Elephants on Acid

by Alex Boese

  Historians believe that Weinhold performed this experiment, but the consensus is that he lied about the results. After all, a kitten lacking a brain and spinal column is not going to dance around a room, no matter how much electricity you pump into it. As medical historian Max Neuburger delicately put it, “His experiments illustrate the fantasy of his thinking and observations.”

  Weinhold probably would have preferred to use a human corpse instead of a kitten, but in 1804 German authorities had banned the further use of human bodies in galvanic experiments. The public, it seemed, had lost its stomach for such postmortem grotesqueries. Thus restricted, Weinhold focused his efforts on animals. He was willing to break the laws of nature, but not of the German state.

  Weinhold’s personal life matched the strangeness of his experiment. His contemporaries described him as peculiarly unattractive. His long arms and legs contrasted with his small head, and his voice sounded feminine. He had no beard. He made many enemies on account of his campaign to eliminate poverty by forcibly infibulating indigent men—infibulate meaning to sew the foreskin shut. Whether this crusade was in any way inspired by the deformity of his own genitals, a condition discovered by a medical examiner after his death, is not known. A modern biographer of his noted, “Weinhold seems to have cared little for what others thought about him, and he was not afraid to propose ideas that would cause large segments of the population to despise or detest him.”

  If ever there was a real-life Dr. Frankenstein, it was Weinhold. But did he actually serve as a model for Shelley’s character? Historians have speculated about this possibility, but it is unlikely. For one thing, Weinhold published his work in 1817, a year after Shelley began work on her novel.

  Perhaps horror fans should be thankful that Shelley wasn’t aware of Weinhold. Otherwise she might have been tempted to change her novel to fit his story. Imagine a mob of villagers armed with pitchforks and torches chasing after a headless zombie kitten. It just wouldn’t have been the same.

  Weinhold, K. A. (1817). Versuche über das Leben und seine, Grundkräfte, auf dem Wege der experimental-Physiologie. Magdeburg: Creutz.

  The Electrical Acari

  “Life! I have created life!” Andrew Crosse gazed down at the small white insects crawling in the liquid-filled basin. Then he threw back his head and laughed maniacally.

  In a Hollywood version of history, that would have been Crosse’s reaction to the unusual discovery he made in 1836. But in real life his reaction was probably more along the lines of, “I say, how astonishing.”

  Crosse was a Victorian gentleman who lived in a secluded mansion in rural Somerset, England. From an early age he had been fascinated by electrical phenomena, an interest his family fortune allowed him to indulge. He filled his home with all manner of electrical experiments, including more than a mile of copper wire strung between the trees on his estate to capture the power of lightning. His superstitious neighbors, seeing the lightning crackle around the wires and hearing the sharp snap and bang of electric batteries discharging, suspected he was completely mad.

  Among his experiments was an attempt to unite the sciences of geology and galvanism by using electrical current to induce the growth of quartz crystals. In his music room he fashioned a device that continuously dripped an acidic solution over an electrified stone. Crosse hoped crystals would form on the stone, but this never happened. What happened instead was much stranger. His own words tell the story well:

  On the fourteenth day from the commencement of this experiment I observed through a lens a few small whitish excrescences or nipples, projecting from about the middle of the electrified stone. On the eighteenth day these projections enlarged, and struck out seven or eight filaments, each of them longer than the hemisphere on which they grew. On the twenty-sixth day these appearances assumed the form of a perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail. Till this period I had no notion that these appearances were other than an incipient mineral formation. On the twenty-eighth day these little creatures moved their legs. I must now say that I was not a little astonished. After a few days they detached themselves from the stone, and moved about at pleasure.

  For weeks Crosse watched perplexed as insects multiplied and squirmed around his experiment until they numbered in the hundreds. He repeated the experiment and got the same result—more insects. But being the respectable Englishman that he was, he didn’t want to leap to conclusions. Specifically, he hesitated to claim that his experiment had somehow brought forth a new form of life. But a visiting publisher got wind of what had happened and claimed this for him, announcing the news in the local paper under the headline EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIMENT. The media dubbed the insects Acarus crossii, in his honor.

  Once word of the experiment got out, Crosse’s neighbors decided he was not only mad, but quite possibly a devil worshipper as well. In the ensuing months he received numerous death threats. He was called a Frankenstein and a “reviler of our holy religion.” Local farmers claimed his insects had escaped and were ravaging their crops, and a priest performed an exorcism on the hill above his house.

  Ironically, though his electrical-insect experiments occurred long after the publication of Shelley’s novel, it is possible that Crosse was the original role model for the character of Victor Frankenstein. Twenty-two years earlier, in 1814, he had delivered a lecture in London on “Electricity and the Elements.” He described the network of wires strung around his country estate that allowed him to conduct bolts of lightning into his house. Sitting in the audience was a young Mary Shelley. His speech reportedly made a great impression on her.

  Meanwhile, in 1836, the British scientific community didn’t know what to make of Crosse’s discovery. A few, such as Cambridge geology professor Adam Sedgwick, angrily denounced it. But others were intrigued. The surgeon William Henry Weekes repeated the experiment, and after a year claimed to have obtained “five perfect insects.” But four other researchers—John George Children, Golding Bird, Henry Noad, and Alfred Smee—repeated it and obtained nothing. Likewise, the esteemed biologist Richard Owen examined the insects and pronounced them nothing more than common cheese mites. That judgment pretty much ended the debate over the electrical Acarus crossii. They were downgraded from an extraordinary discovery to a common pest.

  More than one hundred years later, in 1953, two researchers at the University of Chicago performed an experiment in a similar vein. Stanley Miller and Harold Urey combined water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a flask, and subjected this chemical brew to periodic electrical discharges. Their goal was to mimic the atmospheric conditions thought to exist on the primitive earth, to see whether the building blocks of life would emerge. They did. Within a week Miller and Urey found high concentrations of organic compounds, including many of the amino acids that form proteins in living cells. However, they reported no sign of cheese mites. Andrew Crosse would have been disappointed.

  Crosse, A. (1841). “Description of some experiments made with the voltaic battery . . . for the purpose of producing crystals; in the process of which experiments certain insects constantly appeared.” Transactions and Proceedings of the London Electrical Society 1: 10–16.

  Severed Heads—an Abbreviated History

  The weighted blade of the guillotine crashes down and with a whack severs the neck. Another head rolls into the executioner’s basket.

  The French Revolution and the decades following it were productive years for the guillotine. But as the heads piled higher, a disturbing question formed in the minds of onlookers. Did those decapitated heads retain consciousness for any length of time? Were they aware of what had happened to them? Amateur researchers tried yelling at the heads to see whether they could get a response, but such efforts proved futile. However, they did inspire men of science to ponder a more far-reaching question: Could a head be made to survive isolated from the body? Having thought of the question, they were determined to find an answer.

  In 1812 the French physiologis
t Julian Jean Cesar Legallois speculated that an isolated head might survive if provided with a supply of blood, but it wasn’t until 1857 that his theory was put to the test. Dr. Charles Édouard Brown-Séquard lopped off the head of a dog, drained its blood, and after ten minutes injected fresh blood back into the arteries. Soon, he reported, the severed head stirred to life, displaying what appeared to be voluntary movements in the eyes and face. This continued for a few minutes until the head once again died, accompanied by “tremors of anguish.”

  Isolated-head research continued with Dr. Jean-Baptiste Vincent Laborde, a man whose brain weighed exactly 1,234 grams. We know this because Laborde was a member of the colorfully named Society of Mutual Autopsy. This society was a social club with one purpose—dissecting one another’s brains. Thankfully, the group waited until a member died of natural causes to perform the dissection. Laborde’s brain caused a bit of gossip because it turned out to be somewhat light. (The average brain weighs approximately three pounds, or 1,360 grams.) Had he just been posing as an intellectual heavyweight all those years? His friends, eager to preserve his reputation, insisted his brain must have shriveled because of old age.

  In 1884, long before his gray matter was removed and weighed, Laborde became the first scientist to perfuse a severed human head with blood. The head belonged to a murderer named Campi (nineteenth-century newspapers tended to refer to all criminals by single names, like modern-day pop stars) and came courtesy of the French authorities. The results were disappointing—nothing much happened, a fact Laborde blamed on the hour-long delay between Campi’s execution and the delivery of his head to the lab. But according to rumor, Campi’s skin was later removed and used to bind the copies of his postmortem examination. So the experiment wasn’t a total loss.

  Laborde subsequently conducted a more successful trial on the murderer Gagny, whose head he received only seven minutes after execution. By the eighteen-minute mark he connected Gagny’s carotid artery to the corresponding artery of a still-living dog, and blood was pumping through it. Laborde reported that the facial muscles contracted, as though the man were still alive, while the jaw snapped violently shut. But unfortunately (or fortunately for Gagny), no signs of consciousness appeared.

  Around the same time, one of Laborde’s colleagues, Paul Loye, attempted to settle the debate about postguillotine consciousness by erecting a guillotine in the offices of the Sorbonne and using it to decapitate hundreds of dogs. He assembled a second-by-second chronology of the canine response to sudden head loss, a subject surely never again to be studied as thoroughly. He concluded that the guillotine caused almost instantaneous loss of consciousness, although signs of facial agitation, including dilation of the nostrils and opening and closing of the mouth in what resembled a yawn, persisted for up to two minutes.

  After Laborde, a handful of doctors pursued similar research, but for a real breakthrough in severed-head studies the world had to wait until the late 1920s. That’s when Soviet physician Sergei Brukhonenko succeeded in keeping the isolated head of a dog alive for over three hours. What made this possible was the use of anticoagulant drugs and a primitive heart-lung machine developed by Brukhonenko. He called it an autojector.

  Brukhonenko displayed one of his living dog heads in 1928 before an international audience of scientists at the Third Congress of Physiologists of the USSR. As part of the demonstration, he showed that the severed head reacted to a variety of stimuli. It flinched at loud noises such as a hammer banging on the table beside it. The pupils contracted when light was shone in them. It licked citric acid off its lips. And it even swallowed a piece of cheese, which promptly popped out the esophageal tube on the other end.

  Brukhonenko’s severed dog heads became the talk of Europe. The playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote a letter to the Berliner Tageblatt suggesting, apparently quite seriously, that Brukhonenko’s technique be used to extend the life of scientists suffering from terminal disease. He mused, “I am even tempted to have my own head cut off so that I can continue to dictate plays and books without being bothered by illness, without having to dress and undress, without having to eat, without having anything else to do other than to produce masterpieces of dramatic art and literature.” He also imagined doctors removing professors’ failing bodies and allowing their brains to live on as pure intellect. An entire university, he proposed, could be chaired by bodiless heads.

  Shaw’s idea is an intriguing one. Faculty housing certainly wouldn’t be a problem at such an institution. And it would give new meaning to “going to the head of the class.”

  Brukhonenko, S. S., & S. Tchetchuline (1929). Expériences avec la tête isolée du chien. Journal de physiologie et de pathologie générale 27 (1): 31–45.

  Human-Ape Hybrid

  Dr. Il’ya Ivanov was frustrated. He believed his research was of great, possibly world-shaking, significance. If successful it would make him one of the most famous men in the world. And yet here he was, thousands of miles from European civilization, reduced to sneaking around a West African research station like a criminal, hiding his intentions from the suspicious native staff. Only his son knew his true purpose. Together they planned to create a new kind of creature—a human-ape hybrid.

  Early in the morning of February 28, 1927, the father-and-son team told the staff they would be inspecting two female chimps, Babette and Syvette, for medical treatment. They knew they didn’t have a lot of time. If the staff realized what they were actually doing, Ivanov wrote in his notebook, he and his son would face “very unpleasant consequences.” So, much to his displeasure, the insemination would have to be done fast. His son carried a gun in his pocket, in case the chimps fought back.

  Ivanov and his son subdued the chimps and prepared to place human sperm inside the uteri of the animals. They used the tools of artificial insemination developed by the elder Ivanov in Russia, where his years of research had revolutionized the field of veterinary reproductive biology and had set the stage for the rise of large-scale stud farming there. However, the procedure went badly. Feeling rushed, Ivanov failed to fully insert the sperm. He knew there was little chance of success.

  For many decades Ivanov’s gruesome hybridization experiments remained little known in the West. There were rumors, but few concrete details. Ivanov never published his findings. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of Russian archives that details finally emerged.

  The militantly secular Soviet government sponsored Ivanov’s research, believing that a successful human-ape hybrid would have, if nothing else, enormous symbolic significance. This was less than two years after the Scopes Monkey Trial had demonstrated the hostility with which many Christian fundamentalists in the United States greeted any suggestion of an evolutionary relationship between man and apes. The pro-Darwin, Marxist leaders of the Soviet Union rubbed their hands together with glee at the thought of presenting the fundamentalists with a “human-zee.”

  But Ivanov received aid from other sources as well. The French Institut Pasteur, fully aware of his plan, provided him with access to their West Guinea research facility, hopeful that his work would contribute to scientific understanding of the origins of man.

  Later in 1927, Ivanov made one more attempt to impregnate a female chimp with human sperm, but this third try proved no more successful than the first two. He knew from his work with livestock that five or six inseminations per animal provided the optimal chance of success, but social conditions at the research facility didn’t allow him that luxury. None of the chimps ever showed signs of pregnancy.

  Faced with failure, Ivanov turned to Plan B—impregnate human women with ape sperm. He made inquiries at a Congo hospital about the possibility of inseminating female patients. He suggested it would be prudent to do so without the women’s knowledge. His request was denied. Disheartened, and complaining about Africa’s “backward” culture, he returned to the Soviet Union, where he hoped to continue his experiments.

  He brought back a male
orangutan named Tarzan to serve as the sperm donor. He also revised his plan, deciding to seek out female volunteers. Remarkably, he got a few. One woman cheerily wrote to him that she was willing to surrender her body to science because “I don’t see any sense in my further existence.” Once again, though, fortune did not favor Ivanov. Tarzan died of a brain hemorrhage in 1929 before the experiment could start, leaving Ivanov apeless. The next year Ivanov was swept up in one of Stalin’s political purges and shipped off to a prison camp. He was released two years later, but died soon thereafter. This, as far as we know, brought an end to his research program.

  Ivanov’s experiments mark a low point in the history of biological research. But they raise an interesting question. Could he have succeeded? Is a human-ape hybrid possible?

  Humans are very closely related to other primate species, chimpanzees in particular. We share 99.4 percent of our DNA with them. The phrase “human-ape hybrid” is itself misleading, since humans are, in fact, a species of African ape. A May 2006 study published in Nature speculated that after humans split from chimps between five and seven million years ago, human evolution may have been influenced by continued interbreeding with chimpanzees. Many biologists see no reason why a human-chimp match would not still be possible, though the topic remains controversial.

  And just in case you’re curious: No, Ivanov did not use his own sperm during the 1927 experiments. The identity of that proud father-to-be remains unknown. Ivanov only identified him as “a man whose age isn’t exactly known. At least, not older than thirty.”