Authors: Alex Boese
Elephants on Acid
Elephants on Acid
and Other Bizarre Experiments
In the following pages you will encounter elephants on LSD, two-headed dogs, zombie kittens, and racing cockroaches—to name just a few of the oddities that await you. Some of these oddities might shock you. Others might amuse you. Still others might make you think, “That can’t be true!” However, I assure you, unless stated otherwise, it’s all true. This is definitely a work of nonfiction.
All of these strange phenomena share one thing in common: They have all played starring roles in scientific experiments. What you’re holding in your hands is a collection of the most bizarre experiments ever conducted. No knowledge of science is needed to appreciate them, just curiosity and an appreciation for the odd.
The criteria for inclusion: Did an experiment make me chuckle, shake my head in disbelief, grimace with disgust, roll my eyes, or utter a shocked exclamation? Did it force me to wonder what kind of imagination, twisted or brilliant, could have dreamed up such a thing? If so, it went on the
must include
pile. As for the question of scientific worth, some of these experiments are brilliant examples of the scientific method; others are not. Mad scientists, geniuses, heroes, villains, and fools all rub shoulders here.
I first encountered the bizarre-experiment genre in the mid-1990s as a graduate student studying the history of science at the University of California, San Diego. My formal studies focused on all the usual suspects—Darwin, Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Einstein, et al. But scattered throughout the texts assigned by my professors were references to little-known, intriguing tales about crackpots and mad experimenters. These secondary tales were far more interesting to me than the primary material I was supposed to be learning. Soon I found myself in the library chasing down those stories.
Fast-forward to 2005. I had built a kind of career—
kind of
because my friends and family insist what I do is too much fun to be a real job—out of studying another offbeat subject I encountered during the seven years I spent at grad school. That subject was hoaxes. Think Orson Welles’s 1938
War of the Worlds
broadcast or the Piltdown Man. I created a Web site about hoaxes,
museumofhoaxes.com
, and authored two books on the topic.
One day I was having lunch with my American editor, Stacia Decker. As we ate our meals, she told me about an unusual experiment involving a researcher who raced cockroaches. She had heard the story from her sister. Apparently, a scientist had built a little stadium, complete with stands in which other roaches could sit to watch the races. (You can read more about the roach stadium in chapter five.) Bizarre experiments would make a pretty good topic for a book, she suggested. It would, I agreed, as I thought back to all the material I had encountered in graduate school. The book you’re reading now is the result of that conversation.
Shifting from hoaxes to bizarre experiments continued my interest in weird stuff. But I also came to realize that hoaxes and bizarre experiments share many features in common.
An experiment starts when a researcher looks at a situation and thinks,
What would happen if I changed one part of this?
He or she performs an experimental manipulation and observes the results. A hoax proceeds in essentially the same way, except that the manipulation takes the form of an outrageous lie. Of course, as we’ll see throughout this book, the manipulations performed by researchers also frequently involve deception. Experimenters sometimes rehearse for days, perfecting the elaborate ruses they’re going to foist on their unsuspecting subjects. In these cases, the line separating hoaxes and experiments is almost indistinguishable.
The big difference between hoaxes and bizarre experiments is that experimenters wrap themselves in the authority of science. They claim as their motive the desire to advance knowledge, whereas hoaxers are often just trying to get a laugh or perpetrate a scam. This sense of gravity is what lends bizarre experiments their particularly surreal quality. It’s that odd combination of apparent seriousness—white-lab-coat-wearing researchers toiling dispassionately to further the limits of knowledge—mixed with a hint of mischief, eccentricity, or, in some cases, seeming insanity, that provides the frisson of weirdness. To preserve this effect, I’ve avoided including any experiments conducted in a spirit of jest. All the research in the following pages was undertaken quite seriously. To me, this makes these stories all the more fascinating.
Let me wrap up these introductory remarks by addressing a few questions that may occur to you as you read this book:
Hey, Where are the Nazis?
I wouldn’t mention this, except that the Nazi death-camp experiments are apparently what many people think of first when the subject of bizarre experiments comes up. At least, whenever I told people I was writing a book about bizarre experiments, the most common response I received was, “You mean, like the Nazi experiments?”
I have not included any Nazi research in this book. First, because I didn’t intend the book to be a catalog of atrocities. Second, because I wanted to explore actual scientific research—not sadistic torture disguised as science, which is what I consider the Nazi “experiments” to be.
How can one distinguish between the two? A couple of guidelines suggest themselves. First, once an experimenter starts purposefully killing people, his research instantly ceases to be legitimate. The second rule is more subtle: Genuine scientists publish their work. When a researcher submits his work for publication, he offers it up to the scrutiny of the scientific community. And when an established, respected journal accepts the submission, this suggests other scientists agree it deserves wider dissemination and consideration. It doesn’t mean the work is good science, or ethically justified—especially when judged by present-day standards. But it does mean that, for better or worse, the research cannot be denied a place in the history of science. Sometimes extenuating circumstances prevent a researcher from publishing his work, but 99 percent of the time, the publication rule is a useful guideline for identifying real science.
Where’s my favorite bizarre experiment?
Maybe there’s a bizarre experiment that’s a particular favorite of yours, and you discover that—uh-oh—it isn’t in here. It could happen. The book format does not permit unlimited space. Forced to pick and choose from a wide field of possibilities, I ultimately settled on ten themes, each of which became the focus of a chapter. If an experiment didn’t relate to one of these themes, I put it aside.
How can I find out more about an experiment?
I don’t dwell too long on any one subject. If all went as planned, this should make the book fast-paced and easy to read. I hope that people who wouldn’t normally read a book about science might enjoy these stories. I joke that it’s a toilet reader’s guide to science—which is why I have included chapter eight specifically for this audience.
This format means that each vignette presents a condensed account of what is often a very complex subject. I’ve placed a single reference at the end of each vignette. This reminds you that the story you just read is real. I wasn’t making it up. But I’ve also provided additional references at the end of the book so that readers can pursue in greater depth any topic that whets their interest.
One more comment, then I’ll let you get on to the good stuff—the experiments.
Although this book may, at first glance, resemble a kind of circus parade of oddities (led by an elephant on acid, no less), my intention is
not
to trivialize scientific research or the experimenters who appear in the following pages. Quite the opposite. To me, what these stories are really about is people consumed by insatiable curiosity.
The researchers who appear in the following pages—even the scariest and most eccentric ones—all share one virtue. They all looked at the world around them, and instead of taking what they saw for granted, they asked questions. Their questions might have been bizarre. They might even have been stupid. But often the most brilliant discoveries come from people willing to ask what might seem, at the time, to be dumb questions.
The danger of curiosity is that only in hindsight do people know whether it’s led them to brilliance or madness, or somewhere in between. Once you fall under its spell, you’re along for the ride, wherever it may take you.
Like the researchers I was writing about, I, too, experienced a kind of obsessive curiosity as I worked on this book. I spent months in the library, pulling dusty old journals down from shelves, eagerly flipping from one page to the next, always looking for something new that would catch my eye. The other library patrons must have wondered who
was
that odd man, chuckling as he read decades-old copies of the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Hopefully you’ll find these experiments as fascinating to read about as I found them to write about.
—Alex
April 2007
Frankenstein’s Lab
Beakers bubble over. Electricity crackles. A man hunches over a laboratory bench, a crazed look in his eyes.
This is the classic image of a mad scientist—a pale-skinned, sleep-deprived man toiling away in a lab full of strange machinery, delving into nature’s most forbidden and dreadful secrets. In the popular imagination, no one embodies this image better than Victor Frankenstein, the titular character of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. Gathering material from charnel houses and graves, he created an abomination—a living monster pieced together from the body parts of the dead. But he was just fictional, right? Surely no one has done that kind of stuff in real life. Well, perhaps no one has
succeeded
in creating an undead monster, but it hasn’t been for lack of trying. The history of science is full of researchers whose experiments have, like Frankenstein’s, gone well beyond conventional boundaries of morality and plunged them deep into the realms of the morbid and bizarre. These are the men—for some reason, they are all men—we meet in this chapter. Prepare yourself for zombie kittens, two-headed dogs, and other lab-spawned monstrosities.
“Frog soup,” Madame Galvani wheezed. “Make me some frog soup.” She had been sick in bed for over a week, aching, feverish, and suffering from a wracking cough. The doctor had diagnosed consumption. Frog soup, he assured her, was just the thing to put her on the road to recovery. She asked her servants to prepare some, and soon they were scurrying about, gathering the ingredients. Painfully, she forced herself out of bed to supervise. It was just as well she did so. She found them milling around, searching for somewhere to lay out the frogs. “Put them on the table in my husband’s lab,” Madame Galvani instructed. A servant obediently carried the tray of skinned frogs into the lab and set it down next to one of the doctor’s electrical machines. He picked up a knife and began to carve a frog, but just then a spark flew from the machine and touched the knife. Instantly the legs of the frog twitched and spasmed. Madame Galvani, who had followed the servant in, gasped in surprise. “Luigi, come quick,” she cried. “The most remarkable thing has just happened.”
In 1780 Luigi Galvani, an Italian professor of anatomy, discovered that a spark of electricity could cause the limbs of a dead frog to move. Nineteenth-century popularizers of science would later attribute this discovery to his wife’s desire for frog soup. Unfortunately, that part of the story is a legend. The reality is that Galvani was quite purposefully studying frogs, to understand how their muscles contracted, when a spark caused movement in a limb. However, the frog-soup story does have the virtue of restoring to his wife a greater role in the discovery than Galvani granted her—credit she probably deserves since she was a highly educated woman from a family of scientists. And Madame Galvani did develop consumption, and may well have been treated with frog soup. Unfortunately, the frog soup didn’t help her. She died in 1790.
A year after his wife’s death, Galvani finally published an account of the experiment. It caused a sensation throughout Europe. Many believed Galvani had discovered the hidden secret of life. Other men of science rushed to repeat the experiment, but it didn’t take them long to grow bored with frogs and turn their attention to more interesting animals.
What would happen
, they wondered,
if you wired up a human corpse?