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A Sex Chip to transform a homosexual man into a heterosexual
This is an infamous case from the 1970s, in which psychiatrist Robert Heath placed “pleasure electrodes” in the brain of a gay man code-named B-19, in part, as an attempt to “cure” his homosexuality.
The patient pressed a button compulsively to turn on an electrode that induced a desire for sex, but whether he actually enjoyed the sensation was unclear.
With permission from the state attorney general, Heath arranged for a twenty-one-year-old female prostitute to visit the lab, and he placed her in a room with B-19. For an hour B-19 did nothing, but then the prostitute took the initiative and a successful sexual encounter between the two occurred. Heath considered this a positive result.
Little is known of B-19′s later fate. Heath reported that the young man drifted back into a life of homosexual , but that he also had an affair with a married woman. Heath optimistically decided that this showed the treatment was at least partially successful.link
Looking through cats’ eyes
On October 11, 1999 Professor Yang Dan at UC Berkeley demonstrated the technology that captures images of what a cat sees. This is one approach to the technical challenge to remotely acquire the vision of an animal.
By recording the electrical activity of nerve cells in the thalamus, a region of the brain that receives signals from the eyes, Dr Yang and researchers from the
university were able to view these shapes. They recorded the output from 177 brain cells that responded to light and dark in the cat’s field of view. link
Ilya Ivanov, real life Dr. Moreau
Ilya Ivanov was a Russian biologist who specialized in the field of artificial insemination and the interspecific hybridization of animals.
The most controversial of Ivanov’s studies was his attempt to create a human-ape hybrid. He obtained permission from the Institute’s directors to use its experimental primate station in Kindia, French Guinea, for such an experiment.
Although Ivanov attempted to organize the insemination of human females with chimpanzee sperm in Guinea, these plans met with resistance from the French colonial government and there is no evidence such an experiment was arranged there.
Frustrated, Ivanov eventually returned to the Soviet Union.There are vague rumors suggesting that other Soviet scientists continued Ivanov’s work, but nothing has been proven. link
Two-headed dog
Vladimir P. Demikhov, was a Soviet scientist, organ transplant pioneer and the first to perform a heart transplant on a dog, in 1946.
He is also well-known for his transplantation of the heads of dogs. The head transplant was not planned. Konevskiy had planned an experimental heart transplant but the puppy was involved in an automobile accident. Not wanting to “waste the sterilized operating table”, the surgeon proceeded with the head transplant.
Twenty such creatures were created. None lived longer than a month, but the work is seen as paving the way for human heart transplant surgery. link
Elephants on LSD
Forty-five years ago, two psychiatrists administered history’s largest dose of LSD to Tusko, a three-and-a-half ton elephant.
The 14-year-old male was given enough acid to make 3,000 people hallucinate, in a bizarre bid to find out whether it would trigger a temporary form of madness called musth, in which bull elephants become sexually aggressive.
After the experiment,trumpeted round its pen for a few minutes, before keeling over and dying shortly afterwards.
Faced with a public outcry, researchers Louis Jolyon West and Chester M Pierce noted they had taken the LSD in the past without fatal consequences – and suggested the drug could be used to destroy herds in countries where they cause a problem.link
The Remote-Controlled Bull
Yale researcher Jose Delgado stood in the hot sun of a bullring in Cordova, Spain. With him in the ring was a large, angry bull. The animal noticed him and began to charge. It gathered speed. Delgado appeared defenseless, but when the bull was mere feet away, Delgado pressed a button on a remote control unit in his hand, sending a signal to a chip implanted in the bull’s brain. Abruptly, the animal stopped in its tracks. It huffed and puffed a few times, and then walked docilely away.
Delgado’s experience in the ring was an experimental demonstration of the ability of his “stimoceiver” to manipulate behavior. The stimoceiver was a computer chip, operated by a remote-control unit, that could be used to electrically stimulate different regions of an animal’s brain. Such stimulation could produce a wide variety of effects, including the involuntary movement of limbs, the eliciting of emotions such as love or rage, or the inhibition of appetite. It could also be used, as Delgado showed, to stop a charging bull.
Delgado’s experiment sounds so much like science fiction, that many people are surprised to learn it occurred back in 1963. During the 1970s and 80s, research into electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) languished, stigmatized by the perception that it represented an effort to control people’s minds and thoughts. But more recently, ESB research has once again been flourishing, with reports of researchers creating remote-controlled rats, pigeons, and even sharks. link
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