to be a real job—out of studying another offbeat subject I encountered during the seven years I spent at grad school. That subject was hoaxes. Think Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast or the Piltdown Man. I created a Web site about hoaxes, museumofhoaxes.com, and authored two books on the topic.

  One day I was having lunch with my American editor, Stacia Decker. As we ate our meals, she told me about an unusual experiment involving a researcher who raced cockroaches. She had heard the story from her sister. Apparently, a scientist had built a little stadium, complete with stands in which other roaches could sit to watch the races. (You can read more about the roach stadium in chapter five.) Bizarre experiments would make a pretty good topic for a book, she suggested. It would, I agreed, as I thought back to all the material I had encountered in graduate school. The book you’re reading now is the result of that conversation.

  Shifting from hoaxes to bizarre experiments continued my interest in weird stuff. But I also came to realize that hoaxes and bizarre experiments share many features in common.

  An experiment starts when a researcher looks at a situation and thinks, What would happen if I changed one part of this? He or she performs an experimental manipulation and observes the results. A hoax proceeds in essentially the same way, except that the manipulation takes the form of an outrageous lie. Of course, as we’ll see throughout this book, the manipulations performed by researchers also frequently involve deception. Experimenters sometimes rehearse for days, perfecting the elaborate ruses they’re going to foist on their unsuspecting subjects. In these cases, the line separating hoaxes and experiments is almost indistinguishable.

  The big difference between hoaxes and bizarre experiments is that experimenters wrap themselves in the authority of science. They claim as their motive the desire to advance knowledge, whereas hoaxers are often just trying to get a laugh or perpetrate a scam. This sense of gravity is what lends bizarre experiments their particularly surreal quality. It’s that odd combination of apparent seriousness—white-lab-coat-wearing researchers toiling dispassionately to further the limits of knowledge—mixed with a hint of mischief, eccentricity, or, in some cases, seeming insanity, that provides the frisson of weirdness. To preserve this effect, I’ve avoided including any experiments conducted in a spirit of jest. All the research in the following pages was undertaken quite seriously. To me, this makes these stories all the more fascinating.

  Let me wrap up these introductory remarks by addressing a few questions that may occur to you as you read this book:

  Hey, Where are the Nazis?

  I wouldn’t mention this, except that the Nazi death-camp experiments are apparently what many people think of first when the subject of bizarre experiments comes up. At least, whenever I told people I was writing a book about bizarre experiments, the most common response I received was, “You mean, like the Nazi experiments?”

  I have not included any Nazi research in this book. First, because I didn’t intend the book to be a catalog of atrocities. Second, because I wanted to explore actual scientific research—not sadistic torture disguised as science, which is what I consider the Nazi “experiments” to be.

  How can one distinguish between the two? A couple of guidelines suggest themselves. First, once an experimenter starts purposefully killing people, his research instantly ceases to be legitimate. The second rule is more subtle: Genuine scientists publish their work. When a researcher submits his work for publication, he offers it up to the scrutiny of the scientific community. And when an established, respected journal accepts the submission, this suggests other scientists agree it deserves wider dissemination and consideration. It doesn’t mean the work is good science, or ethically justified—especially when judged by present-day standards. But it does mean that, for better or worse, the research cannot be denied a place in the history of science. Sometimes extenuating circumstances prevent a researcher from publishing his work, but 99 percent of the time, the publication rule is a useful guideline for identifying real science.

  Where’s my favorite bizarre experiment?

  Maybe there’s a bizarre experiment that’s a particular favorite of yours, and you discover that—uh-oh—it isn’t in here. It could happen. The book format does not permit unlimited space. Forced to pick and choose from a wide field of possibilities, I ultimately settled on ten themes, each of which became the focus of a chapter. If an experiment didn’t relate to one of these themes, I put it aside.

  How can I find out more about an experiment?

  I don’t dwell too long on any one subject. If all went as planned, this should make the book fast-paced and easy to read. I hope that people who wouldn’t normally read a book about science might enjoy these stories. I joke that it’s a toilet reader’s guide to science—which is why I have included chapter eight specifically for this audience.

  This format means that each vignette presents a condensed account of what is often a very complex subject. I’ve placed a single reference at the end of each vignette. This reminds you that the story you just read is real. I wasn’t making it up. But I’ve also provided additional references at the end of the book so that readers can pursue in greater depth any topic that whets their interest.

  One more comment, then I’ll let you get on to the good stuff—the experiments.

  Although this book may, at first glance, resemble a kind of circus parade of oddities (led by an elephant on acid, no less), my intention is not to trivialize scientific research or the experimenters who appear in the following pages. Quite the opposite. To me, what these stories are really about is people consumed by insatiable curiosity.

  The researchers who appear in the following pages—even the scariest and most eccentric
ones—all share one virtue. They all looked at the world around them, and instead of taking what they saw for granted, they asked questions. Their questions might have been bizarre. They might even have been stupid. But often the most brilliant discoveries come from people willing to ask what might seem, at the time, to be dumb questions.

  The danger of curiosity is that only in hindsight do people know whether it’s led them to brilliance or madness, or somewhere in between. Once you fall under its spell, you’re along for the ride, wherever it may take you.

  Like the researchers I was writing about, I, too, experienced a kind of obsessive curiosity as I worked on this book. I spent months in the library, pulling dusty old journals down from shelves, eagerly flipping from one page to the next, always looking for something new that would catch my eye. The other library patrons must have wondered who was that odd man, chuckling as he read decades-old copies of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Hopefully you’ll find these experiments as fascinating to read about as I found them to write about.

  —Alex

  April 2007

  CHAPTER ONE

  Frankenstein’s Lab

  Beakers bubble over. Electricity crackles. A man hunches over a laboratory bench, a crazed look in his eyes. This is the classic image of a mad scientist—a pale-skinned, sleep-deprived man toiling away in a lab full of strange machinery, delving into nature’s most forbidden and dreadful secrets. In the popular imagination, no one embodies this image better than Victor Frankenstein, the titular character of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. Gathering material from charnel houses and graves, he created an abomination—a living monster pieced together from the body parts of the dead. But he was just fictional, right? Surely no one has done that kind of stuff in real life. Well, perhaps no one has succeeded in creating an undead monster, but it hasn’t been for lack of trying. The history of science is full of researchers whose experiments have, like Frankenstein’s, gone well beyond conventional boundaries of morality and plunged them deep into the realms of the morbid and bizarre. These are the men—for some reason, they are all men—we meet in this chapter. Prepare yourself for zombie kittens, two-headed dogs, and other lab-spawned monstrosities.

  The Body Electric

  “Frog soup,” Madame Galvani wheezed. “Make me some frog soup.” She had been sick in bed for over a week, aching, feverish, and suffering from a wracking cough. The doctor had diagnosed consumption. Frog soup, he assured her, was just the thing to put her on the road to recovery. She asked her servants to prepare some, and soon they were scurrying about, gathering the ingredients. Painfully, she forced herself out of bed to supervise. It was just as well she did so. She found them milling around, searching for somewhere to lay out the frogs. “Put them on the table in my husband’s lab,” Madame Galvani instructed. A servant obediently carried the tray of skinned frogs into the lab and set it down next to one of the doctor’s electrical machines. He picked up a knife and began to carve a frog, but just then a spark flew from the machine and touched the knife. Instantly the legs of the frog twitched and spasmed. Madame Galvani, who had followed the servant in, gasped in surprise. “Luigi, come quick,” she cried. “The most remarkable thing has just happened.”

  In 1780 Luigi Galvani, an Italian professor of anatomy, discovered that a spark of electricity could cause the limbs of a dead frog to move. Nineteenth-century popularizers of science would later attribute this discovery to his wife’s desire for frog soup. Unfortunately, that part of the story is a legend. The reality is that Galvani was quite purposefully studying frogs, to understand how their muscles contracted, when a spark caused movement in a limb. However, the frog-soup story does have the virtue of restoring to his wife a greater role in the discovery than Galvani granted her—credit she probably deserves since she was a highly educated woman from a family of scientists. And Madame Galvani did develop consumption, and may well have been treated with frog soup. Unfortunately, the frog soup didn’t help her. She died in 1790.

  A year after his wife’s death, Galvani finally published an account of the experiment. It caused a sensation throughout Europe. Many believed Galvani had discovered the hidden secret of life. Other men of science rushed to repeat the experiment, but it didn’t take them long to grow bored with frogs and turn their attention to more interesting animals. What would happen, they wondered, if you wired up a human corpse?

  Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, took the initiative and pioneered the art of corpse reanimation. He promoted his publicity-shy uncle’s work by embarking on a tour of Europe in which he offered audiences the greatest (or, at least, most stomach-wrenching) show they’d ever seen—the electrification of a human body.

  Aldini’s most celebrated demonstration occurred in London on January 17, 1803, before an audience of the Royal College of Surgeons. The body of twenty-six-year-old George Forster, executed for the murder of his wife and child, was whisked straight from the gallows to Aldini and his waiting crowd. Aldini then attached parts of Forster’s body to the poles of a 120-plate copper-and-zinc battery.

  First the face. Aldini placed wires on the mouth and ear. The jaw muscles quivered, and the murderer’s features twisted in a rictus of pain. The left eye opened as if to gaze upon his torturer. Aldini played the body like a marionette, moving wires from one body part to another, making the back arch, the arms beat the table, and the lungs breathe in and out. For the grand finale he hooked one wire to the ear and plunged the other up the rectum. Forster’s corpse broke into a hideous dance. The London Times wrote of the scene: “The right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion. It appeared to the uninformed part of the bystanders as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to life.”

  A few days later Aldini continued his London tour with a show at a Dr. Pearson’s lecture room. There he unveiled the decapitated head of an ox and extended its tongue out of its mouth by means of a hook. Then he turned on the current. The tongue retracted so rapidly that it tore itself off the hook, while simultaneously “a loud noise issued from the mouth by the absorption of air, attended by violent contortions of the whole head and eyes.” Science had at last created an electric belching ox head.

  An even more spectacular demonstration occurred on November 4, 1818, in Glasgow, when Scottish chemist (and later industrial capitalist) Andrew Ure connected the corpse of the executed murderer Matthew Clydesdale to a massive 270-plate battery. Twice the power, twice the fun. When he linked the spinal marrow to the sciatic nerve, “every muscle in the body was immediately agitated with convulsive movements, resembling a violent shuddering from cold.” Connecting the phrenic nerve to the diaphragm provoked “full, nay, laborious breathing . . . The chest heaved, and fell; the belly was protruded, and again collapsed, with the relaxing and retiring diaphragm.” Finally Ure joined the poles of the battery to an exposed nerve in the forehead and to the heel: “Every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles, united their hideous expression in the murderer’s face, surpassing far the wildest representations of a Fuseli or a Kean.” Some spectators fainted, and others fled the lecture hall in terror.

  Men of science such as Aldini and Ure were confident galvanic electricity could do far more than provide a macabre puppet show. They promised that, under the right circumstances, it could restore life itself. Ure wrote of his experiment on the murderer Clydesdale, “There is a probability that life might have been restored. This event, however little desirable with a murderer, and perhaps contrary to law, would yet have been pardonable in one instance, as it would have been highly honourable and useful to science.”

  As late as the 1840s, English physicist William Sturgeon (inventor of the first electromagnets) described electrifying the bodies of four drowned young men in an attempt to bring them back to life. He failed but felt sure he would have succeeded had he only reached the scene sooner.

  Mary Shelley never indic
ated on whom she had based her character of Victor Frankenstein, but the experimental electrification of corpses was undeniably a source of inspiration for her. In the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, she wrote that the idea for the novel came to her in June 1816, after she overheard Lord Byron and Percy Shelley discussing recent galvanic experiments and speculating about the possibility that electricity could restore life to inanimate matter. That night she had a nightmare about a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.” And so, from a journey of discovery that began with a twitching frog, Victor Frankenstein and his monster were born.

  Aldini, G. (1803). An account of the galvanic experiments performed by John Aldini, . . . on the body of a malefactor executed at Newgate, Jan. 17, 1803. With a short view of some experiments which will be described in the author’s new work now in the press. London: Cuthell and Martin.

  Zombie Kitten

  During the early nineteenth century many researchers repeated the galvanic experiment of electrifying a corpse. But only one man claimed to have used the technique to restore life to the dead. His name was Karl August Weinhold.

  Weinhold published a work, Experiments on Life and its Primary Forces through the Use of Experimental Physiology, in which he detailed an experiment that, supposedly, succeeded in revivifying a decapitated kitten.

  The procedure went as follows. First, he took a three-week-old kitten and removed its head. Next, he extracted the spinal cord and completely emptied the hollow of the spinal column with a sponge attached to a screw probe. Finally, he filled the hollow with an amalgam of silver and zinc. The metals acted as a battery, generating an electric current that immediately brought the kitten to life—so he said. Its heart revived, and for a few minutes it pranced and hopped around the room. Weinhold wrote, “Hopping around was once again stimulated after the opening in the spinal column was closed. The animal jumped strongly before it completely wore down.” To modern readers, his creation may sound disturbingly like a mutant version of the Energizer Bunny.