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"B-19 features in two 1972 papers: ‘Septal stimulation for the initiation of heterosexual behavior in a homosexual male’, by Heath and his colleague Charles E Moan, and ‘Pleasure and brain activity in man’, by Heath alone, which set out – apparently for the first time – what happens to human brainwaves during orgasm. The papers are extraordinary: at once academic and pornographic, clinically detached and queasily prurient. And they prompt all sorts of questions. Who was this Dr Heath? How on earth did he come to carry out this experiment – and get permission for it? And did it really, you know, work?"...
Imagine a line that goes through one ear and out the other. Now take another line that runs dead centre from the top of your skull and down through your tongue. Where the two meet is what Heath labelled the septal area, although scientists today would probably call it the nucleus accumbens. For Heath, it was the seat of pleasure and emotions that he thought would allow him to unlock the human brain...
There was just one problem. Heath could – and did – carry out all the tests he wanted on animals, but he couldn’t test his theories on humans: not so much for ethical reasons as because his colleagues at Columbia weren’t interested in the subcortex. Then, on a trip to Atlantic City, he found himself lying on the beach next to a man from New Orleans. He was the dean of Tulane University’s medical school, and he was looking to set up a psychiatry department. He’d heard good things about a guy called Bob Heath. I’m Bob Heath, said Bob Heath. And so they started to talk...
electrodes had, they announced, uncovered “an abnormality in the septal region” – unusual brainwave patterns, seen during seizures, that were exclusive to schizophrenia. And their use of electrical pulses to stimulate the same area had had promising results with the initial 22 patients, 19 of whom were schizophrenic...
Yet you do not have to read through many of the 600 pages of Studies in Schizophrenia to feel slightly different emotions. The type of electric pulse, Heath and co admitted, was “arbitrarily chosen” because it seemed to work on animals: “We are still by no means certain that it is the most effective way of influencing the circuit.” Among the first ten patients, “Two patients had convulsions… wound infection occurred in two cases.” Among the second ten, there were two deaths, both related to brain abscesses that developed following the operation. Some patients developed infections, others had convulsions. Patient 21 “tugged vigorously at his bandage and displaced the electrodes”. Patient 12 had two electrodes put in the wrong place...
of the initial 22 patients, four who had had abnormal brainwave patterns showed improvement a few months later, but at least the same number who had had normal patterns developed “evidence of gross abnormality”. Also, although Heath did not acknowledge it, any improvement may have come about simply because the chosen patients were getting more attention from their doctors...
Heath’s was a time in which damaging or experimental procedures were commonplace: there were almost none of the controls or restrictions that we have today. But even so, his radicalism stood out.
Other doctors would implant a few electrodes for a few days; Heath implanted dozens, and left them in for years. Others experimented with animals; Heath experimented with people and animals both, feeding the findings from one set of tests into the next. Others tested the pleasure reflex under carefully controlled laboratory conditions; Heath handed patients the control boxes and set them loose to juice themselves as they saw fit...
Among these were his efforts to treat gay men by turning “repugnant feelings… toward the opposite sex” into pleasurable ones – and similar work on “frigid women”. He experimented with dripping drugs deep into the brain down tiny pipes called cannulae, targeting the same regions as his electrodes. He tested a ‘brainwashing’ drug called bulbocapnine for the CIA, on both animals and (although he denied it for decades) on a human prisoner, as a small part of the vast and largely illegal ‘MK-ULTRA’ program to explore the limits and limitations of the American body...
controversy damaged Heath’s national reputation – already imperiled by a feud with Seymour Kety, who as the first director of the National Institute of Mental Health ensured that Heath was always denied federal funding for his work, and had to go cap in hand to private donors...
Valenstein pointed out gently but firmly that because of Heath’s lack of controls, his habit of reading what he wanted into the data, and other experimental errors, much of his work was simply invalid. “My criticism of Heath,” he says today, “was really that he didn’t seem to know how to test his own conclusions for verification. He was always interested in results that were spectacular – like finding some protein in the brain that would evoke schizophrenia. He’d published papers of that sort but never really looked for alternative explanations, never tested the reliability of his findings, was very willing to rapidly publicize his findings, so that he was quite unreliable.”
http://mosaicscience.com/story/gay-cure-experiments
This man sounds like the Donald Trump of neurology.
