The names of William Hunter and William Smellie still inspire respect among today’s doctors, more than 250 years since they made their contributions to healthcare. Such were the duo’s reputations as outstanding physicians that the clienteles of their private practices included the rich and famous of mid-18th-century London.
But were they also serial killers? New research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM) claims that they were. A detailed historical study accuses the doctors of soliciting the killing of dozens of women, many in the latter stages of pregnancy, to dissect their corpses.
via Founders of British obstetrics ‘were callous murderers’ | UK news | The Guardian.
Here’s a “cold case” that’s really cold: between 1749 and 1774, with a pause between 1755 and 1764 due to suspicion about how they procured their specimens, the two obstetricians had between 35 and 40 pregnant women killed and their bodies delivered to them for anatomical dissection. The historian Don Shelton built a circumstantial case for murder based on the rarity of natural or accidental deaths of women who were pregnant near to term, that is eight to nine months along.
Don Shelton names Dr Colin Mackenzie and John Hunter, William Hunter’s brother and a celebrated anatomist, as their accomplices. The author of the Guardian article states that William Hunter had links to powerful families that allowed him to avoid any investigation despite the fact that suspicion had fallen on them both by 1755. Hunter apparently resumed ordering the killings in 1764 but limited the “take” to one victim a year and stopped in 1774.
The “resurrection” business– the trade in corpses used for anatomical dissection– was described as “very lucrative” during the 18th and 19th centuries in particular. Two notorious killers, Burke and Hare, gave the name “Burking” to the murder of individuals specifically so that their corpses could be sold to doctors in need of specimens for dissection. They were said to have murdered 17 citizens of Edinburgh in 1827 and 1828. Large cities were poorly policed, and London was described as “unhealthy and semi-anarchic.” The practice of “grave robbing”, or obtaining recently deceased individuals for dissection, was popular and well-compensated, although the bodies normally obtained in this way were usually old or in a state of extremely poor health before death, making them weak subjects if one’s purpose was to look at (“autopsy” means “to look for one’s self”) healthy bodies and organs. Thus, Burke resorted to the much more risky practice of murder for the purpose of obtaining healthy specimens.
Burke and Hare sold their victims to Dr Robert Knox, a popular anatomist of the time who gave lectures in which he dissected corpses and identified their organs for medical students as well as the interested public. They were allegedly assisted by Burke’s mistress and Hare’s wife. They became so notorious that a word for their activities was coined: “burking”, which originally meant to smother a victim, leaving no marks of violence, specifically for the purpose of using the corpse for anatomical dissection. “Burking” was extended from its original meaning of “to suffocate a victim so as to leave no evidence of violent death” to a more general meaning of “to hide wrongdoing or cover-up misdeeds”.
“Burking” was popularized when Burke and Hare were captured and put on trial; their testimony on the stand was discussed and repeatedly endlessly by morbidly fascinated citizens. The degree of interest in such grotesque subjects is difficult for modern people to understand, but until the mid-eighteen hundreds, execution by public hanging was the rule and was attended by huge crowds. Burke was attended by an estimated crowd of 25,000 at his execution and was himself delivered up for dissection afterwards. Hare escaped execution by turning “state’s evidence” and Knox, who kept his mouth shut, was not charged.
Before the Anatomy Act of 1832 (see below), the fear of grave-robbing led to extreme measures to prevent digging up fresh corpses. At some cemeteries, guards were set to watch at night to observe any unauthorized digging; small houses were built for these guards, with fireplaces to keep warm, windows to observe the graveyard, and loop-holes to fire potshots at any trespassing grave violators. At other cemeteries, heavy stones were placed over fresh graves to inhibit digging; when robbers simply dug at the end of the stone to extract the body through the top of the coffin, solid collars were added to keep the body from sliding out. Heavy stone temporary dwellings were also built to store coffins containing fresh corpses until they had decomposed to the point beyond which dissection was unrewarding. After a couple of months, the coffin could be removed and the remains safely buried in the normal fashion.
“Grave torpedoes” were even invented that would explode if someone attempted to dig up the coffin beneath. Naturally, the torpedo was designed to explode upwards to avoid scattering the remains when activated. Through Wikipedia and a Scottish website detailing methods of discouraging grave robbers I viewed the text from a patent for a grave torpedo that dated to the end of the nineteenth century (Google has scanned the text of numerous old patents). Apparently there was still sufficient concern about one’s grave being dug up nefariously at that late date.
In a movie released in 1945, “The Body Snatcher”, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff take up where Burke and Hare left off; the movie’s story was loosely based on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1884. The movie adds an idealistic young medical student who is forced into the practice of buying corpses by his older, cynical and entrapped doctor mentor. The young student rebels when he discovers a poor young woman he has seen on the street dead in the doctor’s basement, another corpse to be dissected. The perpetrators are killed in a carriage crash at the end of the movie when one of their victims turns out to be still alive and kicking, and has mysteriously turned into one of the killers, supposedly a victim. Of course the killer is trapped in an out of control horse buggy in the pouring rain, with the reanimated corpse crowding him on the carriage seat.
Another film, “The Flesh and the Fiends” (1960), retold the Burke and Hare story with Peter Cushing as Dr Knox, Donald Pleasance as Hare, and George Rose as Burke. This movie, while more faithful to the original Burke history, also includes an idealistic young medical student; this time, the student and his girlfriend are killed by Burke, but the killers are arrested.
The method of the murders, smothering, is said to be the one that leaves the corpse in the best condition and avoids any bloodshed, which could leave tell tale evidence behind.
The problem that doctors and researchers faced for hundreds of years has always been how to see for one’s self how the inside of the human body looks and works. To look at the inside of one’s body usually requires cutting it open; if done before death, it is painful and destructive. If done after death, the body has stopped functioning and much is likely to be missed. Equally important, religious strictures get in the way because it is thought that the body must be retained as intact as possible in order to be raised at the Day of Judgement. Such issues as how the blood circulates could not be settled until it could be seen where the blood comes from, where it goes, and how it returns to its starting point, in a living subject.
The problem of obtaining specimens became acute when Vesalius (1514-1564) popularized the dissection of human bodies to learn anatomy. He discovered that the standard anatomical text of the time, published by Galen of Pergamon (Greece) in the second century CE (Common Era, better known as AD–Anno Domini), had been based on the dissection of Barbary macaques (a sort of baboon) because dissection of humans had been banned. Vesalius began to perform dissections himself and encouraged his students to do the same. He documented his work in his first publication with detailed illustrations that were published as a set of six large woodcut posters in 1538.
Galen had assumed that arteries carried blood to the brain and lungs from the left ventricle, while veins carried blood to the stomach and other, lesser organs from the right ventricle. For this circulation scheme to work, there would have to be a series of holes that interconnected the ventricles; these holes didn’t exist, but until Vesalius began his work, all anatomists agreed that they had found them. Vesalius stated that he couldn’t find these essential holes.
Galen made a number of other notorious errors; for example, he thought that the mandible was two bones, while in fact there is only one mandible bone, joined at the center. He also thought that the sternum had seven separate bones, which is true in apes; Vesalius showed that the human sternum only has three bones. Galen mistakenly thought that the bones of the lower leg were smaller than the bone of the upper arm, also probably as a result of dissecting ape cadavers.
Vesalius corrected some of Galen’s errors, which made him suspect for heresy in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church, and became famous for his publications. The most important of these works was called “De humanii corporis fabrica”, published in Basel by Johannes Oporinus; it consisted of seven volumes and had 273 highly detailed illustrations, probably created by multiple artists, all of whom must have personally witnessed complete dissections. Vesalius was only 28 when the first edition was published. The book made him famous, and shortly afterward, he was invited to be the Imperial Physician to the Court of Emperor Charles V (of the Holy Roman Empire.)
Envious rival physicians mocked him as a barber (the surgeon was often a barber as well) but he served the court for eleven years and had many opportunities as a result to learn by postmortems, treating battle injuries, and observing the results of medications used at that time. His work was attacked as heretical, but an investigation by the Salamanca Inquisition cleared him of heresy. One of Vesalius’ rivals, his main detractor, claimed that the human body had changed since Galen studied it, and this was why Vesalius’ findings were different.
“In 1564 Vesalius went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land after being accused of dissecting a living body.” (Wikipedia) On his return voyage, he was shipwrecked and died on the island of Zakynthos; he was buried on Korfu. Apparently the accusation of vivisection, resulting in condemnation by the Inquisition and a forced pilgrimage, was a fabrication. It’s not clear from Wikipedia whether the fabrication occurred before or after his death.
As a consequence of Vesalius’ work, dissection of human cadavers became extremely popular among physicians, and came to be thought of as essential to a doctor’s training. At one point, a medical student was required to dissect three cadavers in the course of sixteen months’s training before he could become a surgeon. Soon there was a serious shortage of material for this purpose, and “Burking” arose to fill this need.
According to Wikipedia, Vesalius freely allowed that he did not have any pregnant cadavers to work with and therefore was unable to fully explain the anatomy of the female reproductive organs. The work of Hunter and Smellie was to correct this gap in medical knowledge, apparently at a cost of nearly forty murdered pregnant women, if this new analysis as reported in the Guardian is to be believed.
The work of William Harvey (1578-1657), who studied mostly animals, contradicted Galen’s explanation of blood circulation. Through many experiments performed on animals from shrimp to pigeons all the way to humans(who were not cut open), Harvey was able to establish that blood circulated from the veins, through the right side of the heart to the lungs and back again to the left side of the heart, and then out to the peripheral circulation through the arteries, finally returning through the veins to the right side of the heart.
Harvey’s work on humans was limited to observations of the results of temporary compression of the upper arm or leg. Lack of blood flow became obvious (and painful) after a few moments of compression to above 200 mm of mercury equivalent. The actions of the veins, and their valves, could be demonstrated with slight compression and “milking” of blood towards the torso; venous valves prevented back-flow of blood when it was stripped through the vein with finger pressure.
Galen’s theory of the circulation had postulated two separate systems, arterial and venous, which came together through invisible pores in the wall of the left ventricle. This theory was contradicted by Arabic scholar Ibn al-Nafis, who saw a circulation of blood from heart to lungs, mixing with air, returning to the heart, and then going out to the rest of the body; his work was not publicized in Europe, however.
Harvey’s book, “De Motu Cordis”, showing how blood actually circulated, caused controversy and accusations of blasphemy. The agreed-upon system, based on Galen, had two separate circulations, as noted above: venous blood, which originated in the liver, and arterial blood, the “vital system”. The arterial blood was thought to contain “spirits” which came from the heart and distributed heat and life to the body. The lungs were supposed to cool the “vital blood.” Pulmonary circulation of the blood was also described by Vesalius, among others, before Harvey completed the circuit.
Harvey’s work was limited by his ability to magnify only with a simple hand lens; he did not have available to him a microscope, although this was developed by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek(1632-1723) shortly after Harvey’s death. Leeuwenhoek, who was primarily a businessman rather than a scientist, kept his method of developing powerful magnifying lenses a secret because he wanted to be remembered for his role in developing microscopy rather than simply lensmaking.
He had discovered a powerful and extremely simple method of creating tiny glass spheres by heating a the center of a long piece of soda lime glass over a flame; pulling the piece apart while it was soft created two thin whiskers of glass. Reheating the end of the whisker made it collapse into a tiny glass sphere which was smooth enough to serve as a powerful magnifying lens. Combining two such spheres would make a microscope. This bypassed the tedious method of grinding a larger piece of glass on a careful pattern and then smoothing the surface with finer and finer abrasives.
Leeuwenhoek’s method of building microscopes didn’t create a demand for cadavers, but it satisfied a demand for close examination of tissues and opened up a new world of “animalcules”– single-celled organisms too small to be observed with the naked eye or a hand lens. At the same time, microscopic examination of animal and plant tissues revealed that they were built up of billions of individual cells that were separated by thin walls. While he is thought of as an amateur due to his orientation towards business, he was able to build microscopes that magnify to at least 275 times (the nine surviving microscopes) and may have reached 500 times magnification(some twenty to thirty were lost over the years).
The resurrection business was slowed down in 1832, at least in the United Kingdom, by the Anatomy Act, which provided for the legal dissection of those cadavers whose relatives did not object to the work. Prior to this Act (which was not universally acclaimed) the supply of bodies for dissection had been drying up, at the same time that the demand was increasing, by the reduction in the number of executions that gradually occurred at the end of the eighteenth century. The Act allowed for persons whose corpses were unclaimed by relatives after death to be “anatomized”, especially those who died in prison or in the workhouses. A person could even donate the body of a next of kin or his own body, in exchange for burial at the expense of the anatomy school.
Dissection was still discouraged by the Church because of a widespread belief that the body had to be intact in order to be resurrected at the End of Days. For the same reason, cremation was thought to prevent one’s rising again to be judged by Christ at the Apocalypse.
In addition, popular revulsion was shown by the actions of “angry mobs”; in particular, Wikipedia mentions the vandalism of an anatomy theater in Cambridge, England late in 1833. People believed that the Anatomy Act failed to prevent the sale of pauper’s bodies for medical research without the individual’s consent. For this reason, the anatomy laboratory was kept under wraps even after the Anatomy Act.
Finally, the passage of the Anatomy Act was hindered by the opposition of the poor for the following reason: the well-to-do would be the primary beneficiaries because, first, they would be free of the fear of their graves being dug up, and second, the advances in medical science would be to their benefit and not to the benefit of the poor, who could not afford medical treatment and doctor’s fees. The poor would be the worse off for the Act because they would be the ones whose bodies would be dissected after they died in the workhouse or without any relatives to claim their bodies. The poor were probably also more likely to believe that they needed to have an intact body to be resurrected and to go to heaven, rather than wander in limbo for eternity.
Thus, even body-snatching can be seen as a class struggle. Not that I endorse that way of thinking: it’s really tortuous and distorted and even silly. In the end, everyone benefits from advances in medical science, and all developed countries other than the United States have universal “free” (insured) health care. No-one is worried about grave-robbing, although there is still a shortage of cadavers for dissection: medical students are assigned, four students to each cadaver, in the first year of medical school.
Nonetheless, poor people distrusted the Anatomy Act and resented the provisions which allowed the government to claim any body that could not be buried at the expense of the family. Thus, if there was no money to pay for interment, “after six weeks” (often in practice, less than one week) the body could be sold for dissection. The body was supposed to be buried after such procedures, with the parts reassembled in a coffin; in practice, often six bodies were combined in one coffin, which was then buried under a numbered crucifix.
Poor people’s resentment of government and distrust of the Anatomy Act’s provisions was, to repeat, based on religious belief: those whose bodies were cut apart in the process of dissection could not rise from their graves intact on the Day of Judgement. To prevent dismemberment, families pooled their resources, purchased insurance policies, or did whatever they could to finance “proper burial.”
This reflects a low opinion of the medical profession in general: the attitude that doctors prefer to work for wealthy people, only do what they get paid to do, and have a habit of covering up unethical practices when they are witness to misdeeds. To stretch a slang term, the poor see doctors as guilty of “burking” their victims.
Dr. Palmer said the case for the required investment should be self-evident.
“It’s a trivial amount of money when you think of climate impact being in the trillions of dollars,” he said. “It’s actually an existential question. If it’s at one end of the spectrum, we can adjust, but if it’s at the other end of the spectrum, we’re not going to come out of it unless we cut emissions in the next decade.”
via A Climate-Modeling Strategy That Won’t Hurt the Climate – NYTimes.com.
This article appeared in the May 11, 2015 online version of the New York Times (NYT) and the quote is from the very end of the article. The primary thrust of the article from its first paragraph was that new computing techniques will be needed to solve the problems of climatology– specifically the scientific question of how quickly global warming will occur and, in general, what is likely to be the trend of the climate over the next hundred years. The new computing techniques will be required because a sufficiently fine-grained model of the earth for climatological purposes– say one kilometer on a side as the pixel size– would require 200 million cells to be computed per cycle, suggesting a 30 megawatt power consumption by the computer used to run the simulations. Large numbers, to be sure, and calculating the climate may be very expensive and will generate a lot of heat!
Therefore, the innovators of the Times article discuss using an inexact computing model to allow for approximate results that would give good enough conclusions with much less power required. One can imagine the analogy of using a slide rule to get results to two or three significant digits– approximate but close enough to point to a correct conclusion. The mechanisms of an inexact computation are discussed, and its theoretical advantages pressed, in this article, convincingly I think.
The final quotation refers to something very important that really has not been addressed– the inexact nature of our ability to predict what will happen over the next hundred years. The climate change may be mild enough, in the best case, for us to adapt to easily– or, in the worst case, the change may be so severe as to threaten the survival of the human species. We don’t really have an exact answer to the question that says: how bad is it going to be?
Krugman Flogs a Dead Horse (Just Kidding)
The New York Times’ resident economist, Paul Krugman, has published a new column entitled, “The Insecure American”,
( http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/opinion/paul-krugman-the-insecure-american.html ) in which he reports some more statistics that point out the continued, possibly worsening, economic insecurity that plagues middle America. For example, the Pew Research Center reports that “more than 3/4 of conservatives believe that ‘the poor have it easy’ due to government benefits.” The same poll reports that “only one in seven [conservatives] believe that the poor have hard lives.”
Krugman claims that “punishing the poor has become a goal in itself”, resulting in the refusal of Republican-run states to accept a Medicare expansion that would be paid for by the federal government; refusing the expansion leads to a group of people caught in the middle, too poor to afford private health insurance, and too “rich” to qualify for Medicaid. These millions of in-between people are unable to obtain health insurance of any kind and are actually worse off than they were before.
Krugman continues by repeating a contradiction to the widely-held belief that the age for Social Security should be raised because people are living longer. In fact, only the wealthy are living longer: the average life expectancy for those in the lower half of the income curve has hardly risen at all. Those who need Social Security the most are worn out by chronic diseases (some of them induced by their work) and die just as young as they did when Social Security was first implemented in the late 1930’s. The facts of this distribution of life expectancy have been well known for years, and yet it is almost a part of neoliberal dogma to claim that the retirement age should be increased because people are living longer. People are living longer, but almost the entire benefit of this increased life span is limited to the well-to-do, and the physical battering that poor people suffer in their jobs has not improved. The average coal miner, janitor, or street sweeper is worn out by age fifty, and lucky to reach sixty-five alive.
This problem is reflected in the rate of people applying for permanent disability, which allows immediate access to one’s Social Security savings; unfortunately, it does not result in eligibility for Medicare for two years after being declared disabled, an absurd restriction which theoretically saves money for the government but usually results in doctor’s visits not made or emergency room bills not paid. The only exception to the two year waiting period is for people afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s disease, who are not expected to survive the two years.
Krugman also reports on the results of a study run by the Federal Reserve, which reveals that three in ten nonelderly Americans have no retirement savings whatsoever. That is a surprisingly low figure, and I suspect that the retirement savings reported by the typical survey respondent are minimal when they exist at all. In addition, 47 percent of respondents stated that they would not have the resources to pay for an unexpected $400 bill, such as a car repair or noncovered medical expense.
Here is a “conservative” commenter’s argument against welfare:
“I am certainly not devoid of compassion. Its a basic human instinct. If you read what I said carefully, it is that permanent entitlements create dependencies, lead to anti-social behaviour and in the end a burden for society to maintain those dependants in a state of managed care that minimises violent “protests”.”
You can see that this person thinks that “permanent entitlements create dependencies” and “lead to anti-social behavior” and a “burden for society” that puts those dependents in “a state of managed care that minimizes violent ‘protests’ ” –surely this is a poor form of reasoning that argues against providing the type of help that is really needed, that is “permanent entitlements” for fear of “anti-social behavior” in those who are given the help they need. It seems to claim that those who are helped are actually hurt by “creating dependencies”– as if a “burden for society” does not already exist in the situation in which people who really need help are present. This is twisted reasoning that creates a specter of entitled, dependent, angry people who demand help as their right and are “anti-social” if they don’t get it, staging “violent ‘protests’ ” and generally causing trouble by asking for help.
In reality, people who need help are suffering and society will be helped by giving help. There is no reason not to help people by providing paid work, paid health care, and payments for housing, clothing, and food. Society and the economy are helped because those who are helped will spend all the money they receive; the economy heats up because spending increases, and those who do not appear to need help are benefited by a stronger economy. The bugaboo of “permanent entitlements” is just that– a fear that functioning people have of people who cannot function.
It is true that poor people are scary. Just looking at them reminds one of the possibility of one’s self becoming poor and helpless. Rather than indulge fear by turning away from needy people, we should banish fear by helping them. All of society will benefit from our help.
Killing Cats
Killing Cats
When I went back to school in the spring of 1972, my parents handed me an assistantship in a research project that was going on at Massachusetts General Hospital. My parents were friends with a professor whose boyfriend was a medical student; this student had been working in a laboratory there and wanted someone to replace him as an assistant. The research was in neurophysiology, and it involved using very thin electrodes inserted into the brains of cats to pick up activity in certain nerve centers within the brain.
This work was complex and morbid. We would take a young cat that had been raised in a cage at the laboratory animal compound in a big room in the basement that had cages of dogs, rabbits, and a few other mammals that were there to be used in various research projects. The men who worked in the big room were called Dieners, which is German for ‘servant’, and I was told to be very careful to be respectful of them because they were sensitive.
The cat would be given an intraperitoneal (that is, in the stomach) injection of a fast acting anesthetic like Pentothal. In a couple of minutes, the cat would fall sound asleep and we would then perform a cutdown (cut through the skin to expose a vein) and insert an intravenous line. This line was used to infuse a paralyzing agent, Flaxedil, and a saline/glucose mixture that kept the cat hydrated.
After the cutdown, we would open the cat up at the neck and perform a tracheostomy (insert a plastic breathing tube into the trachea after cutting it open.) The “trach” tube would be connected to an air pump that breathed for the cat, since the Flaxedil stopped the cat’s breathing muscles as well.
Finally, the cat’s head was placed in a large adjustable metal device that supported it on two prongs inserted in the ears and a clamp that held its jaw. The skin over the top of the skull was cut lengthwise and small holes were drilled over the needle insertion sites. The needle was then run on a stereotactic vise (a vise on which precisely measured movements can be made) down into the brain until we picked up a signal from a nerve center that responded to light. The cat was placed in a large box with a translucent screen in front of its eyes and measured lines of light were projected on the screen, moving across in a slow, measured fashion, or moving up and down in the same measured fashion. The light source was adjustable from a long line to a small spot.
The desired nerve centers responded to the light in a repetitive fashion: as the line of light moved across the screen, at a certain spot the nerve would start firing, then after the beam of light had passed, stop firing again. The best nerves we located would respond to the light like a bull’s eye: there would be a round area within which the nerve would fire repeatedly, but in the center of this area the nerve would suddenly stop firing altogether for a moment.
These nerve centers represented cells within the lateral geniculate body, a kidney bean shaped area in the brain within which were the neuron cell bodies that passed along visual impulses from the optic nerve and the eye to centers in the occiput or rear of the brain that processed visual information. These neurons were organized and specialized to fire only at a light impulse that appeared in a small area of the visual field, and the individual neurons collectively built a picture of the cat’s visual field.
We also inserted electrodes into the median raphe, the general activating center of the brain. Small electrical impulses in this area would alert the cat or wake it up.
We recorded the electrical impulses we received from the electrodes that we inserted into the lateral geniculate body onto a large tape recorder that we could play back afterwards to remind us of specific activity that we had picked up at definite times after light beams stimulated it or electrical stimulation of the median raphe occurred.
When we had located a cell that appeared to have the right behavior, a bull’s eye shaped reaction to light, we would infuse LSD-25 into the cat’s vein and record the cell’s reaction, which usually lasted two or three hours. Most often, the cell’s activity would increase but its sensitivity to light would decrease.
In the first few cats we did this procedure on, we did not use any anesthetic. After I figured out what was happening from the cat’s perspective, I realized that it would be awake but paralyzed and possibly suffering. I insisted that they find some sort of anesthetic and they began to use nitrous oxide through an anesthesia machine; a mixture of 80% nitrous oxide and 20 % oxygen was produced by the machine, and this was pumped into the cat’s lungs by the ventilator.
After dosing the cat with nitrous oxide, an inhalation anesthetic that induced a light coma, we would record impulses from the cat’s brain for 24 to 72 hours, depending on how long the cat survived. Eventually the cat would die, from side effects of the anesthesia or malnutrition (we fed them intravenously with glucose but it wasn’t adequate for prolonged survival.)
We then infused glutaraldehyde as a preservative into the cat’s brain, cut it out and sent the preserved brain to be sliced for microscopic examination. This would show us the needle tracts and whether we had reached the desired location within the brain.
Between the fall of 1972 and the spring and summer of 1973, I participated as an assistant in about twenty or thirty of these procedures, each ending with the death of the cat and its preservation in glutaraldehyde for microscopic examination.
In the summer of 1973, our cats started dying prematurely and we discovered that the anesthesia machine had a crack in the output valve that was allowing the cats to be slowly suffocated.
In the fall of 1973 and into 1974, the lab moved into a different building and I didn’t do any more cat procedures. I analyzed the data we had gathered and performed statistical tests on it. Eventually I produced a report which was turned into a paper published in the Proceedings of something or other.
In the spring of 1973, possibly in February or March, I adopted one of the cats from the lab cages and took it back to my dorm room. It promptly took shits randomly all over the place and I had to clean these things up. The next day I took the cat back to the lab and a few weeks later, I used that cat in an experiment where I anesthetized it and cut out its lateral geniculate body for evaluation of the amount of serotonin in it by another laboratory. I then turned up the nitrous oxide to 100% and disposed of the cat a few minutes later after its heart stopped beating.
I was dating a girl named Mei-Ling Ma in the spring of 1973 and I took her on a visit to the laboratory. She took a job in a lab a floor above us where there was a hospital unit.
The lab became a place where I did unauthorized experiments, and in the summer of 1973 I took an ounce of marijuana and extracted the cannabinoids with ether, concentrating them in a smaller portion. I did the experiment late at night and put a sign up on the door to warn the night watchman that I was working that night.
When I went home I forgot to take the sign down. I remembered after I went home and turned around, and went back to the lab and took the sign down. After I took it down, it was already 7 in the morning, and I sat down at the bench to look at some specimens under the microscope. I was looking through the scope when the head of the lab came in, a few minutes before 8 in the morning. He saw me working at the microscope and assumed that I had been there examining specimens for some time. He told me to go home and get some sleep, which I did.
The process of experimenting on cats disgusted me after a while and I think I felt guilty about it too. When I went to medical school I was offered a position in a lab that did experiments on cats; this time they kept the cats alive indefinitely and they seemed to be doing well. They installed plastic domes in place of their skulls and took small samples of cerebrospinal fluid periodically to measure serotonin levels. This was some of the pioneering research that was being done on serotonin in the brain. I turned down the offer to work in that lab in medical school. If I had accepted the offer, I could have paid my way through medical school. Instead I turned to a National Health Service scholarship and obligated myself to serve for four years in an underprivileged area in return for a generous scholarship and stipend.
That was a major turning point in my life, in which I abandoned research in favor of primary practice in an underserved area.
Here’s something I never would have known if I hadn’t found this web site:
The idea is to impeach Hillary Clinton before she becomes President. I know what you are thinking, how can they do that? Well, the truth is they can’t – and they know it. So what these clever little mental munchkins came up with is a plan to impeach her for being Secretary of State, posthumously.
I am sure they were passing around gold stars to everyone over at specialoperationsspeaks.com. the good people who are leading the charge to impeach Clinton…
…Fact is, congressional precedent dictates that all elected officials remain subject to impeachment and disqualification from holding office even after resignation.
While it technically is true that an official can be subject to impeachment after they resign, the actual “congressional precedent” can be found in three cases, none of which are even remotely similar to Mrs Clinton….
…The last “precedent” was when Richard Nixon resigned just prior to adoption of articles of impeachment by the House.
This happened in a tiny town in Oklahoma back in January, but it didn’t get into the national news. I don’t know why not.
As reported in the Atlanta Black Star January 18, 2015: “on Thursday” (January 15?) a man called 911 twice and claimed that there was a bomb in the local school house, the Sentinel Head Start school. He identified himself as Dallas Horton. Local police and sheriffs (a total of five officers) conducted a raid on Horton’s home, with the black police chief leading. The chief said that he and the other officers were shouting “police” and so on, but Mr. Horton claimed he didn’t know they were police. When the police chief entered the room where Mr. Horton was standing, Horton, fired four shots at him; three struck him in the chest, striking his bullet resistant vest, and one struck him in the arm. He was treated at the hospital and released.
However, none of the other officers returned fire. After a brief investigation, Horton was released. The logic behind the release supposedly was that the calls to 911 did not come from Horton’s home, so he could not have made the threats. In addition, the investigators apparently believed Horton’s claim that he did not know that the officers were police rather than random armed intruders. The investigation was conducted by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, who searched Horton’s home; in addition to several legal firearms, they were said to have found a “possible” explosive device. There was no explanation as to why the “possible” explosive device did not justify arresting Mr. Horton for investigation of “possession of an explosive device”, which is a crime.
Mr. Horton was apparently well known to the local police, and his Facebook page has a number of violent, racist images and statements. He is said to be a “survivalist type.” The mayor of Sentinel (population 904) said that he has known Horton his entire life.
I don’t know what to make of this story, but it doesn’t sound to me as if Dallas Horton was adequately investigated or appropriately charged. Perhaps this is because this was a small town and he was well known to the police and local politicians; it seems that a white racist, survivalist type fits right in to this community.
Comment of the Day
Indrid Cold
USA 5/22/2015 8:00 AM
This explains the widespread and increasing contempt for our criminal justice system. Why do you suppose people are filled with such rage against our legal system, and the police? Could it be that the citizenry are tired of seeing people incarcerated for years over victimless drug possession, while those who steal the equivalent of a small nation’s GDP go free? I find our current system of “justice” utterly contemptible lacking even the basic mandate of criminal law enforcement. Our prisons are now nothing more than for-profit facilities designed to warehouse those without job prospects (the surplus population if you will.)
Our police, with their paramilitary operations methodology, now simply keep our for-profit penal system filled up to the capacity that the municipal governments are contractually bound to. Yet not a single corporate CEO has been indicted for massive crimes that have had negative effects from coast to coast. And the “fines” that are levied amount to little more than 10% of the amount that was illegally appropriated. I am not some young inexperienced kid railing against “the man” but am a successful business owner who quite unexpectedly finds himself in a circumstance of total disrespect for “authority.” I can hardly imagine how those who have suffered direct predation by “the man” must feel. I suspect however, that the riots in cities like Baltimore are but the fuse that will ignight a full scale civil rebellion.
In what can only be described as a remarkable and swift series of events, one of the authors of a much-ballyhooed Science paper claiming that short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage is requesting a retraction following revelations that the data were faked by his co-author.
Donald Green, of Columbia, and Michael LaCour, a graduate student at UCLA, published the paper, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,” in December 2014. The study received widespread media attention, including from This American Life, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Science Friday, Vox, and HuffingtonPost, as LaCour’s site notes.
David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, graduate students at University of California, Berkeley, were two of the people impressed with the work, so they planned an extension of it, as they explain in a timeline posted online yesterday:
As we examined the study’s data in planning our own studies, two features surprised us: voters’ survey responses exhibit much higher test-retest reliabilities than we have observed in any other panel survey data, and the response and reinterview rates of the panel survey were significantly higher than we expected. We set aside our doubts about the study and awaited the launch of our pilot extension to see if we could manage the same parameters. LaCour and Green were both responsive to requests for advice about design details when queried. Earlier this month, they began a pilot of their extension. They soon realized that the response rate of the pilot study was notably lower than what LaCour and Green (2014) reported. When Broockman and Kalla contacted the firm they thought had performed the original study upon which the Science paper was based, the survey firm claimed they had no familiarity with the project and that they had never had an employee with the name of the staffer we were asking for. The firm also denied having the capabilities to perform many aspects of the recruitment procedures described in LaCour and Green (2014).
As noted in the article on Retraction Watch, Michael La Cour was a graduate student at UCLA. He subsequently received a PhD, partly on the basis of his dissertation, which was entitled “When Persuasion Works, Lasts and Spreads: Evidence From Three Longitudinal Field Experiments on Gay Equality and Abortion.” It is possible that this PhD may be rescinded. He also was apparently offered a position at Princeton starting in July, although that offer may have been taken back since this revelation only a couple of days ago.
We should note that the retraction isn’t official just yet; it hasn’t been printed in Science, the magazine that published the original piece. They are publishing an Editorial Expression of Concern, and after they have confirmed the information, they will presumably proceed to an actual retraction. In addition, LaCour states on his web site that he “stands by” his findings and “…will supply a definitive response on or before May 29, 2015. I appreciate your patience, as I gather evidence and relevant information…” What evidence he needs to gather is open to question; it seems to me that he needs merely to search his own mind and remember whether he actually had anything to do with Qualtrics, the company that he claimed he contracted to do the actual survey.
Green stated that LaCour had “confessed to falsely describing at least some of the details of the data collection” but apparently that confession was only for Green’s consumption, not for public attribution.
Here is another fraudulent piece of research, this time quickly discovered and put up for retraction. In the the Paolo Macchiarini case, some of the doctors involved in the care of the patients raised concerns about his claims. In this case, researchers who wanted to confirm and extend the study discovered that the data was questionable and confirmed it by contacting the survey firm allegedly used in the study.
In this case, the conclusion is that people who are biased against gay marriage can be convinced to accept it with a brief talk– implying that the bias is either not deeply held or is readily overcome with personal discussion. This conclusion has lost support because the study claiming to confirm it has been shown to be fraudulent.
In the previous case, an exciting new therapy for replacing organs damaged beyond repair was given support by false reports of survival after surgery. This new form of therapy is still in the experimental stages and the false reports leave us without confidence in the technique used– for the moment.
Retractions of published research papers seem to be very common, but according to Retraction Watch, they represent only a tiny percentage of publications– about 600 a year out of 2.5 million papers total. It seems that retractions are newsworthy and memorable, especially the ones involving fraud, but the ordinary paper that is not retracted just flies under the radar.
Retractions do not always indicate fraud– in most cases, they are the result of mistakes made in the preparation of figures and formulation of hypotheses. Thus, even when a paper is retracted, it does not necessarily reflect on the character of the authors. The really newsworthy retractions are the rare cases in which one of the researchers has actually committed fraud or made something up.
These cases are also the most difficult to detect, since an author who has made something up has probably consciously covered his tracks. Thus, it is possible that there are many more fraudulent papers out there that haven’t been and may never be discovered. This means that the best way to avoid fraud is to teach the potential authors to be honorable while they are still in college. Even more important, current researchers tell us, the pressure to “publish or perish” needs to diminish to prevent excessive publications. Researchers cannot function effectively when they are subjected to this kind of pressure.
PS The originators of the site Retraction Watch have written an “op-ed” piece about research fraud for yesterday’s New York Times. It has additional explanations for the “epidemic” of fraud and is well worth reading: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/opinion/whats-behind-big-science-frauds.html …I’ll summarize it tomorrow as I have already posted too many times today (there’s a limit?)
But there was one measure of a specific slur. According to analytics compiled by Topsy, a research company that collects and analyzes what is shared on Twitter, the number of postings that included Mr. Obama’s name and one particular racial epithet jumped substantially on Monday, the day of the president’s first posting, to 150.
One Twitter user who did not use that specific racial slur responded to the president with just two words: “Black monkey,” a comparison that was not uncommon. “Get back in your cage monkey,” another person wrote.
Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said that the language directed at Mr. Obama was unfortunately “all too common on the Internet,” and that officials would probably not spend much time trying to block abusive commenters from the president’s account.
via Obama’s Twitter Debut, @POTUS, Attracts Hate-Filled Posts – NYTimes.com.
Here’s a measure of how stupid and full of hate some people can be: sending Twitter posts to President Obama’s personal account referring to him as a “monkey” or a “N..” You’d think people would know better. From the article:
”
One person posted a doctored image of Mr. Obama’s famous campaign poster, instead showing the president with his head in a noose, his eyes closed and his neck appearing broken as if he had been lynched. Instead of the word “HOPE” in capital letters as it appeared on the campaign poster, the doctored image had the words “ROPE.”
The accompanying message said “#arrestobama #treason we need ‘ROPE FOR CHANGE.’ ” It was addressed to @POTUS by a user calling himself@jeffgully49, who has posted other images of Mr. Obama in a noose, and whose Twitter profile picture shows Mr. Obama behind bars. “We still hang for treason, don’t we?” his post said.
The writer, Jeff Gullickson of Minneapolis, subsequently posted on Thursday that his reply to Mr. Obama had earned him a visit from the Secret Service at home. Reached for comment, Mr. Gullickson responded by asking in an email how much The New York Times would pay him for an interview.
White House officials and a Twitter spokesman said they could not determine the percentage of postings to Mr. Obama that were racist. But they appeared to be a small number in what was an otherwise social-media-fueled show of love for Mr. Obama, who was drawing followers at a rapid pace — nearly 2.3 million by Thursday afternoon — and hundreds of worshipful messages that welcomed him to Twitter and praised him on everything from his appearance to his policies.
“I love you, @POTUS,” wrote one person, @camerondallas, who has nearly five million followers, in a posting marked as a favorite more than 15,000 times.
”
So most of the Twitter posts were positive. The number of negative, racist, or simply hateful messages is a reflection of the Republican Party’s attempts to demonize the President as much as it is a sign of how many people are racist, xenophobic, or disrespectful. The Republicans seem to have energized their most antagonistic followers to openly display their hate on a forum closely followed by the Secret Service.
Most of these antagonists don’t seem to be aware that every post they make on Twitter puts them on the Secret Service’s list of potential assassins. They also don’t seem to understand that the Secret Service takes its mission– protecting the President and his family– very seriously and will imprison and prosecute those who display an unfortunate zeal for attacking Mr. Obama.
In this way, while it makes the President’s supporters very uncomfortable to hear these negative sentiments, it neatly exposes those who are antagonistic and foolish enough to commit their sentiments to Twitter. The really dangerous people, though, are those with enough presence of mind to keep their mouths shut and make preparations to kill without revealing their intent.
These hidden antagonists are the ones that the Secret Service worries about the most — the ones who hide their intentions until the critical moment and make it necessary to interpose their government paid bodies in front of the President when they shoot at him. It is because of these people that the Secret Service has its most potent oath: to die if necessary to prevent anyone killing the President.
An investigation in Sweden into a surgeon who is a pioneer in the field of regenerative medicine has found that he committed scientific misconduct by omitting or falsifying information about the conditions of three patients in medical journals.
Dr. Bengt Gerdin, the independent investigator who looked into accusations against the surgeon, Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, said that in several journal papers, including one in The Lancet in 2011, Dr. Macchiarini had “omitted some data and also fabricated or falsified some data regarding the postoperative state of patients” on whom he had performed experimental groundbreaking operations.
via Inquiry Finds Misconduct by a Top Surgeon, Paolo Macchiarini – NYTimes.com.
The substance of the accusation was that the surgeon had failed to do followup on several patients into whom he had transplanted prosthetic tracheas of plastic treated with stem cells and regeneration drugs. At the same time, he had reported the followup examinations as if he had really performed them. Two of the patients have died, and the third has been stuck in intensive care for almost three years.
The investigation started last fall after four doctors who treated the patients complained that their conditions had never been as good as represented in the papers published about them. Each patient had suffered a severely damaged trachea which, in an experimental operation, Dr. Macchiarini replaced with a plastic trachea implanted with stem cells. The trachea was treated with drugs that promoted regrowth, and, it was hoped, eventually a new trachea.
There have been both tremendous interest and numerous attempts recently to create new organs, to take the place of damaged ones, with stem cells in a plastic scaffolding that supports regrowth and eventual replacement. Animal experiments have so far been very encouraging. The results of Dr. Macchiarini’s surgeries were the subject of several scientific articles, including a positive report in The Lancet in 2011.
There are also complaints that Dr. Macchiarini failed to obtain adequate informed consent from the involved patients for the operations, and that there had not been appropriate ethical review of the procedures. These accusations will be taken up at another level, according to Dr. Gerdin.
There has been some delay because the report by Dr. Gerdin was published only in Swedish, based on the work that Dr. Macchiarini had done at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Some principals have delayed their response until the report is translated into English. The accused doctor has denied all the allegations and blamed other doctors for the problems.
