Physiology
Topics from the archives of the Mad Science Museum related to the study of physiology. Arranged in descending chronological order.
Electrified Sheep
& Elephants on Acid
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Categories
 The Virtual Rat Project. (Aug 2011) A group of American researchers (led by Dan Beard of the Medical College of Wisconsin) is joining forces to build a virtual rat. It'll be a computer simulation of a rat's physiology, which researchers will then be able to use to run virtual experiments. Apparently the idea is not to have the virtual rat replace real rats, but rather to use the virtual rat to help design better experiments using real rats. Link: jsonline.com.
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Seeing Through Cat’s Eyes (1999)
 In 1999 researchers led by Dr. Yang Dan, an assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley, anesthetized a cat with sodium pentothal, chemically paralyzed it with Norcuron, and secured it tightly in a surgical frame. They then glued metal posts to the whites of its eyes, and forced it to look a screen that showed scene after scene of swaying trees and turtleneck-wearing men. |
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The Remote-Controlled Bull (1963)
 Yale researcher Jose Delgado stood in the hot sun of a bullring in Cordova, Spain. With him in the ring was a large, angry bull. The animal noticed him and began to charge. It gathered speed. Delgado appeared defenseless, but when the bull was mere feet away, Delgado pressed a button on a remote control unit in his hand, sending a signal to a chip implanted in the bull's brain. Abruptly, the animal stopped in its tracks. It huffed and puffed a few times, and then walked docilely away. |
 Sam Legg, a participant in the experiment |
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Heartbeat At Death (Oct. 1938)
 On October 31, 1938, John Deering took a last drag on his cigarette, sat down in a chair, and allowed a prison guard to place a black hood over his head and pin a target to his chest. Next the guard attached electronic sensors to Deering's wrists.Deering had volunteered to participate in an experiment, the first of its kind, to have his heartbeat recorded as he was shot through the chest by a firing squad. The prison physician, Dr. Stephen Besley, figured that since Deering was being executed anyway, science might as well benefit from the event. Perhaps some valuable information about the effect of fear on the heart could be learned. |
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Dr. Chamberlain’s Glass Brain (Oct. 1936)
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The scene: London, 1935. A man in his mid-twenties sits in a comfortable chair in the middle of a hospital room. His eyes are tightly closed. His arms lie on the armrests. Several fingers of his right hand are enclosed in glass devices resembling test tubes, connected by plastic tubing to a machine. An older man wearing a white lab coat creeps up behind him, careful not to make any noise. The older man walks around in front of the sitting man, looks closely at him to determine that his eyes are shut, then reaches down between the other man's legs, grabs, and roughly squeezes the testicles. The younger man gasps.
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The Sensitive Testes (1933)
In 1933, either Herbert Woollard or Edward Carmichael had weights stacked on his testicles for the sake of science. It's not possible to say exactly which one of these London-based doctors bore the unusual burden, because while both participated in the experiment, only one of them lay on a table and suffered the scrotal compression. The other one did the stacking. They never revealed who served in which capacity — nor how they chose who was to be the unlucky one. |
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Throughout his career, Cambridge physiologist Joseph Barcroft conducted self-experiments in which he pushed himself to the very edge of insanity and death. He referred to these as his "borderland excursions". Some of Barcroft's early excursions included volunteering to be exposed to hydrocyanic acid gas (aka prussic acid) during World War I. A dog in the gas chamber with him died in ninety-five seconds, but Barcroft waited ten minutes before stumbling out with the dog in his arms. |
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The Isolated Head of a Dog (Late 1920s)
 Ever since the carnage of the French Revolution, when the guillotine sent thousands of severed heads tumbling into baskets, scientists had wondered whether it would be possible to keep a head alive apart from its body, but it wasn't until the late 1920s that someone managed to pull off this feat. |