Elephants on Acid (4 page)

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Utterly defeated, Cornish returned home and eked out a living selling a toothpaste of his own invention, Dr. Cornish’s Tooth Powder. He died of a stroke in 1963. The local paper noted in his obituary that while attending Berkeley High School as a teenager he had been the “first student ever known to wear sandals to school regularly.” It was a fitting tribute to a man who never quite fit in.

A hiker wandering through the forests outside of Moscow comes across a large, official-looking building. Peering over the fence surrounding it, he sees doctors and nurses walking dogs around a courtyard. Hardly a shocking sight. But a second look leaves the hiker puzzled, and scared. There’s something different about these animals. He sees a dog limp by with one leg a conspicuously different color than the rest of its body—as though the leg had been sewn on. And could it be? Surely not. But yes! One of the other dogs has two heads.

The Soviet Union shocked the world in 1954 when its government proudly unveiled a two-headed dog. The strange animal was the creation of Vladimir Demikhov, one of the nation’s top surgeons. He had honed his craft in field hospitals during World War II, after which the government set him up in a top-secret research center outside Moscow. His mission there was to prove the Soviet Union’s surgical preeminence.

Demikhov created the two-headed dog by grafting the head, shoulders, and front legs of a puppy onto the neck of a mature German shepherd. Eventually he created twenty of these hybrids. However, because of postoperative infection, most of the dogs didn’t live long. The record was twenty-nine days—suggesting that, at least as far as the dogs were concerned, two heads were not better than one.

The dogs made headlines around the world. The press nicknamed them Russia’s “surgical Sputnik.” In 1959 United Press reporter Aline Mosby visited Demikhov’s lab and met Pirat, a German shepherd/puppy combo. Accompanying Demikhov on a walk with Pirat, she noted Pirat had to be led by the ears because a normal collar wouldn’t fit around his neck.

Mosby also reported that although the two heads shared a circulatory system, they led separate lives. They slept and woke at different times. The puppy even ate and drank on its own, though it didn’t need to because it received all its nourishment from Pirat. When the puppy eagerly lapped at a bowl of milk, whatever went into its mouth dribbled out the stump of its esophageal tube onto Pirat’s shaved neck.

Was there any medical justification for the dogs? Critics didn’t think so. They dismissed them as a publicity stunt. Demikhov, however, argued that they were part of a continuing series of experiments in surgical techniques. His ultimate goal was to make possible a human heart-and-lung transplant. In fact, another doctor eventually performed the first human heart transplant—Dr. Christiaan Barnard in 1967—but Demikhov is widely credited with paving the way for it.

Demikhov also envisioned a future in which banks of surgical spare parts could be created by grafting extra sets of limbs onto human “vegetables”—his term for brain-dead patients. When needed, the limbs would be removed. An
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entire market in used extremities could come into existence. However, Demikhov seriously underestimated the problems involved with tissue rejection. For that reason, you don’t need to fear a Demikhov Limb and Organ Bank opening on a street corner near you anytime soon.

The monkey opened his eyes. Even through the haze of drugs, he could sense something was wrong. He tried to move but couldn’t. Why were his limbs not responding? He felt scared and wanted to run. Instead he could only stare straight ahead. What was this place he was in? Who were these men that surrounded him? Angrily he tracked their movements with his eyes and warned them away the only way he was able—by baring his teeth and snapping menacingly at the empty air.

When American leaders learned that Vladimir Demikhov had created a two-headed dog, they knew they had to respond. For the sake of national pride, they not only had to match Demikhov’s achievement, but also had to do one better. Thus ensued one of the more peculiar chapters of the Cold War—a surgical arms race. Though perhaps
head race
would be a more fitting term.

America’s answer to Demikhov was Robert White. In 1960 White was a thirty-four-year-old Harvard-trained surgeon with great ambitions. He wanted to make a name for himself, and if in doing so he could simultaneously help his country, then all the better. So in 1961, with the help of the U.S. government, he established a brain research center in Cleveland, Ohio. The government told him to do whatever it took to beat Demikhov.

White agreed with critics who thought Demikhov’s dogs were a bit of a stunt. Sensational, yes. But still a stunt. After all, stitching the upper body of a puppy onto the neck of an adult dog was not a true head transplant. What White envisioned doing was altogether more ambitious. He would cut the head off an animal and then sew on a new, functioning head. It would be a true head transplant, the kind of thing found only in Hollywood movies and science-fiction novels.

But before he could do this, he had to learn more about how the brain functioned. This would take him years of study and experimentation.

Step one in this process was to find out whether a brain could be isolated from the body and remain alive. On January 17, 1962, he proved this could be done. He removed the brain of a monkey from its skull and sat it on a stand, supplied with blood from an external source. This was a far more complicated procedure than simply lopping off the top of the skull and lifting out the gray matter, because the arteries supplying blood to the brain had to remain intact. White had to carve away the tissue of the face—the skin, nerves, muscle, and cartilage—until all that remained was the skull attached to the body by the thread of the arteries. Only then did he crack open the skull and reveal the brain. It took hours. As he worked, he puffed on a pipe and chatted about current affairs, as though he were chiseling away at a piece of wood instead of a living creature.

The brain sat motionless on the stand, a gray mass of tissue. Only by its electrical activity—the blips of an EEG trace—could one tell it was alive and thinking. After a couple of hours, having done what he set out to do, White switched off its blood supply. It took three minutes for the brain to die.

The next step was to find out whether a brain could survive being transplanted into another living creature. White achieved this goal on June 3, 1964. He removed the brain of a dog and placed it under the neck skin of another dog, where the brain remained alive, floating in darkness, for days. Unfortunately for the dog that played host, it was no smarter for having a second brain. In fact, the extra brain was literally nothing more than a pain in the neck.

The final step in White’s research program was a full head transplant. Six more years of preparation were necessary, but on March 14, 1970, White did it. In a carefully choreographed operation requiring a large team of assistants, he separated a monkey’s head from its body and reattached the head to a new body. After a few hours the monkey woke up to its new reality. White wrote that it “gave evidence of its awareness of the external environment by accepting and attempting to chew or swallow food placed in its mouth. The eyes tracked the movement of individuals and objects brought into their visual fields.” When White placed his finger in the monkey’s mouth, the monkey bit it. Evidently, it wasn’t a happy monkey.

It’s hard to imagine an experience more disorienting than waking up and discovering you have a new body, but it could have been worse for the monkey. White could have placed the head on the body the wrong way around. He noted that, because of the way the two bodies were positioned in the lab, it would have been far easier for him to do this, but for the monkey’s sake, he didn’t. As if it really mattered to the monkey at that point.

The monkey couldn’t get up and walk around or swing from trees. Although the head was attached to a new body, it
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couldn’t control that body in any way. The spinal cord remained severed. The monkey was now a quadriplegic. In essence, the new body was merely a pump supplying blood to the head. From a surgical point of view, it was an impressive piece of work. But it seems a mercy that the monkey survived only a day and a half before succumbing to complications from the surgery.

White had achieved his goal, but at a personal cost. Instead of hailing him as a national hero, the public was appalled by his work. Funding for his experiments gradually dried up. But White was hardly one to back down. Instead, he played his role of a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein to the hilt. He freely admitted during interviews that he was a fan of the Frankenstein movies. He once showed up on a children’s TV program toting a Dr. Frankenstein’s doctor bag. He even publicly lobbied for the need to take his work to the next level—a human head transplant. He argued that if doctors were willing to replace a patient’s heart, why not replace the entire body? Surgically, it was possible. And if the patient was already a quadriplegic, it wouldn’t significantly alter his lifestyle. He toured with Craig Vetovitz, a near-quadriplegic who volunteered to be his first head-transplant patient.

White admitted there was a long way to go before the public was ready to accept the idea of full-body transplants, but he predicted that “the Frankenstein legend, in which an entire human being is constructed by sewing various body parts together, will become a clinical reality early in the twenty-first century.” If he’s right, eventually the public will have to get its head around the idea.

Morton Heilig’s Sensorama, built in 1957, was the first fully immersive virtual reality machine. Users sat on a vibrating seat as they viewed 3-D movies. Fans blew wind through their hair; speakers played simulated road sounds; and canisters sprayed the scents of fresh-cut grass and flowers into the air around them. All of this created the illusion users were riding through the countryside on a motorcycle. The Sensorama gives its name to this chapter because we now embark on a journey through the peculiar and often unnerving world of sensory research.

We will examine experiments that probe the mysteries of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. Like the Sensorama, a few of these experiments had a commercial motive. Most of them, however, were inspired by a deeper philosophical principle that can be summed up by the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas’s peripatetic axiom: “Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius in sensu.” In English: There is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses. We gain knowledge through sense-based experience. Therefore, to understand human knowledge, we must first understand the senses and how they distort or enhance the world around us. As we will see, the emphasis seems to be on distortion rather than enhancement.

A blindfolded man sits in a chair. His bare foot, strapped to a stool, rests inches away from a robotic hand connected to an array of rubber hoses and controls. A woman in a lab coat sits down next to him. “You will be tickled twice,” she states without emotion. “First I will tickle you, and then the tickle machine will have its turn.” As she says this she glances at the robotic hand. The man nods his understanding.

No, this isn’t a scene from a fetish club. The setting is the UC San Diego psychology lab of Dr. Christine Harris. During the late 1990s thirty-five undergraduates agreed to bare their feet for Dr. Harris and endure tickle-torture to help her answer that age-old question, Why can’t we tickle ourselves?

Two contradictory answers to this question had previously been proposed. Theory one (the interpersonal theory): Tickling is a social act and requires the touch of another person to elicit a response. Theory two (the reflex theory): Tickling is a reflex that depends on unpredictability and surprise. We can’t tickle ourselves, proponents of this theory argue, because we can’t surprise ourselves.

Harris designed her tickle-machine experiment to put these opposing theories to the test. If the interpersonal theory was correct, she reasoned, a machine-tickle should not be able to elicit laughter from a person. But if a machine could generate this response, that would imply the reflex theory was correct.

So the students came to her lab, took off their shoes and socks, and waited to be tickled. As they sat blindfolded, they felt themselves being tickled by the experimenter (Harris) and then by the machine. Their response to each stimulus was rated on a scale of zero (not at all ticklish) to seven (very ticklish).

However, not all was as it appeared. Unbeknownst to the students, neither Harris nor the machine tickled anyone. The tickle machine wasn’t even capable of tickling anyone. It was just a stage prop that made a loud vibrating sound when turned on. The students were actually being tickled by a woman hiding beneath one of the cloth-covered tables in the lab.

Upon receiving the signal, the secret tickler—aka “research assistant”—lifted the tablecloth, reached out her hand, surreptitiously tickled the foot of the subject, and then retreated back into her lair.

Once the assistant caught her hair in the top of the table, and as she struggled to free herself, the student test-subject realized that something strange was going on. Otherwise, the deception worked perfectly. The tickler did her job so well that during follow-up questioning a number of subjects commented on the artificial feel of the tickle machine. One student said the “machine felt unnatural, temperature different. Like walking across plush carpet.”

Why the elaborate ruse? Harris could have created a real,
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working tickle machine. A British researcher, Sarah Blakemore, later did exactly this—although Blakemore was looking at the kind of tickle that is an itchy feeling, like a bug crawling across your skin, whereas Harris was investigating the intense, laughter-eliciting kind of tickle. Harris was concerned that a robotic tickler might feel different than a human one, and she didn’t want this difference in tactile quality to influence her results. All she needed was for participants to believe a machine was tickling them. If they truly believed this, then, according to the interpersonal theory, they should not respond to the tickling.