The Icepick Surgeon: The Icepick Surgeon bonus notes

Chapter One: Piracy

Remember the scene where Dampier was overjoyed to nab some parrots, despite the raid on the town going bust? Sadly, the parrots didn’t last long. Shortly after pushing off from shore, Spanish ships appeared on the horizon to chase the pirates, and they had to toss the birds overboard to shed weight, along with several barrels of beef and many, many chickens.

Rather than become a pirate, Dampier could have tried establishing himself in a legitimate trade at some point. Throughout his travelogues, in fact, he mentioned several different schemes to make money, involving cloves and ambergris and other coveted goods. But for whatever reason—indifference, lack of capital, a desire to keep doing natural history—he never committed himself.
…………..I suspect that his love of botany and zoology was the determining cause. It wouldn’t have been impossible to keep doing scientific work as a merchant. But merchant ships were often heavy and cumbersome; pirates traveled lean and covered more ground. Plus, merchants were so focused on their cargo that they rarely strayed from the safety of established haunts. Pirates were less conservative and more willing to try their luck in parts unknown to them.

Beyond the eight tons of marmalade they nabbed once, on another occasion Dampier’s crew seized some stores of cocoa—after which, quite charmingly, they began raiding local farms for sugar, hoping to whip up some chocolate treats for themselves.

In one of his less-admirable qualities, Dampier was prone to pouting and even throwing temper tantrums if someone contradicted his judgment. On one buccaneering voyage, when the crew’s food was running low and the ship needed to steer for land immediately, Dampier suggested taking a certain course and was furious to be overruled: “I was so dissatisfied that I turned into my Cabin,” he wrote, “and told them we should all be starved.” They weren’t, obviously.

Beyond biology, Dampier showed flashes of brilliance in other scientific fields. He was well-schooled in the chemistry of making lime (which sailors used to scrub their keels clean) and knew several ways to kill worms with chemicals. Moreover, he showed real engineering chops. In one book, he found himself on an island that lacked fresh water near the shore. So he outlined a scheme to build an entire plumbing system to channel water from an inland spring. For whatever reason, nothing ever came of his plan.

Two quinine factoids:
…………..Quinine undermines malaria by interfering with the ability of the parasite to digest red blood cells, its favored food. And while the parasite has developed some resistance to the drug in the past few centuries, it’s still a decently effective medicine today.
…………..Despite its poor husbandry of cinchona trees, the Peruvian government admired the tree enough to put one on the coat of arms when the country won its independence from Spain in the 1820s. It’s still on there today.

Again, Dampier did have some less-than-enlightened attitudes about the people he encountered in different parts of the world, but even his harshest criticisms are usually tempered with understanding. For instance, he once called the inhabitants of a certain island in the Philippines “very lazy,” but noted that this wasn’t their fault. “These People’s laziness seems rather to proceed not so much from their natural inclinations, as from the severity of their Prince of whom they stand in awe: For he dealing with them very arbitrarily, and taking from them what they get, this damps their Industry, so they never strive to have any thing but from Hand to Mouth.” It’s an economic criticism more than anything—how despotic and arbitrary rulers can undermine people’s will to work.
           It’s also interesting to note that many of the unflattering descriptions of natives did not appear in the original drafts of Dampier’s book manuscripts; rather, they were inserted later, right before printing. As for why they were added, no one knows, but some historians suspect that Dampier’s publishers leaned on him to include them, to make his story more sensational for readers.

Speaking of which, I encourage you to read Dampier’s travelogues yourself—but know that they can be tough sledding for modern readers. He didn’t live in an age when people felt compelled to sculpt their lives into a Grand Narrative; to them, life was just one damned thing after another. As a result, his books lack any sort of coherent story or sequence. They’re more of a hodgepodge, and he veers wildly between topics sometimes, which can be both charming and trying at turns.

The last years of Dampier’s life are dim and obscure. We don’t even know when he died exactly (sometime around March 1715, when his will was proved), and he lies in an unmarked grave in an unknown place.

Chapter Two: Slavery

As noted, Smeathman guessed that the termite Bugga Bug mounds had the ability to self-regulate their own temperature and airflow. Scientists now know that he was correct. The key seems to be the mounds’ height and conical shape. In short, they’re tall enough to catch breezes and redirect fresh air to their interiors. This helps remove any residual heat from all those little busybodies inside and ensures a constant flow of oxygen. Cleverly, certain shopping malls in Africa have copied design elements of Bugga Bug mounds, and can be heated and cooled using just 10 percent of the normal energy requirements.
…………..For what it’s worth, Smeathman also seemed to have a modern understanding of how vital flies and termites and other insects are to ecosystems in general. As he wrote, “We should feel the want of one or two species of large quadrupeds much less than of one or two species of these despicable-looking insects.” Termites, for instance, decompose something like 60 percent of all the dead wood in certain rainforests, cleaning up vast amounts of biological garbage. They’re also the base of the food chain for many other, more charismatic species.

Some tribes in and around Sierra Leone worshipped termite Bugga Bug mounds as totems: they apparently believed that the original inhabitants of their land, a race of pygmies, lived inside them. Given all of Smeathman’s gushing about the mounds, you get the feeling at times that he felt no less reverence in their presence.

Just like the pirate William Dampier, Smeathman could turn a pretty phrase, and he actually had a charming and self-deprecating sense of humor as well. Here are a few passages I enjoyed.
…………..First, an amusing description of his stepping onto some fallen trees that termites had hollowed out: “These excavated trees have deceived me two or three times in running: for, attempting to step two or three feet high, I might as well have attempted to step upon a cloud, and have come down with such unexpected violence, that, besides shaking my teeth and bones almost to dislocation, I have been precipitated, head foremost, among the neighbouring trees and bushes.”
…………..Second, a thought-provoking comparison of how differently humans and termites react to disasters. When termites sense danger, he notes, all the soldiers rush forward and the laborers spring to action to fix the breach in their mound. In this, Smeathman comments, “they shew more good sense than the bulk of mankind, for, in case of a conflagration in a city, the number of people who assemble to stare is much greater than of those who come to assist, and the former always interrupt and hinder the latter in their efforts. The sudden retreat of the labourers, in case of an alarm, is also a wonderful instance of good order and discipline, seldom seen in populous cities, where we frequently find helpless people, women, and children, without any ill intention, intermixing in violent tumults and dangerous riots.”

The name Majoe bitters presents something of a mystery for historians. Again, a grey-haired slave woman named Majoe used the bark of this plant to treat yaws, a syphilis-like skin disease. But it’s not clear how a woman born in Africa learned that this New World plant—one she’d presumably never seen before being transported across the ocean—was an effective medicine. Perhaps she simply had a knack for botany. Or perhaps she learned this fact from native Indians. Slaves often mixed with and formed alliances with natives, since both were the enemies of European settlers. So perhaps Majoe drew upon the Indians’ knowledge of foods and drugs.

Regarding the story of the rebellious slaves who were forced to kill and eat their co-conspirator: it’s not clear whether they ate the organs “voluntarily” or had to be force-fed. But if forced, the ship’s crew might have used a device called a “speculum oris”: it was essentially a lever that wrenched open the mouths of slaves who refused to eat, a common method of attempting suicide on the voyages over. Then doctors would jam food down their gullets.

Again, Smeathman sent certain slaves that he purchased to the Americas. In a letter to one of his sponsors—tellingly, not Fothergill the abolitionist—he mentions a sea voyage and then asks the sponsor to “be so good as to insure to me on slaves and my collections, books, drawings, philosophical instruments, cloaths, etc. £500.” He then changes his mind, adding, “The £500 will probably be best to be made on my collections only, as I value them at much more.”

Smeathman had grand dreams of making his fortune through collecting specimens. But little did he know that one of his sponsors, Dru Drury, was double-dealing behind his back. Drury specialized in insects, especially beetles, and unlike most other types of specimens, a few boxes of insects did reach England while Smeathman was still in Sierra Leone. Under the terms of his contract, Smeathman was entitled to keep and sell any duplicates he sent Drury. Drury, however, was taking these beetles—some of which were so opulent that he described their hue as more “resembl[ing] a flame than a mere colour”—and selling them to rich, ignorant merchants at steeply inflated prices. Drury did channel some of this money back to Smeathman, but the whole arrangement was shady.

Henry Smeathman didn’t say the following statement—a man named Henry Coor did—but I think it accurately describes the flycatcher’s moral slide as well: “At my first coming to the island, a common flogging of a Negro would have put me in a tremble … but by degree and custom, it became so habitual that I thought no more of seeing a Black man’s head cut off than I should not think of a butcher cutting off the head of a calf.”

In the book I mentioned James Cleveland, the rascally fellow from a respectable family who got shipwrecked on the Banana Islands and declared himself king. Apparently some people held grudges against him. After James’s death, another pirate raided the Bananas, and one of his prized pieces of booty was the late king’s headstone. The pirate returned home to a different island and installed the headstone on a footpath in a cemetery there, to force people to tread on it whenever they entered.

One reason that Smeathman’s farming colony for free blacks in Sierra Leone struggled to take off was that the venture lost the support of the Quaker Church. Normally, the Quakers would have been natural allies for a scheme like this, but Smeathman insisted on giving guns to the black settlers, both to hunt with and (perhaps more importantly) defend themselves against local slave-raiders, both black and white, who would inevitably try to capture and sell them. As pacifists, the Quakers refused to support any venture that involved guns, no matter how much good it might do. I guess you can admire the Quakers for being consistent, but this seems like a classic case of putting principles above people.

As noted, the Swedes Carl Wadström and Anders Sparrman made a strong humanitarian case for ending slavery. They succeeded in part because they were scientists and therefore had (as Aristotle might have said) ethos out the wazoo. Crucially, though, the duo also made strong economic arguments against slavery, and thereby appealed to people’s selfish interests: abolish slavery, they said, and your pocketbook will benefit.
…………..Perhaps most importantly, they noted that many Africans were eager to grow corn, sugar, tobacco, cotton, rice, and indigo—all of which were prized goods in Europe. But as the slave trade ramped up, Africans began refusing to work even in their own fields, since doing so exposed them to raids. The Swedes also described the waste of enslaving (or inadvertently killing) talented African craftsman: “I have seen buckles,” they reported, “that could not have been better made by any European goldsmith.” In all, the local Africans were “as capable of being in all respects brought to the highest perfection, as those of any white civilized nation.”

Incidentally, one person who argued that people should listen to Wadström and Sparrman precisely because they were scientists—and were therefore trustworthy—was the abolitionist William Wilberforce. Students of science history will likely recognize that last name, as William was the father of the notorious Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce. The son later made it his mission to destroy Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and once squared off with Thomas Henry Huxley in a legendary debate. Whereas the father revered scientists, “Soapy Sam” had a less rosy view.

The interplay of slavery and science in the late 1700s also led to another crime—the infamous mutiny on the Bounty.
…………..Among the many wonders described by pirate William Dampier was the breadfruit, a fleshy staple food in southeast Asia and Oceania. A century later, the powerful British scientist Joseph Banks visited Tahiti and was equally impressed: breadfruits are quite fecund, and require little care to flourish. So when Banks returned to England, he convinced the government to dispatch HMS Bounty to Tahiti in 1789 to grab breadfruit plants and transplant them to the Caribbean as a new food crop for African slaves. To this end, the Bounty’s crew included two botanists.
…………..Partway through the journey, however, disaffected crew members rebelled and overthrew the captain, William Bligh. In the scrum, one of the botanists was murdered. The mutineers set the rest of those loyal to Bligh adrift on a small boat. Miraculously, Bligh’s little crew reached land before dying, and eventually wound their way back to Britain. Bligh returned to sea not long afterward and a few years later did successfully transfer the breadfruits to the Caribbean. The only thing was, the African slaves refused to eat them, since they’d never seen the stuff before in their lives and thought it tasted funny.

Some historians have suggested that one reason slaves and indigenous people were denied credit for collecting specimens was that scientists back then were consciously striving to strip away all subjective, personal elements from science and focus solely on the increase of knowledge. To this way of thinking, who collected a specimen didn’t matter, only the knowledge gleaned from it. And there probably is some truth to that. But if the naturalists in charge were truly consistent here, they would have blotted out their own names from scientific books and papers and remained anonymous—and that, of course, rarely happened.
…………..Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to rectify this situation. The records necessary to credit slaves and indigenous people simply do not exist, so they will likely remain anonymous forever.

Chapter Three: Grave-Robbing

Burke and Hare’s method for snuffing people out—now called “burking”—was so stealthy and hard to detect that some scientists back then charged that a crooked anatomist must have taught them the technique. But Burke always denied this. They’d simply gotten lucky.

It wasn’t just human beings that Burke and Hare were callous with. After one double murder, Hare stuffed the bodies into a herring barrel and procured a horse and cart to haul them to Robert Knox’s dissection lab. But something about the scene—perhaps the scent—spooked the horse, and it refused to pull the cargo. Cursing, Hare scrounged up a porter with a wheelbarrow instead. Then he returned to the stubborn horse, led it behind his house, and shot it.

Daft Jamie reportedly had the ability to tell you the day of the week of any date in history, past or future. Pick June 11th, 1458, for instance, and he’d instantly know it was a Sunday. Given Jamie’s behavior, and the fact that many autistic people also possess this calendrical skill, there’s a good chance Jamie was autistic as well.
…………..Incidentally, the same assistant that recognized Daft Jamie on the dissecting table had earlier recognized another victim of Burke and Hare’s, an 18-year-old prostitute named Mary. This later fueled speculation that the young assistant and the young courtesan might have been secret lovers, but no hard evidence of this has ever emerged.

Many of those who were hanged and dissected in eighteenth-century Britain were murderers and rapists, and it’s hard to feel much sympathy for them. But given how common capital punishment was back then, there are sadder cases, too. A thief named William Signal was sentenced to death in 1752 for robbing a traveler on a highway. Desperately poor, he had no decent clothes to ascend the scaffold in, so he pre-sold his body to a surgeon. He then bought a new suit simply to look presentable for his hanging.

In the chapter I mentioned a French playwright who complained that public dissections were cutting into the audiences for his shows. It wasn’t just in France, either. Public dissections were considered high entertainment across Europe, and a charismatic anatomist could pack the house night after night. In Padua, they even incorporated intermissions with live musical acts whenever the anatomist needed a break.

Some student robbed graves for the sport and danger of it, but not all. At least some students robbed graves out of necessity, in exchange for a break on tuition and fees.

With regard to criminal charges for stealing bodies and violating graves, some historians have pointed out that many young British surgeons found themselves in an impossible bind. If they performed a procedure poorly and harmed a patient, they could be sued for malpractice. Yet if they tried to practice on a cadaver and improve their skills, they could be arrested for that, too. Damned if you don’t, damned if you do.

Again, children were the most valuable anatomical specimens. Among adults, anatomists had a hierarchy of preference. Hanged criminals were at the top. In addition to being scoundrels that no one cared about, they were usually young and fit and hadn’t died of some disease that wrecked their anatomies. That said, a rare or exotic disease was also highly prized, since doctors might see only one or two cases in their careers. At the bottom of the hierarchy were the old and sick—better than dissecting nothing, but avoided if possible.

One caveat on the role of the Catholic Church in allowing dissections. Pope Boniface VIII did issue a papal bull in 1300 that forbid cutting up bodies, and some Church scholars interpreted this as a ban on dissections. But most ignored it as time went on, especially for the purpose of educating doctors. And some scholars argue that the real purpose of the bull had nothing to do with science or medicine. It was to prevent people from chopping up soldiers who’d died in the Holy Land during the Crusades, in order to make it easier to ship the bodies home.

The £500 John Hunter spent on the body of Charles Byrne was a ridiculous amount, but Hunter never stinted when it came to procuring items for his collection. In fact, he rarely indulged in luxuries, and channeled every dollar that came into hands toward his obsession. As one historian put it, “It was flesh for his dissecting table, not meat for the dining table, alcohol for his preparation bottles, not wine for his palate, that Hunter desired.”

Goliath beetles, native to Africa, are some of the largest insects on earth, and when rumors about them first started to trickle back to England in the late 1700s, everyone and their mother wanted to get their hands on one for their natural history cabinet. Through a combination of connections and luck, John Hunter’s brother William secured one of the first goliaths, which made several rival collectors sick with envy.
…………..One such rival was Dru Drury, one of the cosponsors of Henry Smeathman’s slavery-tainted collecting mission in Sierra Leone. And, unable to contain himself, Drury resorted to some slimy tactics to pull one over on Hunter.
…………..Members of the famous Royal Society scientific club had to pay dues to join, either a small yearly fee or one larger, lump-sum lifetime fee. The society officer who processed the money was one Emmanuel da Costa, who, alas, was a crook: whenever a member paid a lifetime fee, da Costa would enter it on the books as yearly dues and pocket the difference. It took a while for anyone to notice the discrepancies, which eventually grew to £1,100 ($95,000 today). Da Costa was quickly jailed, and his possessions seized.
…………..Well, one of the possessions seized was a drawing of the goliath beetle. Hunter was actually quite generous about loaning his bugs to others, provided he got “credit” for owning them. Da Costa had duly sketched the beetle, and the paper got seized along with his other goods. Somehow Dru Drury got his hands on the confiscated drawing and published it in a popular book. As a result, he (Drury) ended up getting credit among scientists for “discovering” the beetle—which pissed Hunter off no end. But all’s fair in love and natural history.

I can’t resist adding this story, however tangential.
…………..In the chapter I mentioned that a rival of Robert Knox dissected Burke’s body and displayed it as posthumous punishment. This anatomist’s name was Alexander Monro, and he’s often considered one of the worst teachers in the history of pedagogy.
…………..Monro actually came from an illustrious scientific family: he was the third straight Alexander Monro to occupy the professorship of anatomy at his university in Edinburgh, and he was sometimes called Tertius (the third) as a result. But whereas his predecessors were vigorous and active, Tertius was lazy and dull. He was especially reviled for his lectures, during which he’d recite, in monotone, the exact same lectures his grandfather had delivered a century before—right down to the line, “when I was a student in Leyden in 1719…” In truth, Tertius hadn’t even been born until 1773.
…………..His students, though, actually looked forward to this line about Leyden: it soon became an annual tradition to smuggle peas into the classroom on the day he was scheduled to recite it and pelt him when he did.

Chapter Four: Murder

File under “two degrees of separation”: the young man who inadvertently started the riot by waving the dead woman’s arm was actually a student of a disciple of John Hunter’s. He apparently inherited his master’s master’s ruthless attitude about dissections.

Harvard folks were never shy about taking advantage of their privilege in court, but the Webster murder case gave non–Harvard alums a bit of ammunition to fire back. Not long after Webster swung from the gallows, a lawyer in a Boston court began cross-examining a witness a little harshly. The judge stepped in, and warned the lawyer that this was a Harvard man he was dealing with. The attorney snapped back: “Yes, I know. We hanged one the other day.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. actually occupied the endowed Parkman Chair of Anatomy at Harvard Medical School—named after guess-who. And speaking of professor’s titles, one grim detail that I uncovered while writing this chapter was that Harvard actually had a joint professorship of “obstetrics and medical jurisprudence.” Apparently infanticide was so common then that they felt the two disciplines naturally went together.

The jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. would of course go on to become more famous than his father the anatomist, and believe it or not, the same thing would happen with George Parkman’s son. Francis Parkman became a legendary historian, and even wrote a book with a title that might sound familiar: The Oregon Trail.

Parkman did dabble in philanthropy at times: he’d previously donated an organ and a piano to a lunatic asylum. But the donation of the medical school land was out of character for him. In fact, Parkman probably would have gone down in history as a joyless, greedy S.O.B. if he hadn’t been murdered. And some of his peers suspected that even donation of the land was a scam. The details are a bit fuzzy, but Parkman appeared to donate that property at the same time he sold another parcel of land on which the city built a new jail. The donated land was free, obviously, but city officials appraised the land for the jail at far, far beyond its actual value, netting Parkman a sweet payday. A later mayor even tried to void the prison-land deal, but it was too far along.
…………..This wasn’t Parkman’s only shady dealing, either: on another occasion he helped a brother of his slip town and escape prosecution for forgery.

There are rumors out there that the Webster murder case introduced the phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt” into the judicial system—those words being the burden of proof that a jury needed to convict someone. That’s false; the phrase had been used before. But not often: “reasonable doubt” was still a novel concept for most people then.
…………..Furthermore, the judge in the trial did create some important law with regard to the phrase. When the closing statements finished, he gave the jurors detailed instructions on how to interpret it, as well as some insightful thoughts on how the concept of “reasonable doubt” should guide their deliberation and decision. So while the phrase had appeared before, some of our modern understanding of it did indeed emerge from this trial.

Oddly enough, Webster was quite a familiar face in the Cambridge courtroom—although usually as a witness, since he often testified during murder cases, especially about arsenic poisoning.

As of the 21st century, anatomists have a good grasp on the normal variation in size and shape for glands and organs in the human body. But poverty—and specifically, the chronic stress that comes with poverty—can still change how our bodies work in ways we don’t quite understand yet. That’s especially true of brain architecture and epigenetic DNA tags, both of which seem to differ in the chronically poor.

At least some medical schools nowadays accept bodies from euthanasia programs—cases where people with terminal illnesses end their lives voluntarily. But as you can imagine, these donations raise several ethical issues: these people are vulnerable, both physically and mentally, and some critics of these donations fear that the patients might face pressure (inadvertent or otherwise) to hurry up and end their lives already and donate their bodies.

Again, the dissection of Parkman’s sternum, clavicle, and ribcage showed an expert hand, and testimony to this effect helped doom Webster. But a few of the Harvard anatomists also testified that the dissection of the hip sockets (necessary to free the legs from the pelvis) betrayed some clumsiness—the mark of someone who kind of knew what he was doing but was out of practice. Again, this description fit Webster the ex-doctor exactly.
…………..Incidentally, Parkman’s remains were buried shortly after their discovery—but in a sealed coffin filled with anatomical spirits, to preserve them in case the police needed to unearth him later for closer study.

To be clear, the Webster murder case was not the first time that anatomical experts ever testified in court. By that point, in fact, a university in Edinburgh had had a chair in “medical jurisprudence and police” since 1807. But the case did provide a big boost for forensic anatomy in the United States, making far more people familiar with it. And while most previous cases had involved intact bodies, the Webster evidence was derived solely from leftover limb shanks and a ribcage. The anatomists didn’t even have a head—yet they positively identified Parkman’s body. The use of dental forensics was also innovative.

Another Harvard alum involved in the trial, the Cambridge town marshal, Francis Tukey, was an out-and-out scoundrel. In his youth Tukey got mixed up in bootlegging, and once beat up and then tarred and feathered a police snitch who’d testified against him. He was later accused (no one knows how truthfully) of embezzlement, seducing Sunday school teachers, and having sex with dead bodies. In sum, one newspaper denounced him as “a three-cent rumseller, a homicide, a thief, and a suborner in perjury. A riper gallows apple never dangled between two uprights than this same lawbreaker.” Yet after all this, he somehow gained admission to Harvard Law School and won an election for city marshal.

To Webster’s credit, after he tried to pin the blame on Littlefield in court, he did try to make amends and invited the janitor to his cell after his conviction. There, the two men reconciled. But public scorn for the professor besmirched the name of Harvard for years to come. As late as 1870, an old woman in Massachusetts refused to let a scholar stay overnight at her home because, she said, she could never fall asleep “if one of those Harvard professors was in the house.” This supposed maniac was James Russell Lowell, a poet and literary critic and possibly the least likely killer imaginable.

Chapter Five: Animal Cruelty

Some notes about George Westinghouse.
…………..Westinghouse had one of those minds that was always churning up new ideas, sometimes during the most unexpected moments. As a little boy, his father tried whipping him one day for unruliness, but the switches kept breaking. Through his tears, the little boy informed his father that if he really wanted to make a good job of it, he should try a leather whip instead.
…………..Westinghouse first came to prominence for inventing an air-brake system for trains. Just like with Edison and the lightbulb, many people had tried to build a practical air brake before him, but Westinghouse alone succeeded, and did so at just 22 years old. This device allowed trains to stop within a reasonable distance, in part because engineers could apply the brake to the whole train all at once, rather than each car individually, the way they had to before.
…………..In business dealings, Westinghouse could be gruff. Unlike Edison, he scorned publicity as flimflam. And he could be cutthroat, too. He sometimes bribed patent inspectors to get his applications reviewed before those of his rivals. And when he couldn’t get patents, he simply infringed on other people’s right and refused to pay royalties.

I glossed over it in the chapter, but in addition to lethal injections and electrocution, the committee trying to revamp the death penalty in New York did consider two other methods of death that might kill people without suffering—the guillotine and the firing squad. The first was rejected for its association with the French Revolution, the second for its association with South American juntas.

In the chapter, I sort of lump Alfred Southwick—the Buffalo dentist who killed dogs from the pound—with Harold Brown, the Edison lackey who killed dogs, horses, and calves. But there was one big difference between them. Southwick’s work wasn’t exactly Nobel Peace Prize fodder, but he at least dispatched his animals painlessly. Brown didn’t. Indeed, his goal was to torment them, to stamp into people’s mind the association between alternating current and pain.

There were many reasons for rejecting Brown’s experiments on animals, including the needless cruelty he inflicted and the fact that the work was completely unsystematic. Westinghouse pointed out another. During Brown’s experiments, he purposely clamped the electrodes onto the most vulnerable parts of the animal’s bodies, meaning the chances of death were far higher. At a power plant, in contrast, people would probably touch things accidentally with their hands, a far less damaging point of contact.

When given a chance to make a final statement, Kemmler complained about how the newspapers had consistently misrepresented him as a bad guy. This seems a little rich, given how brutally he killed his wife. But without any sense of shame, the reporters who witnessed his execution repeated these slanders against them in their stories the next day.

I mentioned in the chapter that it’s almost a cliché nowadays to read about some miracle cure for cancer or whatever in mice—and then to watch that “cure” flop in human beings. Well, to help temper expectations for rodent research—and remind us of the vast biological gulf between mice and humans—there’s actually a Twitter account called @justsaysinmice that automatically appends the phrase “IN MICE” to overhyped research stories.

Although almost all power generated today is AC power, the technology for DC transmission has improved by leaps and bounds recently. In particular, it’s now much easier to “step up” the pressure-voltage for DC power, allowing you to send it down powerlines in an efficient manner and then step it down for safe use in the home. Given how entrenched AC is, DC power transmission probably isn’t imminent, but it could make a comeback eventually.

There’s a rumor out there that Edison and Tesla were supposed to split the 1915 Nobel Prize in physics but that they refused to share it with each other. That doesn’t appear to be true, even though one newspaper did report this. According to the official Nobel Prize database, Tesla was not even nominated in 1915, although Edison was.

For whatever reason, certain scientists in Germany were obsessed with the biological effects of electricity. As one historian noted, “electrical experiments had become such a popular fad in Germany that officials banned tests with the severed heads of executed criminals.” Even more gruesomely, one German researcher started killing kittens, extracting their spinal columns, pouring a molten silver-zinc alloy into the cavity, and running electric currents through their bodies. He claimed he could induce the kittens to open their eyes and hop around, which seems like obvious hogwash.

He’s a vivid picture of what Brown looked like: a reporter one described him as “a tall young man, who looked as if his face had been cast in a waxen mould [sic] and some of the wax had adhered to it in spots.”

In the 1910s, after reading about the electric chair, an official in Canton, China, thought it would be perfect for killing criminals there, too. So he wrote a letter to the United States asking to buy one. Oddly, though, he wrote the letter to Montgomery Ward, the mail-in retail company, as if the electric chair were nothing more than a dishwasher or some other consumer item.

Again, I know that Edison isn’t popular nowadays, especially among the Very Online, but he was a pretty amazing fellow, holding well over a thousand U.S. patents. Still, I recognize his flaws as well. I think this quote from a historian sums up the two Edisons quite nicely. “In 1879, Edison was a bold and courageous inventor. In 1889, he was a cautious and conservative defender of the status quo.”

Edison’s sense of humor could be cruel, too. Given the long hours he worked, Edison rarely saw his family, and was completely unsympathetic to his wife’s chronic health problems after the birth of their third child. He once sketched a caricature of her that he labeled “Stillsick,” a dig on her maiden name of Stillwell. That said, Edison did have a sweet side, too—if a bit nerdy. After his first wife died, he began courting another women, in part by teaching her Morse code. They used to spend long carriage rides tapping sweet nothings to each on the palms of their hands. Finally, Edison asked her one day, . – – .. . –.. . –.. / –.– – – – – .. – / – – . – . –. . –. –.– – / – – . .. – –.. Will you marry me? Of course she answered –.– – . …

One overlooked but probably significant factor in the botched Kemmler execution was this: In a bit of macabre showmanship, the electric chair’s designers had bolted a row of 36 lightbulbs over it, which glowed whenever the chair was getting current. It looked impressive, and assured the witnesses that current was indeed running through the circuits. (You’d think that the prisoner’s body jerking and jolting would have been clue enough, but I digress.) Unfortunately, as any first-year electrical engineering student could have told you, the current running through the lightbulbs necessarily siphoned power from the rest of the circuit—lowering it from a lethal dose to one that was merely torturous.

In the anatomy chapter, I mentioned that “executed” criminals sometimes woke up on the dissection table—or didn’t wake up, and actually died of being cut open alive. Sadly, many of the dogs dispatched by Edison’s crew probably died in the same way. The electric shock had merely stunned them, and the subsequent autopsy was the real cause of death. We know this because it was not uncommon for the autopsy doctor to find the dog’s heart still-beating in its chest.

Given the limitations of the technology then, Edison’s DC regime was probably doomed from the start. But it wasn’t inevitable that Westinghouse would triumph and become the market leader: there were other AC firms he had to compete with. In fact, a series of setbacks nearly doomed Westinghouse’s company. The main problem was inertia—the human resistance to change. Tesla’s AC system worked best at 60 Hz, but most other AC equipment had been designed for other frequencies. And despite the superiority of Tesla’s machines, other Westinghouse engineers—who were perhaps jealous of the Serbian—refused to convert or change their designs. As a result, the Westinghouse firm plunged into a deep financial hole from which it barely recovered.

Chapter Six: Sabotage

Cope wasn’t the only person that Marsh delighted in exposing. Marsh actually loved traveling to circuses and country sideshows and unmasking supposed mermaids and giants and mummies as hoaxes. He even got to know P.T. Barnum, from whom he bought exotic animal skeletons, including kangaroos and sharks.

To protect against bandits out West, Cope’s crew sometimes sewed money into the lining of their trousers, a trick they called “banking.”

William Hosea Ballou, the scurrilous New York Herald reporter, once called Cope even more brilliant than Charles Darwin, and Cope more or less agreed with him. Cope even tried to outdo Darwin once with a long paper called “On the Origin of Genera”—as if one-upping Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

In the Herald rebuttal, Marsh aired all the allegations against Cope about antedating his papers in order to secure priority for discovering certain species first. Cope had denied the charges, saying that they resulted from printing errors. Marsh noted in the Herald that such errors do happen. But he marveled that every last one of them in this case worked in Cope’s favor. “Assuming them to be errors,” Marsh wrote, “the law of chances has evidently made an exception for his special benefit.”

In addition to supposedly challenging Marsh to a posthumous brain weigh-off, Cope also allegedly offered up his skeleton as the type specimen for human beings—that is, the official anatomical remains that define what a Homo sapiens is. All animals and plants have a type species, so humans must, too. But it’s egotistical beyond belief to volunteer yourself for that role, and many historians dispute the tale.

Marsh was one of those people who always seemed old. Again, he entered prep school at age 20 and was known as Daddy to his classmates. And when he was a middle-aged professor managing his own youngsters, they called him The Great Dismal Swamp behind his back.

In addition to discovering a love of natural history, one other event during his time in prep school profoundly influenced Marsh—the death of a beloved sister. Her demise shocked him, and convinced him to buckle down and study. Without her death, he might have kept drifting through life and become a carpenter or surveyor or one of the many other trade jobs he’d been considering.

George Peabody wasn’t the only uncle who influenced Marsh. Another uncle, Ezekiel Jewett, first taught him about fossils in geological strata, especially trilobites. He even taught the lad how to extract the trilobites with tools.

In the book I used the term “salting” to describe how Marsh’s men purposely left some fossil bones behind at a dig site, to trick Cope into thinking they belonged to a new species. The term originated with miners, as salting was an age-old trick to get rubes to buy up useless land. You just sprinkled some gold flakes or tiny diamonds around for someone to “discover,” then signed the deed over when they were flush with excitement. Gets ‘em every time.

Another precaution that Marsh and Cope’s men took in the field to keep their dig sites secret was sending their mail along circuitous routes, so no one could trace it. I’m not sure how they accomplished this, though—perhaps by putting one envelope inside another and asking the initial recipient to post the nested one.

Here’s an anecdote about Marsh that I love: he fixed his telephone so that it couldn’t receive incoming calls. Its sole purpose was to make outgoing calls, mainly to give people orders. Says volumes about him as a manager and a man.

In the chapter, I said something to effect that dinosaurs were first recognized “as something unique” in England in 1817. Given that dinosaurs bones and teeth were often exposed or even lying free on the ground, people from all ancient cultures—Chinese, Native American, European, African, whatever—had of course seen ancient bones and teeth long before then. In most cases, though, they attributed the fossils to an ancient race of giants or other mythological beasts. Only William Buckland in 1817 recognized the truth: that the bones and teeth belonged an ancient clade of reptile-like creatures. Thus started the modern age of dinosaur study.

Dinosaurs were the sexiest part of the Cope-Marsh feud, but the duo also sparred over dozens of other beasts—none more fiercely than the uintatheres. These were rhino-sized mammals with short legs and tusks. Cope believed that uintatheres had trunks like elephants, and in fact insisted that only an idiot would believe otherwise. (Trunks of course wouldn’t fossilize but might leave telltale marks on the skull.) Marsh battled him on this point for years, dismissing the trunks a figment of Cope’s imagination: “Surely,” he once wrote, “such an animal belongs in the Arabian nights.” They spent hundreds of pages arguing over this, with many, many buttals and rebuttals on both sides.

If Cope had his ribbon-neck blunder, Marsh had an equally embarrassing boner of his own. One day out in the field, he’d come across a thick skull with horns, and he soon identified it in a paper as an extinct bison. It was actually a dinosaur, and Cope howled over the correction—apart from the horns, dinos and bison look nothing alike. Marsh’s saving grace here was that he himself discovered and corrected the mistake, rather than have his rival expose him. Also, in making the correction, he bagged one of the most iconic dinosaurs in history, the Triceratops.

Chapter Seven: Oath-Breaking

Before smoking became ubiquitous, lung cancer was a rare disease. (A graduate student scouring the journals in 1898 discovered just 140 cases, total, in the entire annals of medicine.) So when lung-cancer rates exploded in the early 1900s, doctors were baffled at first. They blamed everything from car exhaust to new types of asphalt to the lingering aftereffects of the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic. This shows just how hard it is to tease causation from correlation in epidemiology. After all, cars also spread at exponential rates in the early 1900s, and there was no real reason to think that smoking, and not exhaust, was the real culprit.
…………..The first scientists to nail down the cigarette-cancer link were Nazis, beginning with an initial report in 1939 and a definitive report in 1943. However, medical historians gave credit instead to a group of British and American researchers who came to similar conclusions after the war. Part of the reason for this misattribution was innocent: World War II was chaotic, and Allied doctors weren’t receiving and reading German scientific publications. But many scientists deliberately resisted the Nazi smoking research as well, assuming that if the idea came from Germany, it had to be tainted. No matter how you look at it, though, the Nazis got there first

Regarding animal rights within medicine, Göring himself decreed in August 1933 that “vivisection of animals of whatever species is prohibited in all parts of Prussian territory.” He then added, “persons who engage in vivisection of animals of any kind will be deported to a concentration camp.” Apparently no one had the guts to point out to Göring that Homo sapiens is an animal as well.

Sadly, many of those who survived the barbaric medical experiments in Nazi concentration camps were executed anyway in 1944 and 1945. The Nazis were losing the war by that point, and wanted to eliminate potential witnesses to atrocities. In some cases, however, fellow prisoners took pity on these “rabbits” and protected them, either by hiding them under loose floorboards in the barracks or giving them the roll-call numbers of dead prisoners to help them switch identities.

Examples of diseases named after Nazi or Nazi-friendly doctors include Hallervorden-Spatz syndrome, Cauchois-Eppinger-Frugoni syndrome, Beck-Ibrahim disease, Reiter’s disease, Van BogaertScherer-Epstein syndrome, Hallervorden-Spatz syndrome, and Wegener’s granulomatosis. For a more complete list, see “Eponyms and the Nazi Era: Time to Remember and Time for Change”, by Rael D. Strous and Morris C. Edelman, in The Israel Medical Association Journal, volume 9, issue 3, 2007, pages 207–214, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17402342.
…………..Related to this, I mentioned in the chapter that the American Medical Association has stated that the use of Nazi data in modern medical research may be justified in certain circumstances. But the AMA also recommended not mentioning by name any of the Nazi doctors involved in barbarous experiments. The reason is simple: doing so implicitly honors the doctors, and they should not be honored in any way, shape, or form.

Some scientists have proposed making the anniversary of the opening of the Nuremburg Doctors Trial (either December 9th, or the second Monday of December) an annual day of remembrance for the victims of Nazi medical research. Doing so would, in the words of one, “serve as a recurring reminder that the physician is a vulnerable and fallible human being and that no individual or institution, no matter how powerful or prestigious, is indefectible.”
…………..Most Nazi doctors remained unrepentant about their experiments on human beings. One who deliberately exposed prisoners to malaria even had to balls to ask whether he’d be allowed to continue his research—during his trial for war crimes. In other cases, especially with sterilization work, the American prosecutors at Nuremburg struggled to get convictions for a simple reason: many American states had eugenic sterilization laws on their books, a fact that Nazi doctors flung back in their face. If it was okay in America, why was it illegal in Germany?
…………..Sadly, despite the fact that seven doctors were hanged at the Trials, most Nazi physicians, especially the run-of-the-mill ones, never faced any prosecution for what they did. Even worse, some were even brought to the United States and given plum military research contracts as part of the cynical Operation Paperclip, which scooped up Nazi doctors before the Russians could get them in order to help fight the Cold War.
…………..Incidentally, most people don’t realize how shockingly close the Nazis came to covering up most of these atrocities. In fact, they might have gotten away with everything if not for the dogged efforts of one Jewish physician, Dr. Leo Alexander. For more on Dr. Alexander’s incredible work, see my podcast over at http://samkean.com/podcast.

Regarding the Tuskegee study: In exchange for paying funeral costs, the PHS did seek out and earn consent to perform autopsies on the men who died during the study—an advance over the resurrectionist days, when doctors didn’t bother with such consent. But that’s about the only ethical aspect of the whole Alabama study.

Here’s another way the doctors involved with Tuskegee, both black and white, tried to justify the work. Given endemic poverty in the South, most poor people weren’t going to receive treatment for syphilis; however unjust that sounds, that was the reality. So the doctors wanted to know the effects of this neglect: over the long term, how debilitating was the disease? It might have been the case that, all things considered, long-term syphilis wasn’t that bad—in which case, scarce public-health dollars might better be spent elsewhere. Essentially, the study was an attempt at triage, according to these doctors.

Was there any way the Tuskegee study might have been ethical if designed differently? Perhaps. First, the PHS doctors could have included white people in a matched community—poor, rural, and Southern. This also would have allowed them to directly test the theory about potential differences between the severity of syphilis in black people and white people. Furthermore, from the very beginning, the doctors could have set up a placebo-controlled treatment trial, where half the men received treatment and half didn’t. The real question shouldn’t have been, What happens when syphilis is left untreated?, but instead, How much worse was untreated syphilis compared to standard treatments?

It’s not really relevant to the morality of Tuskegee, but many people assume that all the PHS doctors and scientists involved were men. They were not. They weren’t even all white. Aside from Eunice Rivers, seven women worked on the study in various capacities. And as late as 1969, when the Centers for Disease Control was debating whether to continue the study, at least some black advisors to the CDC suggested that it continue.

As a pedantic note, it’s not quite accurate to say that Dr. John Cutler never received any consent to run the experiments on the prisoners and soldiers and psychiatric patients. He simply sought the consent of the administrators in charge of the asylums and prisons, rather than the individual subjects. This end-around was partly a byproduct of an older, more paternalistic attitude in medicine, where the doctor or administrator knew best, and the patient had to shut up and take it. Consent from the top was considered good enough.

During my research for this chapter I learned that, in addition to being called “the clap,” gonorrhea in the 1940s was also known, for some reason, as the “running ranges.”

Just like in Tuskegee—where there was evidence that syphilis might affect black people and white people differently—some doctors in Guatemala argued that syphilis might not affect native Indians to the same degree as other people. That’s because syphilis was one of the few diseases that got transmitted from the New World to the Old World after 1492 instead of vice-versa. Indians might therefore have built up immunities to it in prior centuries. It’s similar to how people in the Old World, while still dying of malaria and smallpox in large numbers, fared vastly better than people in the New World, since malaria and smallpox originated in the Old World and people there had built up at least some resistance.
…………..Incidentally, some scientists have argued that, if the population densities in the New World had been as high as in the Old World, the Columbian exchange of diseases probably would have included more than just syphilis: Europeans would have had to deal with their own smallpoxes and malarias, and the history of colonialism would have looked much different.

All seven women in the psychiatric ward who got syphilis injected into their spines suffered from epilepsy, and Cutler later explained that the procedure was an attempt to “shock” them out of their seizures. How exactly this was supposed to work, medically speaking, wasn’t clear—and might be a cover-up.

In the chapter, I focused mostly on exposure to STDs through sexual intercourse, as well as smearing pus on penises. (Just wanted to put that image in your head one last time.) But Cutler’s team did test other exposure methods as well. In particular, they forced some subjects to swallow syphilitic material from ground up animal testicles. This was supposed to mimic oral sex.

As a side note, the Guatemala study did technically include children in orphanages as well. Thankfully, though, Cutler didn’t infect any children. He was simply testing them for various diseases to establish a background rate of infection in the general population.

Sadly, this chapter hardly exhausts the list of unethical medical experiments that have been run on human beings. But for reasons of space, I’ve left many out, including experiments that involved injecting cancer cells into unwitting patients and firing x-rays at the bladders of babies who were just two days old, to see if it disrupted their ability to pee.

Regarding the Uganda AIDS-drugs trial, and the criticism that it was unethical, one defender of the study went so far as to say that ethicists mucking around in drug trials “had become a significant threat to global health,” given all the rules they wanted to implement and the way they handcuffed researchers. I think that ethical codes in medicine have done vastly more good than harm, but it’s true that there will always be some cost to any bureaucratic strictures.
…………..On a related note, the AIDS outbreak in the United States in the 1980s sparked plenty of debate over medical ethics as well. As one AIDS activist put it, “Double-blind studies were not created with terminal illnesses in mind.” Perhaps morals need to shift in urgent cases.

Self-experimentation didn’t stop in the mid-1900s. The classic modern case involves Barry Marshall in Australia and stomach ulcers. Based on research that he and a colleague had done, Marshall was convinced that the conventional explanation for ulcers—stress—was baloney. Instead, he suggested that a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, caused ulcers instead. No one believed him, however. So one day in 1984, Marshall rather bravely swallowed a beaker of broth that was swimming with the bacteria, just to see what would happen. Within days, he was doubled over in agony: he had a whopper of an ulcer. He then cured himself with antibiotics, further proof for his theory. For his pains, he won the 2005 Nobel Prize.

Regarding the history of syphilis, I’ve always enjoyed the fact that every country had its own name for the disease—usually implying that it had arisen among a hated enemy first. The Italians called it the “French sickness,” the Dutch called it the “Spanish sickness,” the Russians called it “the Polish sickness,” the Turks called it “the Russian sickness,” and so on. I’ve often wondered whether, if you looked hard enough, you could find an unbroken chain of blame that connected syphilis to every country in the world and eventually circled back to the original.

Here’s the promised anecdote on historian Susan Reverby.
…………..Reverby first announced her discovery of the Guatemala experiments at a sleepy academic meeting in Rochester, Minnesota, in the spring of 2010. But if you guessed that her work caused an immediate uproar, think again. She presented on the last day, a Sunday, when most of her colleagues had already ditched the conference. As a result, the audience was small, maybe two dozen people. And as Reverby later commented, “Historians are used to awful stories,” stories of bloodshed and genocide and massacres. “Nobody [went] running out of the room and call[ed] the National Enquirer” when they heard her tale.
…………..In fact, nothing much happened at all until she tried to write a paper on Guatemala study. While going through the proofs, she sent a draft to a doctor she knew so he could fact-check some of the medical aspects. The man happened to be a former director of the CDC. (He’d in fact been the one hanged in effigy after the exposure of the Tuskegee study.) As the ex-director, the doctor had heard some rumors about the Guatemala research but had no idea how bad things were. He and Reverby normally communicated via email, but the day after reading her draft he called her up and personally asked for permission to alert the CDC before the paper got published, so the agency could prepare a response. Reverby thought he was being melodramatic, but agreed. So the director sent her draft over to the CDC—a draft full of spelling errors and other solecisms. She assumed that this would be the last she’d hear of it. As she later said, “This is why you don’t wanna go to Vegas with me. I clearly can’t predict anything.”
…………..As soon as the CDC heard about Reverby’s findings, officials there conducted their own review of Cutler’s papers, to see if things were as bad as Reverby claimed. They were, so the CDC began placing calls up the government chain of command and passing on Reverby’s un-spell-checked draft—which mortified her. A whirlwind broke out, and before long both the National Institutes of Health and the State Department were involved. Things soon reached Barack Obama, and almost before Reverby knew what was happening she found herself at the White House in October 2010 to hear Obama apologize on behalf of the United States and call the Guatemala research a “crime against humanity.” To Reverby, the whole thing must have been bewildering but gratifying. Only rarely do historians get to see their own work make history.
…………..There remains one outstanding mystery to the whole Guatemala saga: after essentially stealing the papers in 1960 to mask his role, why did John Cutler then leave them to the University of Pittsburgh and risk being outed one day? It might have been oversight—but that theory is undermined by the fact that the Guatemala records were the only thing Cutler left to Pitt. It’s almost as if he wanted to get caught. Or perhaps, still defiant, he thought that history would justify him. Either way, it was one last twist in a bizarre story.

Chapter Eight: Ambition

In addition to being an ambassador, Moniz also represented Portugal at the Versailles peace talks after World War One—a futile job. His assignment was to win booty and reparations for Portugal, but considering how little the country had contributed to the war effort, he didn’t get very far.
…………..World War II was a different story, as Portugal stayed neutral. And Moniz was so attuned to the political winds that when he finished a major neurological paper during the war, he ended up publishing it in a mediocre Swiss journal rather than a prestigious American one simply because Portugal and Switzerland were both neutral during the war and the United States wasn’t.

Before his work on angiographs, Moniz’s biggest contribution to medicine was arguably a book he wrote on sexuality—which got banned in Portugal for including information about fetishes and bizarre sex acts, as well as Freudian musings on infant sexuality. Naturally, the ban only made the book more popular, and it eventually went through 19 editions. Oddly, Moniz also wrote a two-hundred-page history of playing cards around this time, which sounds like the ultimate aristocratic flimflam.

One of Moniz’s biographers noted that he wanted to be thought of as a creative genius—the type who yells Eureka! and blows the world away with his incredible flashes of insight. In truth, Moniz was not creative at all. He relied almost entirely on crude trial and error and was actually prone to blundering: he did a lot of collateral damage to patients during his research. His real gift wasn’t any species of genius but his persistence and especially his willingness to take risks.

Regarding the man who barged in and shot Egas Moniz five times: Moniz had once treated the man as his patient—although he had not, as some reports indicate, given him a leucotomy. (The patient seemingly had a hormonal problem.) Four of the bullets entered Moniz’s body and one struck his hand. Surgeons quickly removed all but one of the bullets, which was nestled too close to his spine to risk going after it. Moniz lived with this bullet inside him for the rest of his life.

Back in the old days, people who’d lost their wits usually became the responsibilities of their families, who had to take them in. That might sound heartwarming, but the families could be indifferent or even cruel at times. Some families preferred to lock those who’d gone “soft” into basements or back bedrooms, and simply ignore their howling. Others chained people up in pigpens or staked them down in gardens. All that said, many families did take good care of mental patients, better care than asylums did, and overall, home treatment was much more humane.

If you want a bit more background about Walter Freeman, here goes.
…………..Like Moniz, Freeman had an illustrious pedigree: his grandfather was an eminent neurosurgeon who once treated FDR. But unlike Moniz, Freeman had little ambition when young, despite his obvious intelligence. His parents nicknamed him Little Walter Why Why for his constant barrage of questions, and he enrolled at Yale at age sixteen in 1911. But he was essentially a nonentity there, failing several classes and getting fired from the campus newspaper. He didn’t declare an interest in medicine until his senior year.
…………..That declaration probably saved his life. Because he’d entered college young, Freeman was in medical school by the time the United States mobilized for World War I, and was therefore exempt from the draft. Several friends his age got conscripted and killed, either on the battlefield or from the Great Influenza that swept through military barracks and took the lives of 45,000 American troops—more than the number who died in combat during the war.
…………..Given his poor grades and late start in medicine, Freeman had to make up some classes in biochemistry after Yale. And inauspiciously for someone who would later make a living monkeying around inside the brain, he was so clumsy in the lab that he almost killed himself twice. Once he mixed silver nitrate with gelatin, which exploded. The second incident involved pipetting. He grew up in an era when people pipetted things by using their mouths to suck a little fluid up a tube. One day, after dipping a straw in solution and deciding he needed more, he put the wrong end in his mouth, the end dripping with chemicals. Unfortunately the solution contained cyanide, and he collapsed to his knees, convulsing and shaking. He barely pulled through.
…………..Freeman proved far more skilled with neurology. The field first set him on fire when he watched an eminent doctor pinpoint exactly where a patient’s brain tumor must be, based on the man’s symptoms and deficits. An autopsy later confirmed the doctor’s guess.
…………..Freeman soon got so absorbed in neurology that for several months he barely realized his father was dying of liver cancer. And he resented having to care for his old man when his health failed. At one point the task of shaving him fell to Walter. But as he later admitted, he rushed the job most days and caused his father unnecessary pain. Why Freeman admitted things like this in his writing remains a mystery, but he apparently felt no need to pretty up his image for public consumption.

Speaking of autopsies, after settling in Washington D.C., Freeman begged the National Zoo for animals after they died, just so he could carve up their brains. He eventually dissected the grey matter of lions, storks, monkeys, deer, alligators, pelicans, leopards, and boa constrictors.

On page 185 of the first edition of the book, I wrote, “None of his patients were reduced to drooling, brain-dead vegetables; that’s a Hollywood stereotype.” As one reader pointed out, that was probably an overstatement. To be sure, the vast majority of Freeman’s patient did not end up as vegetables. But some did. As the reader noted, “My first job, in 1964, was at Western State Hospital in Staunton, VA, where, in previous years, Dr. Freeman would make monthly trips to Staunton from D.C. where he would spend a day performing prefrontal lobotomies (when I arrived, they were no longer being performed but all of his surgical instruments were well-displayed in a glass cabinet in the main administration building). On the days he visited, the aides would line up the gurneys, side by side, in lengthy ward. … Freeman’s patients, all of whom were chronically there because they met the Hollywood stereotype and worse. The patients on the wards (all of whom had post-op pictures in their medical charts with two big black eyes) sat all day, often in their own excrement, moaning and drooling. They were non-verbal and truly “vegetables.” They required complete nursing care as they had to be bathed, fed, and diapered. It was the proverbial “snakepit” of the Hollywood movie.” So I’ve adjusted the wording in later editions.

One reason Freeman got away with doing brain operations in his office was that experimental surgery has long been a laissez-faire field within medicine, one where pretty much anything goes. Contrast this with experimental drugs, which thanks to various laws have to undergo rigorous testing before anything appears on the market.

There’s another reason that women underwent lobotomies at higher rates than men. As mentioned in the book, most lobotomy patients were dumped on their families after the procedures, where they’d live out their lives in some attic or back room. This fate was socially acceptable for women then, since the home was considered their sphere. Men, in contrast, were often judged harshly for not going out and working. So lobotomies had less of a social stigma for women than men at the time.

One persistent criticism of Freeman and Moniz was that they were doing psychosurgery not for the good of the patient, but simply to make life easier on asylum staff and family caretakers—a violation of the Hippocratic oath to Do No Harm. I think that’s harsh—Freeman and Moniz really did want to help people. But there is a grain of truth there, too.

Freeman had a few sons, and once wrote a dark, Kipling-esque poem to one of them. It ends: “The bigger the game the greater the thrill / And the greatest of games is war, / When man is the quarry you’re trying to kill / And death adds up the score.” Knowing how reckless Freeman could be with people’s lives—he definitely belonged to the crack-a-few-eggs school of medicine—it’s hard not to read that and grimace.

Again, Freeman often enlisted his secretaries to help hold patients down during electroshock seizures. Well, one day a new secretary refused—perhaps because it wasn’t in her job description, or perhaps because the whole scene nauseated her. Regardless, Freeman went ahead and shocked a patient without her, and the woman on the table began bucking so wildly that she broke a bone in her leg. Freeman remained blasé. He injected her with some morphine, then took off to keep a meeting he had scheduled—essentially abandoning his patient.
…………..The woman woke up and found herself in agony. By the time Freeman returned, her husband had arrived and was furious. He told Freeman to lawyer up: he was going to sue. Cursing his secretary, Freeman tried blaming her for the whole mess. It didn’t work and he eventually settled out of court and put the whole thing out of his mind. (I’m tempted to point out that putting things out of his mind was one of Walter Freeman’s strongest talents.)

In addition to Freeman’s workaholic habits, his constant sleeping around did grave damage to his marriage. That said, Freeman’s wife was reportedly quite difficult to live with, given that she was an incorrigible alcoholic. Sherry was her poison of choice, and although Freeman would regularly call local liquor stores and demand that they cut her off, she always found a way to get more.

As noted, Freeman was a sparkling writer—he really had a gift. In describing how he tracked patients through Appalachia, he once said: “‘Over the mountain and down the hollow’ was an oft-repeated phrase. I crossed streams on swaying cable bridges where coal-blacked water flowed a few feet below. I encountered the smelly aftermath of a flash flood where carpets and upholstered chairs were festering in the sun.” You’re practically right there with him in West Virginia.
…………..Here’s another example, one that displays Freeman’s irreverent humor. He once wrote about taking about a transatlantic trip, and his decision to split his family up onto different flights. “We flew the ocean on three different planes on the theory that it was a bad thing to put all the eggs in one basket; or, stated differently, that there ought to be somebody to enjoy the insurance money.”

Regarding all the Christmas cards that Freeman got from patients: In his un–self-conscious and brutally honest way, Freeman did admit that some of the lobotomy patients he tracked down in later years would stiffen upon seeing him—still unhappy at his intrusion into their lives. Others, though, were indeed delighted that the nice doctor cared enough to follow up on them. These were the patients that Freeman clung to as a moral shield.

I’ve mentioned this before, in my neuroscience book The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, but it warrants repeating:
…………..Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a valuable treatment for a small but consistent number of patients. Nowadays, the mere thought of ECT makes many people gasp—isn’t that torture? But in truth the therapy has been maligned by a strange coalition of activists and, reportedly, Scientology front groups. (Many Scientologists oppose standard mental health treatments.) There’s no doubt that, in its early days, some doctors abused ECT. ECT can have serious side effects as well, including memory loss and broken legs or jaws from uncontrolled seizures. And the field got some bad PR when Ernest Hemingway shot himself after undergoing ECT. But again, many people do benefit from it; it’s a viable treatment option. And nowadays doctors can mitigate against the worst side effects by offering muscle relaxants to eliminate seizures and doing the procedure on only one half of the brain at a time, which limits cognitive problems.

In keeping with Freeman’s reckless attitude in general, and specifically his disregard for antiseptic procedures, he performed at least two lobotomies in cheap hotel rooms. On one occasion the police actually had to wrestle a hostile man to the ground so that Freeman could attach the electrodes to his head and conk him out.

In losing the ability to write and speak and use the toilet, lobotomy patients often regressed to what seemed like an infantile state. Freeman bought into this idea as well, and encouraged the families of recovering lobotomy patients to give them dolls and stuffed toys to play with. After they’d recovered a bit more, he suggested letting them draw with crayons and reading picture books to them. If they misbehaved, he advocated spankings.

There was one other big complication with the Becky the chimp case. After she died, her handlers at Yale performed an autopsy on her brain and discovered a huge abscess there—a large pocket of pus. It’s impossible to know how this affected her behavior, and whether it—and not the removal of her frontal lobes—might have been responsible for her sudden docility. But Moniz’s decision to start performing leucotomies based on Becky’s case seem even more dubious in light of this.
…………..Oddly enough, Walter Freeman’s neurosurgical partner, James Watts, had actually met Becky at a conference several years before Moniz ever heard of her. The Yale team was parading Becky around at the time, and she slipped free from her handlers one day, dashed into the audience, and plopped down on Watts’s lap. The audience was alarmed, but no harm came of it. Little did they know that two primates, Watts and Becky, would soon be connected in a much darker way.

Chapter Nine: Espionage

Harry Gold’s father, Samson, could have worked a white-collar job if he’d wanted to; he had the intelligence and math skills to be a bookkeeper. But in his youth he’d been “infected” (his word) by the philosophy of Leo Tolstoy, which promoted the nobility of manual labor. Hence the carpentry job at the phonograph factory.

Throughout his life Harry Gold showed an insatiable desire—almost a sickness—to please people, no matter the cost to himself. He would always loan people money, even if he couldn’t afford it; at times he even went to loan sharks for cash, then passed it onto friends, taking all the risk of broken kneecaps or whatever onto himself.
…………..In high school, an English teacher once asked Harry to correct a stack of quizzes on Shakespeare. His classmates begged him to help them pass, so Harry stayed up until 5am erasing their wrong answers and filling in the correct ones. He even lowered his own grade a touch, and mimicked his classmates’ handwriting to mask the cheating.
…………..After glancing through the quizzes the next day, the teacher merely fixed Gold with a stare and said, “The class did very well, did they not, Harry?” Even decades later, Gold still burned with shame over the incident. “Why,” he asked himself, “had I done this for a group of stupid, lazy dolts to whom I had no responsibility and no allegiance?” He couldn’t say.

Surprisingly, Gold later claimed that the most valuable scientific secret he ever stole had nothing to do with atomic bombs. Rather, it involved Kodak film.
…………..In truth, there aren’t that many ways to build a viable atomic bomb. The real trick is in the engineering, and getting enough fissionable material together. In contrast, Kodak’s process for making film was complex, involving six or seven different chemicals combined in specific ways and different proportions. The recipe had taken decades to develop, and involved so many distinct steps that no one ever could have just guessed it. And while film may seem petty compared to atomic bombs, the theft did have national security implications. With better film, the Soviets suddenly had the means to spy on the United States from planes and snap better reconnaissance pictures.

One of the spies Gold handled gave him a sample of a new explosive called RDX. Supposedly the spy had chemically altered the sample so it wasn’t dangerous, but shortly after he and Gold parted, Gold almost got hit by a speeding cab. He later thanked god he didn’t have to find out the hard way whether the sample really had been effectively neutered.
…………..Incidentally, readers of my book The Bastard Brigade might remember the part where Joseph Kennedy Jr.—brother of future president JFK—dies when his plane explodes in midair. RDX was the explosive responsible for the disaster.

Fuchs was so beholden to the Soviet Union that he actually asked Gold to inquire with the Soviets about whether his sister Kristel could come stay with him in New York if her marriage dissolved. He wouldn’t even consider helping a family member without permission from Stalin’s henchmen.

Although overshadowed by Gold, Tom Black—the communist who first pushed Harry into spying—was a talented spy himself. One of Black’s specialties was stealing copies of keys to desks and supply closets and making wax impressions of them. He got so adept that he could make the impression in ten seconds in his pocket with a block of wax—sometimes while the person who owned the key was standing right there.
…………..Black was also savvier than Harry in some ways. As noted in the book, stealing industrial secrets was technically not a criminal offense then, just a civil one. After the war ended, Black got exposed for stealing industrial processes, but because he hadn’t exposed any military secrets, authorities declined to press charges against him. Some FBI agents were aghast at this, but there wasn’t much they could do.

In addition to being lazy and not having material ready for Gold, David Greenglass was also a putz through and through. When he met Gold in Albuquerque, he laid out a ridiculous plan to recruit a buddy of his into the Soviet ranks, so they could spy together. As if espionage was some sort of boys’ club. The Soviets hadn’t vetted the man, and Gold realized that if Greenglass went forward, or even just started blabbing to his friend, they’d all get exposed. He snapped at Greenglass to shut his mouth and not breath a word about his activities to anyone.
…………..And while Greenglass did steal some valuable secrets—the high-explosive lenses he worked on were a key component of plutonium bombs—he also passed on some blatantly false information. For one thing, he said that the plutonium bomb used 36 explosives, not 32, and he regularly confused barium with boron, two elements with quite different properties.

To be fair to David Greenglass, he later said he felt guilty about taking the $500 gift from Harry Gold that day. It made spying seemed mercenary—less idealistic, more grubby. When he got back inside and showed his wife Ruth the cash, in fact, she sneered, “Now I see how it is: you turn over the information and get paid. It’s just, just like C.O.D. [collect on demand]” But it’s a bit hard to tell whether Greenglass actually repented for taking the money or was simply reacting to his wife’s displeasure.

Although Fuchs rejected the $1,500 cash from the Soviets, he was not above asking them for a favor. At that point in the war, 1944, it was clear that Nazi Germany was going to lose. And given the location of Berlin within Germany (pretty far east), the Red Army would reach the German capital first. So Fuchs wanted someone to locate his Gestapo files there—files that noted he was an ardent communist—and destroy them. He assumed that purging the files would save him. He was wrong.

Regarding Lysenko and epigenetics: Most living things have thousands of genes, but not all those genes are active at once. Some get turned on or off inside cells, or have their activity levels turned up or down. The study of these changes in “gene expression” is called epigenetics. And it just so happens that environmental cues are often what turn genes on or off. In certain cases, these environmentally driven changes can even pass from parent to child—just like Lysenko claimed.
…………..But even a cursory look at his work reveals that he didn’t predict or anticipate epigenetics in any important way. Whereas Lysenko claimed that genes didn’t exist, epigenetics take genes as a given: they’re the things being turned on or off. And while epigenetic changes can occasionally (and only occasionally) pass from parent to child, the changes always disappear after a few generations. They’re never permanent—which contradicts everything Lysenko said. The rise of epigenetics alone, then, can’t explain Lysenko’s recent revival.
…………..I do want to emphasize that both genes and environment are important. We’re not just a collection of genes; our environment shapes us profoundly. But our genes are a crucial aspect of who we are, and they affect our temperaments and mental traits profoundly. In fact, it’s unscientific to separate genes and environment. Oftentimes our genes cause us to reshape our environments, and our environments can in turn bend back and affect how our genes function. Both the Nazi right-wing and Communist left-wing versions of reality were, and are, wrong.

In addition to starving his people, Mao also sponsored some dubious hybridization research during the Great Leap Forward. In one case his scientists claimed to have mixed tomatoes with cotton plants to produce a breed that yielded red fibers.

Gold resented, bitterly, the fact that the FBI wouldn’t let him out of jail to visit the heart hospital lab one last time to clear up some business there. He needed just 45 minutes, he said, and even offered to let the FBI agents accompany him, with their own biochemical expert, to make sure he stuck to science. But the FBI refused.

Gold could be quite elegant on the topic of anti-Semitism. “Only in the Soviet Union,” he once wrote, “was anti-Semitism a crime against the state … here [in America] it could get a man elected to public office” I also found this line evocative: “To me Nazism and fascism and anti-Semitism were identical. This was the ages-old enemy, the evil bloody stench of the Roman arena, of the medieval ghetto, of the Inquisition, of pogroms, and now of the concentration camp.”

Gold came closest to quitting espionage in the fall of 1942, when he found himself waiting for yet another late-night train in New York. He was tired and broke, and he finally resolved to cut ties with the Soviets for good. And he might have—if an anti-Semitic drunk at the station hadn’t started harassing him. Gold was 31 years old then, of draft age, but the army had rejected him for being overweight and having high blood pressure. (The navy would later do the same.) So when the sot called him a “yellow draft dodger” and a “kike bastard,” Gold was incensed.
…………..As Gold later said, “I would have smashed him—hard—but I withheld because I could not afford to be involved in a scrape in New York, where I had absolutely no business to be. So I just walked away. But as I did, so went my resolution to quit espionage work. It seemed all the more necessary to … work with the most increased vigor possible to strengthen the Soviet Union, for there such incidents could not occur. To fight anti-Semitism here [in the United States] seemed so hopeless.”

Regarding Gold’s fantasy about his redhead wife and twins: He actually almost blew his cover once when a secretary at a company he was working for asked him how many dependents he wanted to list on his tax forms. Without thinking, Harry blurted out, none. But what about your wife and kids?, she asked. Realizing his blunder, Gold suddenly had to make up a story about how she’d left him, and how he was so distraught he was considering suicide. In addition to being embarrassing, it’s a good example of how hard it is to keep track of all your lies once you start down that path.

Chapter Ten: Torture

Henry Murray was cross-eyed as a lad and came home one day to find two white-smocked doctors waiting in the dining room. Little Henry had eye surgery scheduled, and apparently it wouldn’t do to be seen at a hospital. Oddly, his mother promised him an aquarium if he endured the operation without anesthesia; he agreed to this. Alas, the doctors botched the procedure and nicked some important muscle fibers, which left one of his eyes adrift. He had poor hand-eye coordination as a result and proved clumsy at ball sports growing up. Hence his focus on rowing at Harvard.

Murray’s interest in personalities was genuine, but he also enjoyed being controversial and provoking the rats-and-reflexes crew who considered his work inexact and mushy. Whereas they had narrow research interests, Murray was omnivorous. One admirer called him a “modern Leonardo,” and he had 11 unfinished books sitting around at the time of his death. And while most psychologists at the time considered it gauche to talk of the spiritual side of life, Murray wrote essays with deliberately provocative titles like “The Personality and Career of Satan.”

In his psychological profile of Adolf Hitler, Murray offered eight predictions for what Hitler would do toward the end of the war, include going insane, seeking refuge abroad, committing suicide, and leading troops in battle against the incoming Russians.

The 1950s was a time of both great optimism in neuroscience/psychology and also great hubris. Today their research looks simplistic or even crude, but by that point, scientists did have a basic understanding of the brain’s architecture and ability to send messages around via electrochemical signals. As a result, many neuroscientists assumed they were on the verge of a huge breakthrough in understanding the mechanics of the mind. And with that basic understanding in place, they assumed they’d also learn how to control the brain. Once you knew what all the parts did, the thinking went, you could easily hack the brain—find weaknesses, exploit them, and bend people toward your will, benevolent or otherwise.

To be sure, some psychologists whose research was funded by the CIA took the money unwittingly through third parties or innocent-sounding foundations, and would have been horrified to know who was backing them. Many, though, eagerly sought out partnerships with the agency.

There are no indications that Henry Murray ever realized the outsized role he played in Kaczynski’s life. Murray actually lived until 1988, dying at age 95, so he was surely aware of the Unabomber (who targeted universities, after all). But he had no more idea who the Unabomber was than the rest of the of the country did.

Although it’s not as pointedly unethical as the Murray experiment (not even close), Facebook manipulated 700,000 people’s emotions by feeding them happy or sad stories in their news feed in 2014, then tried to determine their mood afterward. Facebook says these people “consented” to the experiment by signing their Terms of Service agreement, but critics maintained that the work was sneaky and manipulative.

Again, many troops in Korea “confessed” to war crimes they didn’t commit. Even more crazy, most of them refused to recant the confessions after being freed. They seemed convinced of their guilt. But there’s no historical record of them actually committing such atrocities.

Though MK-ULTRA was a crash program, it did build off another, smaller project instituted earlier. Ridiculously, that previous program was called Project Artichoke, a name too whimsical to take seriously.

One technique that CIA interrogators used to break spies was called, improbably, “Spinoza and Mortimer Snerd.” It worked like this. Whenever agents visited with a spy, they’d start babbling for hours about some arcane philosophical nonsense that the spy knew nothing about. Even worse, they’d start barking questions at him about esoteric points of metaphysics and heaping abuse on him when he admitted he didn’t know.
…………..Finally, after several days of this onslaught (often with no breaks to sleep), the CIA agents would suddenly shift gears and start talking about the spy’s espionage work or another crime he was being accused of. Normally, being so straightforward would cause the suspect to clam up. But in this case, he was so grateful to talk about something—anything—that he actually had some knowledge of, he’d often go along. This was especially true when the spy was isolated and the interrogations were his only source of human contact. He’d keep talking simply to keep the agents around.

Well into the 2000s, long after the practices had been discredited in most psychologists’ eyes, the American government was still using interrogation techniques it had developed during the Cold War. These methods in fact formed the basis of the notorious “enhanced interrogations” that took place at Guantánamo Bay after 9/11 and in Afghanistan and Iraq during the second Gulf War.

Social and emotional factors also make torture worse. You can burn your hand on a stove, quite badly, but such injuries rarely traumatize people. In contrast, if someone holds your hand on the stove, it’s suddenly far worse. The added ingredient of someone wielding power over you magnifies the pain and produces psychological scars as well.

Initially Kaczynski hadn’t want to plead guilty. He wanted to have a trial so he could showcase his ideas about the destructive effects of technology on the human spirit. But his lawyers refused to allow this, and insisted on pleading insanity for him.
…………..Kaczynski was so distraught about being dismissed as a lunatic that he tried to hang himself in his jail cell with his underwear; if the elastic waistband hadn’t snapped, he would have succeeded. But even after the attempted hanging, his lawyers wouldn’t relent: they insisted on the insanity plea. And when Kaczynski tried to have his lawyers dismissed, so he could represent himself, the judge refused.
…………..This put the prosecutors in the case in an odd position. They wanted a conviction, obviously, plus the death penalty. But the fact that the judge wouldn’t let Kaczynski represent himself—a right enshrined in the Constitution, for crying out loud—would have put any conviction on dicey grounds. It might even get overturned on appeal. So they reached across the aisle to Kaczynski and offered to drop the death penalty in exchange for a guilty plea and life in prison without parole. Kaczynski didn’t want that—he abhorred the thought of being trapped in a cell his whole life. But the thought of being branded insane scared him even more, and he agreed.

Incidentally, it’s a bit disturbing that 125 agents spent $50 million on the Unabomber case over seventeen years—and had to rely on an untrained amateur, David Kaczynski’s wife Linda, to crack things open.
…………..Especially bad was the psychological profiling that the FBI employed—it was laughable at best and an active distraction at worst. One profiler proposed that the Unabomber was playing an elaborate game of Dungeons & Dragons with the FBI. Another insisted that the bomber surely knew all his victims. Another that he was physically handicapped. Yet another that he was gay; another that he moved homes frequently and was a natty dresser; another that he couldn’t possibly have had an advanced degree. And on and on.

Chapter Eleven: Malpractice

Although the whispers about his libertine lifestyle did boost John Money’s celebrity, he was always a little slippery with the details. When called to court once to testify on behalf of a homosexual, a lawyer asked Money if he himself was gay. Money denied this. A student of his who knew his proclivities later asked Money how he could honestly say that. I didn’t lie, Money protested. I’m bisexual. I’m of the opinion that the court shouldn’t have been probing such matters anyway, but no matter how you slice it, Money was being less than truthful there.

One reason for Money’s appeal in the 1960s was that, in the words of one critic, he offered “a simple and immediate solution to a complicated problem”—namely, the problem of how human beings acquire their sexual and gender identities, which he said were largely the arbitrary whims of society. Of course, this also calls to mind that quote often attributed to H.L. Mencken: that for every complicated problem in life there’s a simple solution—neat, simple, and wrong.

Later in his career Money also faced pushback on his original, groundbreaking work on hermaphrodites (now called intersex people). Money originally claimed that dozens of hermaphroditic children under his care had been raised in opposition to their seeming biological sex, but were thriving in their new genders anyway. In reality, doctors had assigned a biological sex to the infants superficially, based only on what the external genitals looked like. When other researchers looked into this cohort of cases with an expanded notion of biological sex—one that included factors like hormones, internal gonads, and chromosomes—it turned out that the person’s preferred gender did align with their biological sex in most cases.

Given how terrified she was of Dr. Money, Brenda Reimer protested having to visit him from a pretty young age. Her parents Ron and Janet eventually had to bribe her with expensive side trips to New York and Disneyworld; otherwise she refused to go to Baltimore.

The book recounted a scene in Money’s office with a transsexual, when Money tried to force Brenda to accept surgery. Poignantly, after that, she redoubled her efforts to act feminine. If I just work harder, she kept thinking, and prove to them I’m a “real” woman, they’ll let me skip the surgery. “I decided to play ball,” she later said. “I tried my guts out. I was miserable.”
…………..For instance, Brenda once bought a beige pantsuit—her idea of feminine clothing—and slathered on enough makeup to make a clown wince. A sympathetic teacher finally had to pull some classmates aside and beg them to take Brenda shopping. (They got her a sweater and some designer jeans.) Brenda also made herself attend school galas and dance with boys, and attend pajama parties to gossip about boys. As soon as the other girls starting undressing before bed, and unhooking their bras, Brenda turned away, mortified. But she kept trying. “What do gay people do when they’re in hiding?” she later remembered. “They pretend they’re straight.” So did Brenda pretend.

The “Don’t Want to See John Money” club was necessary because, with Brenda refusing to visit Baltimore anymore, Money decided to come to Canada. He scheduled a talk in Winnipeg in March 1979, and insisted on seeing the Reimers at their home. Touchingly, Ron and Janet were embarrassed to let the famous TV doctor see their threadbare carpet and worn beige couch and peeling paint. What would he think of them? Even the grey weather and dirty snow in Winnipeg somehow seemed like their fault.
…………..Money, though was his usual smooth self—his television self. He complemented Ron’s handmade cabinets and Janet’s ink drawings hanging on the wall, then chatted about life in New Zealand—the dark beer there, and how his mother had to string yarn across their shelves to prevent bottles from falling off during earthquakes. Meanwhile, the twins were holed up in the basement the whole time, refusing to emerge.
…………..Accounts differ about what happened next. Money says he got bumped from his flight home due to overbooking; Ron remembers a snowstorm coming through; Janet remembers Money “accidentally” staying too long at their house. Regardless, Money’s flight left without him and he had to stay the night in Winnipeg. The Reimers offered to put him up, and to their surprise, he accepted; they ordered a bucket of chicken to feed him. At last, Money got what he wanted, and convinced the twins to come upstairs for a chat. They stayed fifteen minutes, muttering and fidgeting in his presence. He gave them $15 each from his wallet, then let them go. It was the last time any of them ever saw him.

Despite having lost Brenda’s trust, Money continued to promote the twins case as inarguable proof of the completely social nature of gender. In fact, a BBC film crew got in touch with him about the case, and while he refused to put them in direct contact with the Reimers—he had to protect the family’s privacy, he said—he was more than happy to appear on camera himself.
…………..Behind Money’s back, however, the film crew had been hearing things. Colleagues of Money’s at Hopkins laughed awkwardly when asked about the twins, and vaguely warned the film producers not to put too much stock in the case. The producers also reached Milton Diamond, the graduate student who’d flooded guinea pigs with hormones in utero and then dared challenge Money’s theories. Diamond was working in Hawaii by then, and was still promoting his then-heretical theory that human beings actually had a sexual biology. Diamond had also been hearing whispers that the twins case wasn’t a brilliant success, and had reportedly been putting ads in professional journals trying to get ahold of anyone who could tell him more.
…………..Finally, the producers got a tip from someone on the Hopkins staff about where the twins were, and flew out to Winnipeg. This was during Brenda’s stint in the vo-tech school, when she was effectively barred from the girls’ bathroom on campus. And, holding to the low standards of the British press, the crew started staking out the alley where Brenda peed and snapping pictures of her. Still, the producers were on Brenda’s side overall, and convinced several psychologists to appear on camera (some anonymously, with their faces shadowed), and suggest that things weren’t quiet as hunky-dory with Brenda as Money claimed.
…………..When Money found out that the producers had gone behind his back, he was furious. He accused them of stealing private patient records and wrote a letter to the director of the BBC threatening to sue of the documentary ever aired. But for once, Money couldn’t browbeat a dissenting voice: the documentary marked the first public rumbling that Money was either lying about the blank slate theory of human sexuality or so delusional he might as well have been.
…………..For their part, Ron and Janet Reimer agreed to be interviewed for the documentary, which infuriated Money—he considered it a betrayal. But the Reimers never actually saw the final product, which aired only overseas. So they never knew about all the dissenting voices until much later.
…………..Afterward, Money continually blamed the antics of the BBC crew for driving the twins away. And to be sure, the BBC producers did not act ethically. (In fact, they were downright creepy at times.) But Money’s claims that he couldn’t follow up on the twins because of a media invasion was horseshit: David lived at the same house the whole time, with same phone number. Money simply didn’t want to follow up, because the data contradicted his theories. Indeed, Money never once mentioned in all his later academic work the fact that David had actually rejected his gender reassignment and loathed the sight of Money and everything he stood for.

Being a vain man, Money clipped out articles about himself whenever he was mentioned in the press, usually glowingly. Tellingly, though, these clippings stopped abruptly in 1996, when the first trickles of the David Reimer case started appearing.

If you’ve ever read Jeffery Eugenides’s incredible novel Middlesex, you might recognize John Money in the character Peter Luce—a psychologist who treats the main character Calliope and writes a magazine column called “The Oracular Vulva.”

Oddly enough, for being a brutal, fundamentalist thug, John Money’s father in New Zealand was apparently quite a talented painter. Just more proof that artistic talent and common decency are orthogonal traits.

Regarding the graphic lectures Money gave, where’d he promote bestiality and other fetishes: He once declared that the purpose of such talks was “to put a metaphorical eggbeater in the brains of the audience.” He succeeded at this and then some.

Most biologists nowadays find the nature/nurture debate to be tiresome and even ignorant—rooted in outdated conceptions of how biology works. Really, it’s like debating the finer points of phlogiston.
…………..The truth is, both inborn traits and environmental factors contribute to our psychology, sexual and otherwise. It’s not nature versus nurture, it’s nature and nurture. People with certain genes and hormones, for instance, will preferentially seek out certain environments where they feel more comfortable. Contrariwise, a different environment can affect the expression of those genes or the psychological effects of those hormones. Everything twists back on itself in a complicated feedback loop, with no clear way to separate nature from nurture.
…………..In sum, talking about nature without nurture (or vice-versa) doesn’t even make sense in most cases. If you remember one thing from this chapter, make it that: it’s not versus, it’s and.

This is pure speculation on my part, but here goes.
…………..In 1966, while pursuing his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Michigan, the future Unabomber Ted Kaczynski moved into a rundown apartment building near campus, next door to a young couple. Being young, they had a lot of sex—very loud, energetic sex—and the thin walls between the apartments blocked nothing. Kaczynski could hear every orgasm in graphic detail, day and night.
…………..This constant soundtrack of sex tormented Kaczynski, who struggled mightily to even talk to women, much less get laid. And, fearing that he might snap, he came up with an outré solution. He went to the university health center and made an appointment to speak with a psychiatrist about getting a sex-change operation—simply so he could have the pleasure of touching a female body once in his life.
…………..Kaczynski never kept the appointment: he realized what a loony idea it was and abandoned it. And while there’s zero evidence that he knew anything about John Money and his theories of gender and sexual fluidity, I can’t help but speculate whether such ideas were “in the air” at Harvard or Michigan, and whether they might have triggered Kaczynski’s plan, even in an indirect way.

One methodological note. The David Reimer experiment was a single case study. And as a single case study, it cannot prove, once and for all time, whether gender and sex are mere social constructs. But the bulk of the physiological, psychological, and genetic evidence—including other David Reimers who have since come forward after their own sex-reassignment surgeries with their own tales of torment and woe—does contradict the idea of sexual blank slates.

In thinking about the range of masculinity and femininity inside human beings, I like this quote from a historian: “Strong colors coexist with pastels. There are and will continue to be highly masculine people out there; it’s just that some of them are women.”

I skipped past this in the book, but after Bruce’s botched circumcision, the Reimers didn’t just hang around at home, hoping that something would come along and save their boy. They of course consulted with doctors and plastic surgeons, including at the Mayo Clinic. And one of the doctors at the Mayo had mentioned Money briefly, saying that he could possibly help them raise Bruce as a girl. So when the Reimers saw Money on the CBC, they vaguely recognized him. But it was only after seeing his performance on the program, and hearing him explain his theories, that they decided he really could help them.

You might be wondering what Brian’s reaction was to finding out that his sister was really his brother. In short, not good. He found out about Brenda’s infant injury the same day she did, and he got furious. He happened to be at the parking lot where his mom worked, in the money booth, and when she revealed the full story to him, he jumped up and smashed his fists into the panes of the booth’s window, breaking two panes of glass. He remembered thinking, “Shit, the first fourteen years of my life was a lie.” Afterward, he went into a downward spiral from which he never really recovered.

Money’s defenders (and they do exist) would argue that surgery is still the best option for people with ambiguous or damaged genitals, because at least they’ll be spared cruel locker-room-style taunts for not having a “proper” penis. But David himself rejected this line of reasoning: he admits that he probably would have had trouble after the botched circumcision no matter what. But raising him as a girl just compounded things: “Then I had two problems on my hands, not just one.”

In the Dominican Republic and wider Latin America there’s a fairly common condition where people who present as girls at birth suddenly emerge as males during puberty, anatomically and otherwise. The name of the condition is pretty blunt: penis-at-twelve syndrome.

Mice have long been a mainstay of biomedical research, and until about a decade ago, the National Institutes of Health funded far more research on male mice than female mice. The reason was simple. Female mice go through a menstrual cycles every four to five days, and scientists reasoned that the spike of hormones during menstruation could affect the experimental results in unknown ways. Mammal bodies are complicated enough, the reasoning went, and by studying male mice only, scientists could eliminate one potentially confounding variable.
…………..However logical this assumption sounds, it turned out to be wrong. A study from 2014 determined that data collected from female mice didn’t vary any more than data collected from male mice. So there was no reason to exclude female mice. Furthermore, follow-up work found a reason to be wary of male mice. When housed together in close quarters, male mice form dominance hierarchies, and the level of testosterone in the top mouse can be five times as high as the level of testosterone in the bottom mouse. So while testosterone levels don’t vary as much day-to-day as menstrual hormones do, male-male differences still might affect the results of experiments. For these reasons, the NIH now forces researchers to take sex into account as a variable whenever they run experiments with mice.

After David “came out” as a boy, he and his brother invented a lie about what happened to Brenda: that she died in a plane crash on her way to visit an old boyfriend in British Columbia.
…………..They chose British Columbia because the Reimer family had actually spent a few years in B.C. during Brenda and Brian’s early adolescence. In a bit of wishful thinking, Ron and Janet had relocated the family there for a fresh start, somewhere distant from all their problems. Little surprise, all their problems followed them west. Ron couldn’t find a job out there and started drinking more. School proved just as awful for Brenda as ever. And the whole family was crammed into a tiny trailer with two volatile teenagers. Finally, the trailer caught fire and burned up most of their family photos. Fifteen months after abandoning the city, they slunk back to Winnipeg.

Botched circumcisions, alas, are not that rare, and many other parents have faced the same bad choices that the Reimers did. Take a pair of cases at Atlanta’s Northside Hospital in 1985.
…………..On August 22nd of that year—David Reimer’s birthday, believe it or not—two unrelated babies both suffered botched circumcisions and lost their penises. One was castrated and raised as a girl; the other, after his parents refused sex-reassignment surgery, was raised as his biological sex. In follow-up work years later, the baby raised as a boy was doing okay. He endured some taunting from his peers, but was adjusting pretty well to his phalloplasty. The other one’s fate was unclear. His/her parents had divorced when young, and s/he’d been placed with a court-appointed guardian. But, knowing how traumatic sex-reassignment can be, and concerned for the child’s well-being, David Reimer personally reached out via letter. He never heard anything back.
…………..You probably won’t be surprised to hear that the doctor who pushed for the sex-reassignment surgery in the Atlanta case was John Money—a full five years after David Reimer had reverted to living as a male. Money absolutely refused to change his theories in light of contradictory evidence, and his patients paid the price.

After Milton Diamond published the paper that revealed the truth about David, a journalist wrote a long profile of David for Rolling Stone. (David had resisted in-depth interviews until then, but he loved rock music, especially Elvis, and thought that appearing in Rolling Stone sounded pretty cool.) In it, David proved quite thoughtful.
…………..For instance, he admitted that he’d grown up in a chauvinistic culture, and was self-aware enough to realize that he probably would have been chauvinistic himself if not for his tortured childhood. “I feel sorry for women,” he said. “I’ve been there. ‘You’re a little lady—go into the kitchen.’ Or, ‘We don’t want you to chop wood—you might hurt yourself.’” He remains one of the few people in history who’s lived as both a male and a female, giving him unique insights into the experiences of both.

Chapter Twelve: Fraud

In some ways, Dookhan’s lapping of her lab mates was even more skewed than the raw numbers suggest. Tests on some drugs, like marijuana, were reportedly quick and easy; you could peg something as marijuana in no time. Other drugs, especially ambiguous white powders, took longer to differentiate. As the top chemist in the lab, Dookhan tended to get the tougher cases, but she still outpaced everyone in her lab by a mile.

Beyond bad forensics, shoddy psychological assessments deserve their own note. According to a recent scientific review, one-third of psychological assessment tools used in the courtroom are not considered valid in the general psychological community. That same review then consulted an authoritative handbook in the field, Mental Measurements Yearbook, and found that 60 percent of the reviewed assessments had mild to serious statistical and technical flaws. Despite this iffy science, lawyers challenged psychological assessments just 5 percent of the time in court cases, and won less than one-third of those challenges. One author of the review concluded that “judges often fail to exercise the scrutiny required by law” of the validity of psychological testing in the courtroom.

Before Dookhan resigned, her bosses did finally ban her from testing samples. But in doing so, they merely shifted Dookhan onto another project, which involved writing up the official testing protocols for samples at the lab. (Before this, the lab had relied on informal, hand-me-down rules.) Upon hearing about Dookhan’s new project, her fellow chemists were stunned. The very person who’d been flouting the protocols—flagrantly flouting them—was now in charge of writing them up. In fact, given that the assignment allowed her to escape the drudgery of constant testing, the assignment seemed like a reward for her fraud. Dookhan also continued to testify in court cases for months, without disclosing the fact that she’d been suspended from testing.

Just a final note on the cashew-crack perp: a judge later ordered Dookhan to pay $2 million to him after he’d served 15 months in prison. It’s not clear whether Dookhan ever actually paid.

As a reminder, the Melendez-Diaz ruling forces lab chemists and other forensic experts to testify in court every single time. Here’s my problem with applying that rule to scientific evidence:
…………..In the vast, vast majority of cases, a lab analyst plops down in the witness box and says, I applied this test and this test, and these were the results—simply repeating what they’ve already stated in their signed certificates. Then the defense lawyer either dismisses them without any cross-examination and tries to scoot past the matter, or else fruitlessly grills them, trying to probe for non-existent holes. This charade wastes everyone’s time and doesn’t serve justice at all.
…………..Also, it’s worth noting that the Sixth Amendment (which the Supreme Court drew upon to make this ruling) applies to eyewitness evidence, and scientific evidence differs from eyewitness evidence in key ways. First, as numerous studies have shown, eyewitness recall is spotty at best and prone to exaggerations and misinterpretations. Scientific evidence is far less spotty, in that any two competent technicians should theoretically both get the same result when testing a sample. (Assuming of course, that the underlying forensic “science” is sound in the first place; see the main text.) What’s more, eyewitnesses are often the lone person to see some act, and in that case, there’s no other way to probe their testimony other than cross-examining them. That’s why the Framers put the so-called Confrontation Clause in the Sixth Amendment. Not because cross-examination is such a great tool for rooting out the truth, but because there were no other options back in the 1700s. But you might have noticed that it’s not the 1700s anymore.
…………..Furthermore, the Melendez-Diaz ruling misunderstands how science works nowadays and even what science is. Much of forensic science nowadays is automated, done by machines; the technicians running them might not even understand their inner workings. So why subpoena the technicians? (The alternative, as one federal judge mockingly pointed out, would be to subpoena the “spectrographs, ovens, and centrifuges” themselves.) Plus, science nowadays is often a team effort—it can take a dozen people to nail somebody with DNA evidence. Yet according to the logic of Melendez-Diaz, all dozen people should appear in court and testify, putting a huge burden on the courts. That’s especially true in rural areas that outsource the work to labs in other states.
…………..Now, that’s not to say that scientific evidence should go unchallenged. Rather, the way to challenge scientific evidence is with more science: to have another, independent lab run the test again. That way, if defendants truly believe they’re innocent and that someone either made a mistake or committed fraud, they can contest the results—and do so much more effectively than by harassing an analyst like Dookhan, who will just lie anyway. It’s true that additional testing could add to the backlog that most labs face, but that’s largely a personnel issue that could be remedied with a few hundred thousand dollars to hire more chemists. And the courts could discourage superfluous testing by forcing defendants to submit all retesting results, favorable or not, to the court. That way, defendants who know they’re guilty would avoid demanding a retest, since two results against them would look pretty damning.
…………..Plus, if Dookhan had known that her samples could be tested again at an independent lab, she would have been much more wary about dry-labbing. The police also could have rooted out such fraud by secretly submitting, on a regular basis, purposely mislabeled drugs—submitting cocaine and calling it heroin, for instance. The chemist testing it wouldn’t know that this was a dummy sample intended to trip her up, and would treat it like anything else seized on the street. But if a chemist routinely got the mislabeled samples wrong, the police would know something crooked was happening. Audits like this are far more likely to catch the next Annie Dookhan than cross-examination.

As mentioned in chapter 11, Dookhan’s case was notable for its novelty, since men commit crimes at far higher rates than women. (It’s an imperfect proxy, but there are roughly a dozen times more men than women in jail in the United States today.)
…………..Not to go all John Money, but there are many different theories out there for why men commit more crimes than women and whether biology or culture explains the difference. Sociologists tend to attribute the gap to either power structures in society or a sort of perverse chivalry that causes men (especially young men) to try and one-up each other with brazen stunts. Those with a biological bent look to differences in genetics, brain structure, and hormones for an explanation.
…………..It’s also worth noting that, according to psychological research, men are generally more willing than women to sacrifice their ethics to get ahead professionally. At the same time, when women do get caught, they tend to be judged more harshly than men.

Appendix: The Future of Crime

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 does prohibit certain acts in space (e.g., deploying nuclear weapons), and it forbids any nation from planting a flag on a celestial body and seizing it. But the treaty focuses on nation-states and says virtually nothing about what private companies or individuals can or can’t do up there. Given that we’re already entering an age of private spaceflight, the treaty obviously needs an update.

One reason that space is hell on human bodies is that our bodies evolved to exist with a certain force of gravity on them, and once that constraint is lifted, things go haywire. Here’s a partial list of all the things that can go wrong, health-wise, in zero gravity: blood clots, nausea, disorientation, bone demineralization, anxiety, memory loss, poor decision-making, muscle wasting, poor vision, chronic insomnia (deadlier than it sounds), chronic motion sickness, leaky intestinal linings (allowing pathogens to attack the body), fraying cartilage, retinal hemorrhages, and deformation of the pituitary gland. Oh, and the lack of an atmosphere or magnetic field up there leaves you exposed to radiation, which can increase your risk of cancer or simply strafe the neurons in your brain to the point that you start seeing things that aren’t there. Good times!

With regard to eerily preserved bodies on other planets: Decay would still be quite different on Mars, but you can find some fairly well preserved bodies on Earth, too. People tossed into bogs often weather the millennia quite well. And with Ötzi, the famous iceman who was murdered in the Alps five thousand years ago, several of his tattoos are still visible on his skin, and his last meal (deer meet and einkorn wheat) was still identifiable in his stomach.

Beyond crimes against individuals, we could also imagine new, global crimes in space. Spaceships orbit planets at fantastic speeds; the International Space Station zips along at nearly five miles per second. So if someone hurled down a huge payload—even a big boulder—it could blast the ground with the kinetic-energy equivalent of several atomic bombs. Or, given the increasing amount of space junk littering low-earth orbit, you could easily steer some of it into someone else’s satellites and wipe out their communications.
…………..And we haven’t even talked about ruining other planets. Several moons of Jupiter and Saturn seem like promising abodes for life. But say that a demented space-Ahab deliberately crashed a probe there, either to contaminate those moons with poison or kick off a nuclear winter. This might not technically qualify as a crime, given the lack of government on the moons, but it would still offend most people’s sensibilities. More realistically, let’s say the United States and another spacefaring country were at war, and astrosoldiers from the other country trashed the Apollo 11 landing site and wiped out Neil Armstrong’s historic first footprint. That might not violate any laws, but much of the world would be outraged.

The space-Ahab scenario mentioned just above (of crashing a contaminated probe onto a moon of Jupiter or Saturn, to destroy life there) might seem outlandish, but we’re actually about to try something similar here on earth.
…………..There are vast deposits of mineral wealth sitting on the deep ocean floor, including gems and metal-rich nuggets. By most estimates, in fact, deep sea beds contain more minerals than all the land area on earth combined (which makes sense, given that our surface is two-thirds ocean). The problem, of course, is getting the gems and nuggets back to the surface. Only in the past few years has technology advanced enough to make seafloor mining potentially profitable. Currently, a few dozen companies have licenses to start. Some propose scooping and floating the minerals up in sea-drones, others using giant vacuum nozzles or other technology.
…………..The problem is that we know almost nothing about life on the bottom of the ocean. Deep sea beds were once thought to be barren wastelands, but that’s almost certainly false—these are viable, ancient ecosystems that we only barely understand. (Some creatures, for example, live entirely on sunken whale carcasses.) Machines that scour or suck up the seafloor will kill untold numbers of critters outright. Perhaps worse, given how long the disturbed sand takes to settle down there, such activity will disrupt the ecosystem for years into the future as well. Now, you might just shrug and say, Who cares? But we actually know more about the moon 250,000 miles away than our own oceans, and we have no idea what we’re going to destroy—fish stocks could plummet, or an incredible new cure for cancer or AIDS could be destroyed for a few piece of jewelry.
…………..As a side note, one of the craziest facts about the recent exploration of the deep ocean is how much garbage already exists down there. One news story reported an explorer finding “a plastic bag at the bottom of one trench, a beverage can in another, and when he reached the deepest point in the Mariana [Trench, the deepest point on Earth’s surface], he watched an object with a large S on the side float past his window. Trash of all sorts is collecting in the hadal [zone]—Spam tins, Budweiser cans, rubber gloves, even a mannequin head.”

With regard to space exploration, we probably won’t get everything right immediately, but if nothing else, we can avoid repeating the worst mistakes of the past. In building colonies on other planets, for example, there probably won’t be natives to exploit and enslave. But human beings throughout history have readily imported slaves (including sex slaves) into new territories, which could easily happen in space.
…………..It also seems likely that purely money-making operations will be more prone to abuse: overseers in those cases will have incentives to sweep in, wring as much profit from the land and workers as possible, and scram. In contrast, people who invest in new planets—who want to raise families there and stay there for the long haul—will almost certainly be better stewards. In those situations, a little investment and heart goes a long ways.

Bitcoin is still pretty niche, something that few people have actually used before. But the collective processing power necessary to run Bitcoin is astounding. The algorithms to confirm transactions are so intensive that they consume something like 0.2 percent of the world’s total energy budget, comparable to all of Switzerland.

Due to their secrecy, cryptocurrencies could enable new types of fraud as well. The founder of the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange Quadriga died while traveling in India in 2019. Shockingly, investors discovered that he alone had access to the digital “keys” that opened the hardware “vault” where their money was stored. So when he died, roughly $200 million of wealth evaporated. Given the stakes, some investors accused the founder of faking his death and fleeing, and they’ve demanded that his body be exhumed and autopsied. So far, this hasn’t happened. But there’s nothing stopping a sketchy tech executive from actually executing a stunt like that in the future.

In addition to crimes per se, there are certain practices in science that, however widespread today, will likely be rejected as unethical in coming decades.
…………..These shifts have happened before in science. In centuries past, it was considered perfectly fine to purge any outlying data points that you wanted to, in order to get a better fit for trend lines. Not anymore. Before the 1800s, scientists like Galileo also regularly passed off thought experiments as real experiments, which seems even more egregious.
…………..So what things won’t pass muster in the future? Especially in fields with small sample sizes (psychology, medicine), scientists might have to pre-register their experiments before they start, to avoid statistical legerdemain. And given the increasing cheapness of electronic communication, it might soon be a scientific sin not to include all your raw data as an attachment to your scientific papers. (In the past, data was precious and it made sense to guard it. Nowadays we’re awash in data, and there’s little excuse for not letting other people evaluate it.) Similarly, while most scientific research is supported by government funds, much of this research is locked behind the paywalls of private publishers. As a result, the people who ultimately paid for the work (taxpayers) can’t access it, which seems unfair.
…………..As far as lab practices, we’ve come a long way from the days when Thomas Edison’s minions could torture dogs and horses in the name of science. But in the future we’ll likely go even further and phase out testing on many more animals beyond chimpanzees. Some international regulations already require scientists to get special permission to run tests on octopuses, which is intriguing considering that they’re invertebrates.
…………..Field work could change, too. There’s always been a bit of a macho cowboy culture among geologists and paleontologists and naturalists—recall Marsh and Cope from the Bone Wars chapter. People heading out into the wilds were careful not to plan too much, and the fact that you might die out there merely added to the allure. But universities and institutes have started to crack down on such practices; sending people the ends of the earth with little preparation and little support will no longer fly.
…………..One final change could involve labor practices. It’s long been one of science’s dirty secrets that, while graduate students and postdocs do most of the work, professors get to slap their names on papers as first author and hog the glory. The exploited are understandably sick of this.

One longtime application of satellite technology has been to spy on other countries, but in many cases, amateurs have utilized this data to beat out so-called experts. In particular, amateurs have an impressive track record of sniffing out nuclear-weapon sites online using publically available information. For instance, amateurs nailed down where North Korea’s first nukes were tested, and did so years before the Norks confirmed this. They also ferreted out details about nuclear sites in Iran and debunked North Korean rumors about the supposed launch of missiles from submarines.
…………..That said, amateurs have made some embarrassing mistakes, too: they’ve confused highways for industrial rail lines, streambeds for underground tunnels, elevators for missile pads, and a circular hotel foundation for a hidden missile site. The biggest boner occurred in 2011 when a group of Georgetown University students thought they’d ferreted out thousands of missiles in China. They hadn’t, but their premature report caused screaming headlines across the world and led to congressional hearings before everyone realized it was all bogus.
…………..The bottom line is that you have to be careful with satellite pictures, no matter who’s interpreting them. As analysts have pointed out, the majestic Arch in St. Louis would look like a little metal strip from the sky—you’d completely miss the perspective that shows what it really is. And never underestimate the potential for mischief. The Georgetown students were earnestly trying to do good, but a group of bad actors could stir up real trouble—even spark a war—by maliciously misinterpreting pictures.