Real life mad scientist

[J T]

This is an utterly disturbing, yet fascinating article about a once well-respected neurosurgeon in the 70s whose horrendous experiments nearly won him a nobel peace prize at one point.

At 3 pages, this may seem a little long for some, but it's a roller coaster of a ride to read about his life, so the time flies right by.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/ ... c-history/


Feel free to use this thread to simply discuss this article or to talk about other examples of real life mad scientists.

[MrPopo]

I've always seen the biggest challenge in medical research is the fact that while you can do a lot of testing in mice and other animals that can include things that are neigh guaranteed to result in death or permanent disability in order to isolate your variables you don't get that option once you make that final leap to humans. There's no "raise a bunch of lab humans, sever the spine, then try these various ways to regrow it" option in human testing.

[J T]

It's debatable that we should even do that kind of research on animals, though it is done all the time.

[MrPopo]

Indeed, but that fact just makes my original point that much more true. I remember in my psych classes going over some of the famous experiments that would be considered unethical today (Milgram and Stanford Prison) and those involved no physical intervention in the subjects. Testing of drugs and surgeries are 100% invasive and the fact that you don't get the ability to just set up a bunch of similar "practice dummies" makes it harder to do iterative research and control the variables to see what actually works and what doesn't.

[Ack]

If you ever want to venture down a rabbit hole of despair, look up Unit 731 sometime. Just...don't expect to like people as much when you finish.

[J T]

True. The research does happen sometimes though, albeit veerrrry slowwwly, since it requires so many ethical safeguards.

When I taught ethics sections in psych classes I usually taught about Milgram and the Stanford Prison Experiment too. I would also talk about the Tuskegee Syphilis study or MK Ultra, which were even more unethical. Of course, there are the really extreme things like Josef Mengele's Nazi experiments or Shiro Ishii's Unit 731 experiments.

[J T]

If you want to tumble around more down the rabbit hole after reading about Unit 731, as Ack and I mentioned, here is a laundry list of unethical human studies conducted in the United States.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethic ... ted_States

[Anapan]

Haven't read any of the articles yet, but it blew my mind when I listened to that radio interview and read the details of this guy who didn't know until he was really old that the reason he couldn't think well was because his new mom convinced his dad to give him an ice-pick (transorbital) lobotomy when he was 12 to settle him down about the new marriage.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=5016775

The stuff you can see on youtube about this procedure is really creepy - Walter Freeman really defended the procedure until his death - believed he help thousands of people who survived it. gah!

[MrPopo]

You're threatened with one in Burial at Sea part 2 for Bioshock Infinite. And by threatened I mean the pick is in the socket and tapped once or twice but not puncturing the skull, in first person.

[J T]

this guy who didn't know until he was really old that the reason he couldn't think well was because his new mom convinced his dad to give him an ice-pick (transorbital) lobotomy when he was 12 to settle him down about the new marriage.

Oh my god. I guess he had 100% reason to not feel settled about that new marriage if his step-mom was pushing for that happen to him! That is disturbing even for the time-period when the lobotomy was a relatively more mainstream procedure.

Dr. Heath also used to do frontal lobotomies, then narrowed it down to the topectomy procedure, which is similar but affects a smaller area of the pre-frontal cortex (though still not a good idea given that, you know, you kind of need that part of your brain for planning, organizing, and carrying out other executive functions). Then he got more interested in the septal area, which began his work of surgically implanting electrodes throughout the brain to stimulate the reward/pleasure centers of the brain, such as the nucleus accumbens. Since these parts of the brain are more towards its center, these were very invasive surgical procedures. You can download video to see one of his patients with the implants here: http://wireheading.com/robert-heath.html

A large part of what I find disturbing about the electrode implants of the first article, or this related issue of frontal lobotomies, is that I can see how they caught on. I can see why people trusted him. Few people understand neuroscience now, and even less so back then. He worked in high status jobs with other high status doctors. He looks and speaks respectably. I found this YouTube video where you can see how he presents himself in a friendly interview about his work. And his ideas weren't entirely wrong; for example, the nucleus accumbens is still considered a vitally important area of the brain for our experience of reward and pleasure, and its possible to say that he played some role in developing that understanding. He was just willing to subject his patients to extremely high risk procedures, and he was willing to take advantage of vulnerable populations to do his research, namely poor black people in Louisiana. He was also really confident and would overstate claims about what he could do while downplaying the adverse consequences of his procedures. In other words, he was a bad scienist. It seems like he would be easy to trust, which he had to be in order to get permission to scrape around in people's brains to see what would happen. Creepy.

Now, I don't want to sound like I'm railing against the entire field of neurosurgery. I have seen it save lives first hand. That being said, even though there have been huge advances in our understanding of the brain since the years Dr. Heath was practicing, we still have a quite limited understanding. The brain's functions are understood in fairly broad strokes. The science is getting more refined, but they are still broad strokes. Just as one example, glial cells, which make up about 70-90% of the brain, have only begun to be understood as important in the last 25 years because so much prior research focused on neurons, which are more obviously vital to brain function. Glial cells were grossly misunderstood for awhile. It went from 'we don't know what glial cells do' to 'glial cells are not known to do anything important' to 'glial cells are junk cells that just provide structural support' to 'wait a minute, glial cells are actually pretty important for a variety of reasons!' The popular notion that we only use 10% of our brain (which is incredibly wrong by the way), stems from the idea that the neurons took about 10% and the glial cells took up about 90%. This major misunderstanding and later advance in understanding is something I've seen unfold in my lifetime. Even more dramatic, is that it was recently found that there is a bug in the software for fMRI brain scans which puts over 400,000 research projects into question!

I've gone on a bit of a tangent, but my point is simply to say that brain surgery requires a high degree of caution because the brain is a delicate organ that isn't entirely understood. Neurosurgery is mostly reserved for patients who are in an otherwise hopeless situation and have major brain hemorrhage, a stroke, blunt force damage, hydroencephalus, or some other issue where things are going to get mortally worse without some sort of intervention. The idea that it would be used to treat more minor problems like feeling unsettled about your Dad's new wife or non-problems like being gay, is just horrific.