Madder Scientists: Wild Experiments and Their Lasting Impact

*Be Advised* This episode contains adult content such as drug use, overdosing, animal death and sex.

In this episode of Wildly Curious (formerly For the Love of Nature), co-hosts Katy Reiss and Laura Fawks Lapole dive into some of the most bizarre and controversial scientific experiments from history. From brainwashing attempts to elephants on LSD, they explore the curious world of mad scientists who pushed the limits of human and animal experimentation. Discover how these strange studies, while often ethically questionable, have shaped modern science and psychology. Packed with mind-blowing facts, dark humor, and fascinating stories, this episode takes you on a wild ride through the weird side of scientific history.

Perfect for science enthusiasts, history buffs, and those curious about the extremes of experimentation.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to For the Love of Nature, a podcast where we tell you everything you need to know about nature, and probably more than you wanted to know. I'm Laura.
And I'm Katy, and today we're gonna be talking about crazy researchers again.
Yeah, because you guys didn't get enough, I'm sure.
We didn't get enough last time. Because that really was a fun one. I, man, you run across some crazy folks.
Yes, who doesn't love a good mad scientist?
Like mad mad, though. So we have more.
Go back to season one and listen to our first one.
Yeah, and this one is gonna be just as bizarre, I assure you. All right, Laura, you wanna do your nature news then? I don't have nature news today, so go ahead, Laura.
That's okay. So the headline is, Octopuses, squid, and lobsters are recognized as sentient beings in the UK. What?
Yeah.
I mean, first of all, about time, but-
Oh, totally, totally, yeah. It's finally, it's just officially in the UK now, all decapod crustaceans, which is crabs, lobsters, crayfish, and cephalopod mollusks, which are octopus and squid and cuttlefish. So all of them are now considered sentient beings.
And as Katy said, about freaking time, because there are so many studies that show that they-
That they're really freaking smart.
Yes, they end that they can feel pain, which I guess was just a big thing that people were like, eh, you know. So what does this mean? So it is going to give them some level of protection.
So right now it's not illegal, but this amendment is kind of recommending no more live boiling, no extreme slaughter, no transportation of the animals in icy water.
No extreme slaughter.
I know, what does that mean? What were they doing before? No, like decapitation?
Like what does-
I don't know.
No transporting them in icy water and no selling them living to untrained handlers. So-
So just kill them first, basically.
Yes, yes. And actually what I didn't know before reading this article is that a lot of other countries have already taken similar steps. So it's illegal to boil lobsters alive without first stunning them in Switzerland, Norway, Austria, and New Zealand.
And boiling them alive has been outlawed in the US since 1999.
I don't think anybody really follows that, though, here.
Well, I was just wondering. I was like, well, obviously people at home, for sure, because I'm sure people just throw crayfish in the pot. Yeah, no, exactly.
I'm just like, all of this is going to red lobster. So I'm like, okay.
What do they do?
Yeah, I guess they can't boil them alive. And like, if it was in the UK they'd have to be trained, trained handlers of lobsters.
Gotta go to school and get that four-year degree now to boil that lobster.
But in the US even though that's illegal, they still in the US aren't recognized as animals, which means that they don't have the same protections when it comes to research. So they're not treated, there's no laws as to how they need to be treated humanely.
Interesting.
So thank goodness. I mean, a lot of people are probably pretty great crabs and lobsters, who cares? But they are really smart.
And then, right, the next level of like octop- I mean, how often have we talked about-
Yeah, an octopus, yeah, and how insane they are. Yes.
Like, super advanced.
The intelligence is, yeah, almost alien-like. Like, where it's just so advanced, it's creepy, but-
Yeah, yeah. I think, I kind of wish, I kind of wish that the next animal would be pigs, because they're also insanely intelligent. Not that we shouldn't eat them.
You can still eat lobsters. You just have to do it humanely. And so I wish that it would be the same, like, with pigs, rather than keeping them in, like, horrible conditions.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is tough. You just have to not think about it, and just do it.
Yeah, yeah. Or, like, I'm gonna, yeah, try and, like, go to a local farm.
Yeah, yeah, where you know it's gonna be sustainable and everything. I agree, I agree. All right, well, speaking of all that.
Yeah. We're finally recognizing how smart some of these creatures are. Now, if we could just move on to trees, that'd be great.
Well, speaking of all that then, about intelligence, that kind of goes right in. So today, again, we're gonna be talking about Crazy Research 2.0. So the second time we've done this one, again, like Laura said, we did this in the first season.
So we just wanted to go through it because, I don't know. I thought, I knew I would have an interesting group for the first one. And this one was just like, there's just so many to choose from because the whole point of this is why we're talking about this, because we want, a lot of these things back then had to happen for us to have our understanding of what is going on now, or at least a better understanding.
So it does lead into better things, regardless of how horrible it is, or sometimes they're just completely pointless, like one of mine today is just so pointless.
And chose that there is a fine line between.
There is. Yes, because yeah, sometimes it leads into good, sometimes it's just like, what on earth are you doing? So the first one then that I'm gonna be talking about is Dr. Ewan Cameron.
So he was from the Allen Memorial Clinic in Montreal, Canada. And he basically, so I'm getting this, first of all, I'm getting this out of a book, and I'll tell you what the book title is for my next one, or during my next segment because it's-
So I'll give this one away?
Yeah, it'll give the second one away if I tell you what the name of the book is. But I've had this book forever. And so both of these from today, I'm actually pulling out of this one book because it's easy.
So. Oh. So, Dr. Ewan Cameron, like I said, he was from in Canada, and we pick up with him with a patient named Mary, and they just call her Mary C.
So if Mary C, minding her own business, she just checked into a clinic complaining of menopause, sorry, menopause-related anxiety.
And of course, yeah, this is back when hysterics and you know.
Yeah, this is.
She just got anxiety.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, anxiety. It's that menopause, brushing off women. So she checked into a clinic, and she pretty much said to herself like, okay, just a few weeks of rest, relax, relaxation, some psych counseling.
That should be it. So. Because you know, this is back in the 50s and 60s, so nothing was normal back then.
So first thing that she came across was they started giving her massive doses of LSD. Because you know, what cures some anxiety, like massive doses of LSD. Yeah, right?
That'll make it better. And then she went into intensive electroshock therapy. Soon after this, she had zero memory of her past.
Oh yeah.
Right? So she didn't even know her own name.
Oh, that's horrible. She's had a brain wipe.
Yeah, and oh, she was like, I'm anxious. And I think it's for menopause. She would stumble blindly through the hallways of the clinic, drooling, and just completely uncoherent, having no idea what was going on.
That is horrible.
Yeah, but there's more to the story, or else he wouldn't be known as a madman. So so far- Yeah, because that's not enough.
That's not enough, yeah, because she still hasn't ran into the actual madman. So 35 days locked inside a sensory deprivation chamber, because then they also thought that that would fix her. Topped off by-
They're literally, here's what's happening. There's some doctors, they're in a room, and they've got ideas up on a board, and they're just throwing darts at it. And they're like, this, yeah, let's try this one.
Yeah, so 35 days inside the sensory deprivation chamber, topped off by three months of drug sleep as a tape-recorded voice spoke the same phrases over and over again from inside her pillow. And what did it say? Hold on, what did it say?
People like you and need you. You have confidence in yourself.
Oh my gosh, first of all, too, that also is... Do you ever watch Dexter, the cartoon?
No, I didn't.
Okay, well, let's...
Oh wait, Dexter's, wait, of the cartoon? Like Dexter's Laboratory? Okay, I thought you meant like the adult grown show of Dexter.
No, Dexter's Lab. Yes, I have seen Dexter's Laboratory.
Did you ever see the episode where he's trying to learn French and he falls asleep and get on? Omelette du fromage, and that's all he can say.
Yeah, that's all he can say, yeah. I didn't, man, I forgot about that. But can you imagine people like you and need you.
All the girls in school were like, oh, he can speak French, and he's just whispering into their ear, omelette du fromage.
I forgot about that. Goodness. Well.
Did she wake up saying that? Did she wake up believing it?
It doesn't say that. So Mary see that now she's now coming in to the care of Dr. Hugh and Cameron, who was the director of the Allen Memorial Clinic in like I said, Montreal. And she became one of the hundreds of just completely unknowing subjects in his CIA funded beneficial brainwashing experiments.
So let's go into a little bit of background of Dr. Hugh and Cameron here for a second. So he was, let's see here, he was the son of a Presbyterian minister, and he clawed, it says he clawed his way to the top fueled by fierce ambition. So pretty much, he was one of those-
Quibble Rufus did not like him.
It's a matter of saying it. Yeah, because it sounds like he was just blinded by success. Yeah.
Essentially. So by the late 50s, he was one of the most respected psychiatrists in the whole world. He had served as president of the Quebec Canada and American Psychiatric Associations, and would go on to co-found the World Psychiatric Association.
Wow.
Yeah, so I mean, he did, but I mean, back in the 50s, you know, so-
Oh, right.
Yeah, pioneer of beneficial brainwashing. Um, so, and he was like so ambitious driven that he was actually really pissed off that he never won the Nobel Peace Prize or the Nobel Prize.
Wow, he sounds like a total D-bag.
Yeah, right? Uh, all these other successes in life, they're just meaningless because I haven't won a Nobel Prize. So anyway, so he then started the program of experimentation to discover a cure for schizophrenia.
And then, and that's what he thought was going to get him the Nobel Prize. So everything from here on out.
So he's willing to do anything for it.
Willing to do anything to win the Nobel Prize. So his patient served as a subject whether they wished to or not, and often whether they had schizophrenia or not. You're going to be cured of schizophrenia whether you have it or not.
Well, I mean, that would definitely help us success rate.
Right? Exactly.
Look, they don't have it.
It's amazing. So the cure that Cameron dreamed up to this treatment was, he pretty much just mixed up his own concoction. And he pretty much put it all together from various, any other experiments, any other quote-unquote treatments that he saw best fit, he just mixed it all up, whether it's medical or pharmaceutical, whether it's experimental, whether it's cognitive, behavioral, whatever.
He's just like...
Big old drug cocktail.
Yes, of everything. So what he wanted to do was to wipe schizophrenic patients' minds clean, erasing all of their memories, and then to insert new non-schizophrenic personalities into their empty brains, which is great for Mary C, because at this point she has no idea who she is.
Yeah. So, great person. Okay, can you, incredibly narcissistic of him, because you are then, okay, imagine somebody with a completely blank mind that you then have to insert.
Do you know how much stuff you'd have to insert to make like a full human being?
Yeah, there's a lot.
I mean, like a baby starts off not knowing anything, and you slowly build that over time. This guy's like, we're just gonna start as an adult, and I'm gonna fix, like, I'm gonna put years worth of memories into you.
Yeah, everything. So, he drew on Cold War imagery. He described this as beneficial brainwashing, capable of transforming the mentally ill into healthy, new people.
Yikes.
So, his first step was the mind wipe. So Cameron referred to this as de-patterning. De-patering.
Patterning.
Patterning.
Patterning. De-paterning.
Patterning.
He swiped away the mind's defenses and memories using electroshock therapy, which is basically what Mary Sekecy happened. Electroshock was, at the time, widely used during the 50s, but Cameron applied it far more aggressively than most doctors dared. Yeah.
To the point where they literally wiped the person's brain.
Yes. So he would administer it multiple times a day at level six times the normal charge. So, yeah, basically he just fried their brains.
He just cooked it. So, and for good measure, though, because that wasn't enough, he topped it off with massive doses of mind-altering drugs such as LSD, which is what he did with Mary or what happened to Mary. Okay, so reducing patients to walking zombies is essentially what they happen.
Would seem like most of the things that physicians would not own up to doing in public, but because Cameron was fully convinced that he would win the Nobel Prize for this, he voluntarily just published the details. So this wasn't like he wasn't keeping it a secret.
He was doing this for the greater good.
Yes, wiping these people clean. You could go to a local library and read about it too, because there is, in the 1960 article in the Journal of Comprehensive Psychiatry, he itemized the effects of d-patterning on one unlucky patient. So here it is.
The patient loses all recollection of the fact that he formerly possessed a space-time image, which served to explain the events of the day to him. With this loss, all anxiety also disappeared. No shit, because you have no idea.
What is going on?
There's no space-time, so he literally can no longer comprehend time.
Yes, of course he doesn't have anxiety. I wouldn't have anxiety either. In the third stage, his conceptual span is limited to a few minutes into entirely concrete events.
He volunteers a few statements on questioning. He says he is sleepy or that he feels fine. He cannot conceptualize where he is, nor does he recognize those who treat him.
What the patient talks about are only his sensations of the moment, and he talks about them almost exclusively in highly concrete terms. His remarks are entirely uninfluenced by previous recollections, nor are they governed in any way by the forward anticipations. He lives in the immediate present.
All schizophrenic symptoms have disappeared. There is complete amnesia for all events of his life. Success.
Oh my gosh. How is this guy not like... This is like...
It was the 50s. 50s and the 60s. Like the Nazi doctor guy.
Yeah. I mean... But anyway.
So having destroyed mind. So that was just the excerpt from that journal. So that was his words describing all of that, not me.
So having destroyed the mind, the next stage then was to rebuild it. So the hope was that some of the...
Here's where I'm sure he's running into problems. Yeah.
So some of the patient's memories would spontaneously return as they recovered from electric shock. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. Meanwhile, Cameron labored to impose healthy thought patterns in place of the unhealthy schizophrenic ones.
To achieve this, he would use a process he called psychic driving. So the concept of the psychic driving was, it just occurred to Cameron after he read about an American inventor called Max Sherover, who had created a sleep learning machine, which is the recording. And so it just repeated it.
So the sleeping mind supposedly...
Which, if only that worked.
Right? I would have aced college. The mind would supposedly soak up the messages, and the person woke up knowing a foreign language, or how to send Morse code, all other kinds of things.
Where did they come up with that?
I wish it worked. So Cameron thought that a modified version of this might be used to reprogram a patient's mind. He experimented several different times, even pairing it with the d-pattern to see if maybe if we do this together, it would be better.
He made patients wear headphones and listen to anxiety-provoking statements in an attempt to force them to confront their fears.
Torturing them.
Right? Pretty much. And so oftentimes they grew enraged, they flung their headphones across the room and stormed out the door.
Because remember, these guys just went through intense shock. So yeah, you're doing these statements over and over again, but they're essentially like drooling zombies. And you know what I mean?
Like they're not coherent humans at this point. So Cameron's ambitions for the psychic driving grew quickly by leaps and bounds. He didn't want patients merely to confront their anxieties.
He wanted to violently drive messages into their psyche to reshape their various identities. He imagined exposing patients to a message all day for months on end. Of course, patients resisted listening for even a few minutes.
So they weren't about to lie still just listening to these messages like thousands and thousands of times because they didn't want to. So he devised ways to force them to listen. He injected patients with curare, a paralyzing South American plant toxin, compelling them to lie motionless in bed.
Or he would drug them with barbiturates, sending them into deep sleep for weeks at a time as the tapes whispered in their ears. Or he can find them in the sensory deprivation chamber and again just let them listen to it over and over again. So Cameron encountered some unexpected problems, of course.
The engineer he hired to record some of the messages spoke with a strong Polish accent, and patients then subsequently reported their thoughts were taking on a Polish cadence. So Cameron corrected this by re-recording the messages in his own voice, since he had a thick Scottish accent. This is probably not an improvement.
So they went from sounding a little Polish to now sounding a little Scottish. Just went from one to the other. They were also, because of the thick accent and just hearing it so many times, they were prone to misunderstanding the message.
Overall, Cameron thought psychic driving showed great promise, and in one step of the technique, he placed patients into the drug sleep and made them listen to the message. When you see a piece of paper, you want to pick it up. Later, he drove them to a local gymnasium relying in the middle of the floor.
It was a single piece of paper, and reportedly, many of them went over to go pick it up, like without thought. So to him, all of that was saying, like, this is working.
I know, but that is such like a causation versus correlation.
It is.
Maybe they just didn't like litter.
Yeah. Maybe they're just really healthy for the planet. So anyway...
And yeah, forcing someone to pick up one piece of... I don't know.
Yeah. So thanks to his public boast and the promise of beneficial brainwashing, Cameron came to the attention of the CIA. And if he was going to develop workable brainwashing technique, of course the CIA would be the ones that would be interested.
So in 1957, the agency began fueling money to him via one of his fronts for the organization that it was called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. But after a few years, despite how enthusiastic Cameron was, the agency realized his progress simply didn't work, and they ended his funding in 61. And then, soon after this, Cameron grudgingly conceded his experiments had been a 10-year trip down the wrong road, is what he called it.
So he just brushed it off.
You do not get to regret.
But he didn't even regret it. He just brushed it off. Just completely brushed it off.
Like, eh, whatever. So he never bothered to apologize to his patients who continued to have to live, obviously. He did, however...
I wonder, too, if they were committed, or if this was, like, how much was consensual and how much was, like, it just people committed?
It was both. So it said it was both. So they were in his program, whether they liked it, whether they agreed to it or not.
They were just part of it. The CIA later came to regret involving the work with Cameron, and when the details of the funding leaked out in the late 70s, it led to a lawsuit filed against the agency by a group of Cameron's former patients, and the lawsuit, of course, because it's the government, it settled out of court quietly. Cameron spent the remainder of his career working on a project that was, in many ways, the polar opposite of his brainwashing experiment, and instead of destroying memories, he attempted to restore it.
He had read about James McConnell's memory transfer experiment, and with his keen talent for attaching himself to questionable research, he eagerly jumped on the bandwagon, envisioning, once again, Nobel Prize. Um, so, yeah, so it just went from one thing to another, but I just can't believe he did all of that, and then he was just like...
What a terrible human being.
Yeah, where he was just like, you know what, meh, I just, you know, ten-year trip down the wrong road, that's it. And end of story. Done.
Yeah, he, like, clearly didn't value. He was so disconnected.
Yes.
Like, yes, for him it worked, sure, but at what cost? He did not at all balk at what it would cost.
Yeah, not at all. So that's the quick story of Dr. Hewan Cameron. Yeah, that's terrifying.
That one's scary.
Yeah. Because you go in there for some, you know, menopausal anxiety.
Yeah. Next thing you know. And come out totally, like, yeah.
My gosh, that is horrible. Um, well, mine is pretty tame compared to that, really, even though I'm also dealing with some mind control stuff. But compared to that, this guy is very tame.
So my man is my man, Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado. Born in 1915, but hit his peak research in the 50s through the 70s, just like your guy. So who was he?
Originally, he was going to be an eye doctor like his father, but he became fascinated with the brain and was like, nope, not eyes for me, brains.
Brains.
So he got a fellowship to Yale in 1946 and joined their faculty in 1950, where he started doing his research. So his research dealt with brain stimulation experiments first on cats, dogs, and primates. And he actually did that before even getting to Yale, he was doing that at the University of Madrid because he is originally from Spain.
But he wasn't just known as a really good researcher, well, psychological researcher. He was also a technological wizard and inventor. So a lot of the things that he used, he made himself, which is kind of cool.
Depends on what it was, but continue.
This episode is crazy researcher, so waiting for the catch here.
Well, so he was, you know, brain stimulation. How can that happen? Well, first, like originally, it was just wires going into skulls.
But this obviously restricted your movement or the movement of dogs and cats.
Because you're attached to a machine now.
Right.
Or at least the nearest wall plug.
And of course, open to infection. Gross. Yeah.
So that's where his technological genius came in. He designed his own. These little tiny things called this.
I believe it's pronounced Stimus Cever or Stimus. No, probably Stimus Cever.
Probably Stimus Cever.
Yeah, for stimulus. So Stimus Cever is which are about the size of a quarter and could be implanted inside the brain. They're equipped with like radio stuff so that a battery pack can be strapped to the subject's head or run around the neck and then receive signals.
So this was the first brain chip. So brain chip in the 50s, which is pretty crazy to think about.
That is pretty crazy. Because I'm sure it had like lead and mercury and all kinds of like, you know what I mean, all kinds of stuff, all kinds of unhealthy metals that shouldn't be in your brain.
Yes. And along with those brain chips, he also invented chemotrodes, which are like little things that can be implanted in the brain that release precise amounts of drugs directly into the brain.
Interesting.
So first he started with animals. So in his animal experiments, he implanted a Stemicevier and a macaque who was terrorizing the other macaques that lived with. It was just a jerk macaque.
Is there such a thing as a non-jerk macaque?
True, true. But so I just found this like hilarious and crazy. So he implants the jerk macaque with a brain chip.
He then installs a lever in the enclosure. If that lever is pulled, it would activate the stem receiver in the jerk and like pacify him. So one of the girls that he lived with soon discovered this and was just yanking that lever all the time.
Of course.
Which is so good.
The exact wording of this is, figured out the lever's significance and yanked it often and with gusto.
So he really, like, as funny as it is, he really had this great idea of, so, you know, he grew up in Spain where there was like, like he was very against dictators and things. So he thought, well, I mean, this is this is just someone rising up and taking...
We're going to sneak into their, sneak in and put this electrode in their brain.
Well, it says, he wrote, the old dream of an individual overpowering the strength of a dictator by remote control has been fulfilled, at least in our monkey colonies.
At least in the monkey colonies it has.
And it didn't stop there. His most famous experiment was when he implanted a whole bunch of bulls with Stimus heavers. And, you know, he comes from Spain where there's bullfighting.
So he went back to Spain, implanted these Stimus heavers, and went into the bull ring. And with all of these... So, not that all...
Of course, bullfighting is a terrible thing. They make the bulls be really aggressive, things like that. So these bulls were charging at him, and he clicked his little radio transmission thing, and they just stopped.
So, pacified. He was in the paper and all sorts of stuff, because they were like, wow. Some people were like, well, he's not really pacifying them.
He's just kind of making them change course at the last second. But some people said he was creating the real live version of Ferdinand the Bull, which I love that story, but Ferdinand did not have a brain chip.
No, no.
He was just kind.
And then the other one, which is just actually terrible. He implanted a chimpanzee with a stemicever, and her name was Patty. So whenever...
He programmed it to detect these certain kinds of signals called spindles. Whenever it did detect a spindle, it stimulated another part of her brain that was extremely painful and unpleasant. So after two hours of this, so every time she would do, I don't know what kind of behavior, something, it would zapper, zapper, zapper, zapper, zapper, zapper, zapper, zapper.
After two hours of this, her amygdala produced 50% fewer spindles, and then by six days dropped 99%. So he thought that this, like your amygdala is, that's still in your reptile brain, I'm pretty sure. So it's like she wasn't even really thinking about these things.
It was just stopping them. So he speculated that this was called automatic learning and could be used to quell seizures, panic attacks, or other brain disorders, which would be super beneficial. Because she's not even consciously thinking about, like, a seizure, you know, would just happen, and then just shut it down immediately.
Which actually, they do treat seizures this way now. That way, yeah. So that was his animal experiments.
He also did some human stuff. He implanted electrodes in at least 25 different people, most who were epileptic or schizophrenic. But unlike your guy who just fried their brains, Yeah, right.
Went for the whole mind race.
Yeah, mine just was stimulating them, like tiny zaps. But he discovered that it was unreliable and that the therapeutic benefits were pretty mixed. So he could create sensation, he could create feelings of pleasure, arousal, friendliness, anger, and fear.
So like very visceral reactions, not actual mind control or brainwashing. He found that the best thing it was used was actually to treat chronic pain, which is pretty cool. But as you can imagine, a lot of people found his research very alarming.
He was being funded by the military for a little bit. Of course. By the CIA.
And so people were really afraid that they were building cyborg soldiers that could be mind controlled.
On a side note, though, for anybody who doesn't know, most of the stuff that... I forget what the date is, but you can actually go online and dig through the CIA archives. Because a lot of it was released and everything, and you can go back and read stuff.
There is some sketchy stuff.
I cannot even imagine.
Man, talk about a rabbit hole. From aliens to the human experiments, there is some stuff to read about. Yeah.
Continue.
People were so afraid of him and what he was doing that random strangers started accusing him of implanting stuff in their heads. Like, he never even met them. He got sued by a woman who insisted that he had implanted her with a brain chip.
Never met the woman. And also, he was lumped in with some other extremely racist, sexist, and just asshole brain implant scientists. Probably like your guy.
Right. Because he was doing similar research, but not the same, and so he was getting a ton of flack. So he said it wasn't because he was running away, but he did move back to Spain at the height of his career, where he decided to not focus on, where he decided to focus instead on non-invasive brain stimulation.
So he would use electromagnets, like this little hood thing that could induce drowsiness, alertness, help treat the Parkinson tremors. But because it was external, then people just started accusing him of remote mind control. So that is José Delgado.
Some questionable methods, some terrifying implications, but got some good work done and probably helped pave the way for some things that are still being done now with curing of epilepsy and chronic pain and stuff.
Yeah, yeah. Well, to take a very drastic shift from all of that, next one we're going to talk about is Elephants on Acid, and that's the name of this book. So it's Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments by Alex...
I guess it's Bozie? Bo-say? I don't know.
Sorry, Alex. She's plagiarizing by reading you, and she can't even pronounce your name.
Not word for word. But Elephants on Acid, it is chock full of just bizarre experiments. Yeah, just stuff like the mock tickle machine to figure out if people could be tickled by other people, like what is tickling.
It's just all kinds of crazy stuff.
I'm not tickling you, I'm mock tickling you.
All right, so Elephants on Acid. So this one, okay, so first of all, disclaimer. Once again, this one happened back in the 60s.
Laura and I have both built our careers, started our careers anyway, in zoos. We support accredited zoos, and in accredited zoos, this kind of stuff would definitely not happen. So I'm going to leave out the name of this zoo because zoos just used to do some sketchy stuff back in the day.
But not anymore, because as long as they're accredited, they're good to go.
Or at least have some government oversight.
Yes, which most of your day, if you look up the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, I think it's just aza.org. You can go on to the website. You can actually click, and you can see all the lists of accredited zoos, and most major zoos within the US are accredited.
All righty, then. So we are going to pick up with the three gentlemen. Two are doctors at a university of...
Well, we'll just say that...
Call out this university.
Well, the university is the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine. And the two professors or two doctors that are there are Louis Jolly West and Chester M. Pierce.
Jolly.
Jolly. Because his middle name is Jollyan. And so they call him Jolly.
Jollyan?
Jollyan.
Some of his parents just made that one up.
It's J-O-L-Y-O-N? Jollyan? I don't know.
Anyway, so it's those two, as well as the director of the zoo, Warren Thomas. So think back to the 60s. What?
Drugs, yes. LSD, to be exact. So this is yet again another LSD experiment.
Elephants on Acid, as I said, is the title of it. So you see where I'm going with this here. So the zoo comes into play because West and Pierce wanted to, they were very impressed with the effects that LSD had, which I'm always like, how were they impressed?
In what capacity were they impressed with the effects of LSD? But even the zoo director was impressed with LSD, and so again, raises some questions.
A lot of people were impressed with LSD at the time, I'm sure.
Yes. So they decided to push the frontiers of psychiatric knowledge, and they, instead of experimenting with LSD on people, they were like, hmm, elephants. That's out of everything.
Those guys were on LSD to even think of an idea like that, right?
For elephants.
Or something, okay? Because why would you choose the largest animal to be out of control?
Yeah, to be out of control. It does go into here why in a second, but so they were, most doctors, like I said, nowadays, or during that time in the 60s, were fascinated by LSD because the powerful effect it could have on patients. It seemed, at the time, in the interest of the CIA and everything, it did seem like a wonder drug because it was able to heighten a patient's self-awareness, facilitate the recovery of memories, and could even entirely alter the behavior patterns that someone would have.
So, besides that, though, there were reports of LSD curing alcoholism almost overnight, and many hoped that it would have a similar effect on schizophrenia. Hence, the former guy, clearly, electroshock LSD wiping someone's brain clean does not cure schizophrenia. But anyway, maybe just LSD does.
So let's dial back all those other things and let's hope that just LSD will cure schizophrenia. So it wasn't until the mid-60s that doctors became more concerned about the drug's dangers and its popularity among counterculture youth, which prompted the US government to ban its use. So as they started to, you know, more and more people started to still experiment as far as from a professional level with LSD.
Of course, the CIA was extremely curious about the military implications of the drug. Basically, could it be used as a debilitating agent in chemical warfare or as a brainwashing tool? Because as we learned again from my first one, the CIA is all about brainwashing in the 50s and 60s.
Terrifying. So to get answers to these questions that the CIA had, the agency had been funneling large sums of money to researchers throughout America and apparently Canada. And so anyone who was working in behavioral sciences at the time received CIA money, though many weren't aware of it because the agency disseminated funds through various front organizations.
So there is no evidence, however, that the CIA played any role in the elephant experiment, even though you kind of know that they did. So the psychiatrists that were interested in LSD, like I said, because it did have some what seemed to be like the cure for schizophrenia and things, and they thought that it would produce what they called a model psychosis in mentally ill patients.
Oh, you mean the model of craziness.
Yeah, the model psychosis. So while a few doctors took the drugs to gain more intimate sense of what their patients might be experiencing, quote, unquote. Let me just take some of this LSD.
Gotta figure this out for myself here. Other researchers were testing LSD on animals and hoped that they could simulate mental illness and thus examine the phenomenon in a more controlled way. Giving LSD to an elephant was pretty much a logical outgrowth of such studies.
But these three researchers, again, it was Pierce West and then the zoo director, Warren Thomas. They decided that because of the elephant's large brain size, it offered a closer analog to a human brain. So not only like, hey, we want to do this more on human brain, but let's just find a bigger one.
And so that was their thought process to get to the elephant's one. Second, male elephants experience periodic episodes of madness known as the must. When they go into the must, the males become highly aggressive and secrete a strange sticky fluid from their temporal glands, which are located between their eyes and ears.
Wes, Pierce, and Thomas reasoned that if LSD truly did trigger temporary madness, that it might cause an elephant to go into that phase of must. They wanted to cause it, yeah. So if this happened, it would be pretty much the validation of LSD's ability to produce model psychosis, so we could force them into it.
Best of all, the onset of must could easily be confirmed by looking at the secretion of the sticky fluid. So basically, like, it was very easy to visibly see, yes, this worked, no, it did not work. So that's the scientific rationale that they offered.
On the morning of August 3rd, then, the experimenters were ready. Thomas had arranged for the use of Tusco, who was a 14-year-old male Indian elephant. This pharmaceutical company, Sand Daws, had provided LSD, and then the only thing that they said that was missing was the knowledge of the appropriate amount of LSD to give Tusco.
No one had ever given an LSD before.
Yeah, you had no idea how much.
Yeah, so how much is too much and how much is not enough. So LSD is a very potent drug. It says a mere 25 micrograms, less than the weight of a grain of sand, can send a person tripping for half a day.
But the researchers figured an elephant would need more than a person, perhaps a lot more, and they didn't want to risk giving too little. So Thomas had worked with elephants in Africa and knew that they could be extremely resistant to the effects of drugs, so they decided to err on the side of excess. They upped the dose.
So again, for a human, a mere 25 micrograms, micrograms, would send a person for a trip for a half a day. They decided to give Tusco 297 milligrams, about 3,000 times the dose of a human. Why?
Yeah, that's so much.
3,000, yeah, okay, well, 3,000 times. Yeah.
So at 8 o'clock in the morning, Thomas fired the cartridge syringe into Tusco's butt. Tusco trumpeted loudly and began running around his pen. For a few minutes, his restlessness increased, right?
Then he started to lose control of his movements. He had a mate, too, that Tusco did. His name was Judy.
She came over to try to support him, but suddenly he trumpeted one last time and toppled over. His eyeballs rolled backwards. He started twitching, his tongue turned blue, and it looked like he was having a seizure.
Dang, this is graphic. The researchers realized...
Should have had a trigger warning at the beginning.
Sorry. The researchers realized something had gone wrong and took measures to counteract the LSD. So then they gave him 2800 milligrams of an anti-psychotic, which was promazine hydrochloride.
It relieved the violence of the seizures, but not by much. Eighty minutes later, Tusco was still lying, panting on the ground, desperate to do something. The researchers basically were just freaking out at this point.
They injected our barbiturate pentobarbidium sodium, but it didn't help. A few minutes later, Tusco passed away.
Freaking jerks.
Right? So I think it was a little, I almost said it was a bit of an overkill. Clearly, clearly, clearly it was giving an elephant 3,000 mL of LSD someone would actually need.
So now came the question, they had a dead elephant on their hands. So this is probably something they shouldn't have been doing anyway. Now, you know, now they have a dead elephant.
Now they're like, oh, shoot, what do we, what do we do? So frantically, Wes Pearson Thomas had to figure everything out, had the LSD concentrated, somewhere in Tusco's body, increasing the toxicity? Did they hit a vein?
And, you know, there's all kinds of questions. Maybe he was allergic. So they went ahead and did a necropsy, and it was actually published a few months later in Science, the journal, and it just noted that it appears the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD.
So that's what they concluded as. Okay, so long story short, they all ended up going on to various different careers. One of them was joined at UCLA, in which another professor, Ronald Seagal, a professor of psychopharmacology, later became one of his colleagues there, became interested in the experiments, and then he started asking questions, which then led to him giving more elephants LSD.
So he was like, you know what, it didn't work, let's go ahead and keep going.
Let's do it again. Yeah.
Yeah. So he ended up having access to two more elephants, to which he tried. The elephants, thankfully, this time didn't topple over dead.
That was good news. So what did they do? Many animals exhibited extremely unusual behavior under the influence of LSD.
Yeah, they're hallucinating.
Right? So he, again, within these experiments, he, I guess they gave them to spiders too, so it wasn't just elephants, it was like all kinds of creatures.
We actually have seen spider webs.
The spider webs on LSD, yeah. So they spin highly regular webs, or spiders spin highly regular webs. Goats walk around in predictable geometric patterns, and cats adopt a kangaroo-style posture in which they sprawl their legs and extend their claws and tails.
The elephants, however, didn't do anything so bizarre. At the low dose, this other guy, Seagull, observed behavioral changes such as increased rocking and swaying, localization such as squeaking and chirping and head shaking. At a higher dose, elephants initially exhibited aggressive behavior before slowing down and becoming sluggish.
The male gave himself an extended hay bath. He's just like high as a kite, giving himself a hay bath. 24 hours later, both animals were back to normal.
So Seagull's experiment began to cast out on the idea that it was the LSD that killed Tusco, but he could not roll out the possibility. So overall, the scientific literature records no other cases of elephants given LSD past Seagull's experiments. So nothing really happened whenever the elephants were given like a normal dose of LSD.
So not a cure for schizophrenia or anything like that.
I definitely know that it probably does have therapeutic effects like other hallucinogenics, but, but, yes, definitely would need very careful research and not on animals that can't handle it. Like, dude.
And the dosaging needs to be exact and correct.
Yeah, yeah.
So anyway, so that was that one, elephants on acid. Yeah, nothing after Tuscopore died, nothing else happened.
Well, I'm going to cheer things up a bit. Because my next person, his name is Wilhelm Reich, and he was born in 1897 in Austria-Hungary. He was trained at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and joined the faculty at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1924.
So why am I going to cheer things up? Because he wrote a book called The Function of Orgasm in 1927.
There we go.
There we go. So this guy is a follower of Freud in some ways. If you know anything about psychiatry, then Freud related everything back to sex.
But usually in a real dark way, this guy was like a happy Freud. Happy Freud. So in The Function of Orgasm book, he termed the coin Orgastic Potency, which man is a good term.
And that is the ability to achieve an orgasm. So your Orgastic Potency is your ability to do that. And he believed that it was absolutely essential for your health to be able to orgasm regularly.
I mean, I'm all on board. Failure to do so leads to neurosis. So mental illness is probably a lot of it is just caused by people not orgasming enough.
I have so many comments. We'll continue.
Yeah, no, it's still... So he believed that the repressed feelings that you have if you don't orgasm enough also are manifested by having tense muscles and that you come up with this mental and physical armor that can only be overcome then by direct manipulation and making people aware of this tension. So he had some real progressive ideas, to say the least.
So due to his political and sexual ideas, he was actually kicked out of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1934 and the Communist Party. They were like, out.
I said he was born in Austria-Hungary, then he was in Berlin, Vienna, but he actually moved around a lot. So his political and sexual ideas were actually combined, which was pretty weird. So he actually is the one who coined the term sexual revolution, which I did not know.
So he believed that for a true political revolution to occur, that would only be possible once sexual repression was overthrown. So he married the ideas. He was a Marxist.
So he grew up in an area that was very fascist. He was a Marxist, originally part of the Communist Party, but more progressive and believed, you know what, if we're going to have a revolution first, we all got to be way, we got to orgasm a lot more and be a little more loose in our sexuality, then we can have our political overthrowing.
Then we can overthrow the government.
So he also, he coined this, well, I guess he started the idea of orgonomy, which is, if you look it up, it will call it a pseudoscience. So he believed that organs, okay, this is where it starts to get farfetched. So I hope you're paying attention because it's a little confusing.
He believed that organs or organ energy is a type of energetic life force. Okay.
Yeah, this just took a weird turn.
Yep, it exists all around. It is produced by bions, which are microscopic energy vesicles in a state of transition between the non-living and the living. I tried to like piece this together, and it was real confusing.
I still don't really know what he was saying, but basically there's organ energy all around us. And it stimulates our life force. And so mental illness is a deficiency in organ energy.
Okay. So how could we fix this? How can we fix this?
We could treat it by spending time in an organ energy accumulator, aka an organ box, which captures...
I'm so excited to hear what this is.
It captures and holds on to organ energy. It's about the size of a telephone booth. It's lined with metal and insulated with steel wool, and it would absorb this energy, contain it, and mysteriously cause the temperature to rise in this box.
That's how you knew there was organ energy in it.
Of course.
Which is just a closed box.
It has nothing to do with you breathing out.
Spending time in it can increase your orgasmic potency because of all this energy. So he used it to treat not just mental illness, but eventually physical illnesses such as cancer.
It's not as fun in the box as I was hoping it would be.
We'll just wait a teensy bit. Okay. So he actually asked Albert Einstein to investigate this box because he was such a believer in it.
Can you imagine being even, he did?
He did. He did. Albert Einstein invested the Orgastic Box and Orgon Box and refuted all of his claims.
So Einstein was like, this is BS. Which would be so disappointing for this guy who was like, no, he was so convinced. He was like, Einstein, come and prove me right.
And Einstein did, but Einstein even, that's even shocking in itself.
Maybe they knew each other from like Vienna or something.
Yeah, so this box became so popular in counterculture that it was used by some famous people, Norman Mailer, JD. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Alan Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. So famous people from the time.
Burroughs actually wrote, your intrepid reporter at age 30. Okay, this is where it gets good, Katy. So you go in this box, and it increases your orgasmic potency.
And he's like, this is true. Your intrepid reporter at age 37 achieves spontaneous orgasm. No hands in an organ accumulator built in an orange grove in far Texas.
What?
Like he just walked in there and orgasmed.
But also, why is it an orange grove in West Texas?
It's oddly specific. It must have been so memorable. He was like, listen, it was in an orange grove in far Texas.
So good, I didn't even have to touch. We are definitely going to have to put something in this episode. We'll have to record something different, edited it in.
But also, this was blowing my mind. So it says, at the height of his James Bond fame, Sean Connery swore by the device. What?
Sean Connery. Sean Connery wins. Sean Connery.
Well, because he seems like such a gentleman. Never mind, hold on, that's sex shaming. You can be a gentleman and still be into that.
Sorry, Sean Connery, RIP. And also Woody Allen parodied it in his movie Sleeper and gave it the immortal nickname of the Orgasmatron. So that's what I'm going to be referring to it now.
As of now on, yes.
It's now the Orgasmatron.
Orgasmatron, yes.
So because of all of his work and all of his beliefs and his crazy thoughts and stuff, he first moved to Denmark, then Sweden, then Norway, and then forced to flee to the US in 1939 after being accused of being a scientific charlatan. So of course the US embraced him with open arms. And he actually commercialized his Orgasmatron here in the US where people were all about it because a lot of people don't know the sexual revolution there's been many once before like the 60s.
Yeah, history repeats itself.
After World War II, he was very much in the eye of counterculture. So he actually was put under surveillance by the FBI because he was suspected of being a communist, of course. Which he was, but he was anti-Stalin, so he was a different type of communist.
He ended up rejecting politics and believed in a self-regulating sexual utopia. Termed, he just called it a work democracy. So work democracy, aka sexual utopia.
And though many of his followers believed in eroticized anarchy. And Kim, of course, has the best comment here. Kim says, this is the best thing I've ever read.
What a phrase. Also, I could get behind this. Double also, dude sounds horny and lonely.
Yeah, right?
But to anyone who would term themselves an eroticized anarchist, that is powerful. So his ideas were embraced by progressives and those who were disillusioned after World War II. I mean, yeah, the whole country went through it.
The whole world went through a terrible war, showed a lot of problems. So morality out of pleasure. So people, you know, his movement was actually like a spearhead for people and for people pushing back, still using the politics thing.
Like to be a political activist, people were like, you know what? I'm going to seek pleasure wherever I can and make my own morality. People who did this felt that they were sexually elite.
People who embraced his ideas wanted to shake off conformity and believed that conformity could lead to fascism. So that conformity is what led us to World War II, so it's true that. And it was also embraced by hipsters, which a lot of people also don't know that hipsters have been around for a while.
The original definition of a hipster is someone who follows the jazz musician lifestyle, aka smokes weed, uses slang, drugs, sarcastic humility, and relaxed sexual constraints.
Those hipsters.
Yeah, one person wrote, The hipster didn't need to dissect his desires on the couch because the orgasm is his therapy. Interesting. He knows at the seed of his being that good orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him.
I also feel like that needs to be on a t-shirt. Or something, kind of. I have been imprisoned by a bad orgasm.
I feel like everyone can relate to that.
Yes, definitely.
So all that said, Reich started to suffer from paranoid delusions, such as he was a big believer in that there were UFO attacks going on. He actually built an organ gun as both a defense and to influence the weather. He was just shooting this organ energy into space.
All the aliens, they were attacking, and then they were like...
But the weather? I don't know how it would affect the weather.
Yes, I was going to ask, what are they expected to do for the weather?
I don't know.
A lot of rain, a lot of rain.
Make it rain!
The FDA launched an investigation into him in 1947 because of his orgasmatron, and they actually filed an injunction against him in 1954 saying he could not sell these things anymore. They spent $2 million on investigation and prosecution of him. In the 50s.
Sounds like just a personal vendetta at that point.
In 1956, he was charged with violating his injunction, so he was still selling his orgasmatrons, and sentenced to two years in federal prison where he died.
Geez, that's intense. For selling a box.
A pleasure box. I guess it literally wasn't hurting anyone physically. So his writings and work were actually destroyed by the FDA from 1956 to 1960 in an extreme form of censorship, and everyone believes that it likely was an attempt to squash the sexual revolution and the fear of anarchy, because so many people were like, yes, this is such a good idea.
Sex, all the sex.
Yes, and so the FDA and the government and the super white, stiff-collared people in charge were like, mm-mm, because also a lot of people who were embracing this were women.
Of course, yeah.
They were really afraid that all these women were going to go out there and they were having sex willy-nilly and not listening to men, and there was going to be anarchy, and people were going to overthrow their government, all because they were just orgasming too much.
So leave it to the man to shut down the orgasmatron. Our happiness. The orgasmatron, and not only just throw this guy in federal prison where he died, but to burn all of his works, destroy everything, and nobody knows about him now.
But speaking of all of this though, if you want a surprisingly really good book to read, you need to get the book Come As You Are by Emily Negowski. First of all, kudos.
What an amazing book title. That's what it's about.
Yes, it's a sex book. So it's the surprising, Come As You Are, the surprising new sex, the surprising new science that will transform your sex life. And it actually, she dives into sex, what's going on in your brain, why some people can orgasm under situations when others can't.
It basically, like how some people have breaks and accelerators. It is a phenomenal book, and it actually gets into like the true science of what's going on in your brain. It is a phenomenal book.
Like, he was crazy in that. I mean, he eventually believed in the UFO attack thing and the whole Oregon energy, which has never been proven. But his premise of having a healthy mental state is because of orgasms.
Yeah, that is true, definitely to some point. We're still just primates, man.
Alright, well, that wraps up Crazy Researcher 2.0.
So yeah, apologies for anyone who was not expecting these topics. Also, this is our last episode of our season, and this is what we ended it on.
Can you believe it? This is episode, season three done.
I am so glad that we ended our season on orgasm.
I mean, it would make sense to.
And boom.
So we will be taking a break here with the holidays and everything, and then we'll be picking it back up. So make sure you just subscribe. So whenever we come back with season four, you'll be ready to listen to what other insanity we have to talk to you about.
You'll probably see us on, you know, you can engage with us on social media. We might be releasing something mini in the meantime, but we'll see how we both are. We've got a lot going on in life.
Yes, very much so. So, all right. Well, thank you guys, everybody, for a successful third season, and we will see you next season.
We love you and we'll see you then. Bye.