Tulane University, Medical Experiments, And Mind Control

[Guest guest]

U.S. Government-Sponsored Mind Control and Tulane

 

" By the time I left to go home — just like every time from then on —

I would recall nothing of my tests or the different doctors. I would

only remember whatever explanations Dr. Robert G. Heath (of Tulane

Medical School) gave me for the odd bruises, needle marks, burns on

my head and fingers and even the genital soreness. I had no reason

to believe otherwise. Already they had begun to control my mind! "

-- Claudia S. Mullen, March 15, 1995

Testimony to the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments

 

 

" Published articles in my files include descriptions of

administration of 150 mcg of LSD to children age 5-10 years on a

daily basis for days, weeks, months, and in a few cases even years.

Neurosurgeons at Tulane, Yale and Harvard did extensive research on

brain electrode implants with intelligence funding, and combined

brain implants with large numbers of drugs including hallucinogens. "

-- Colin Ross, as quoted by Jon Rappoport, in

" Mind Control Experiments on Children, "

Perceptions, Issue 11, Sept./Oct., 1995.

 

----

 

Professor Clarence L. Mohr taught history at Tulane University for 17

years, and University Historian Joseph E. Gordon is dean emeritus of

Tulane's College of Arts and Sciences, where he served in academic

administration from 1954 to 1996. Their book, Tulane: The Emergence

of a Modern University, 1945 – 1980 (Louisiana State University

Press, 2001) documents, among other things, how Tulane became

involved in one of the most nefarious projects associated with the

Cold War period. A sample of their text is reprinted below.

 

----

 

Mohr and Gordon, TULANE, Chap. 2, pp. 120-123

 

In the course of his long career [Dr. Robert G.] Heath would receive

both high professional acclaim and sharp criticism from his fellow

physicians. A full account of either the controversy surrounding his

work or the range of his scientific accomplishments falls outside the

limits of this volume. [114] For present purposes, it is sufficient

to note that at the beginning of the 1950s Heath and his fellow

scientists were working at or very near the outer limits of existing

neurophysiological knowledge—a fact that was not lost upon U.S.

military and civilian intelligence agency officials, who were already

engaged in highly secret efforts to develop psychochemical weapons,

as well as interrogation and mind control techniques, that could be

used against cold war adversaries. From the late 1940s onward, close

ties existed between the army's Edgewood Arsenal, where chemical

warfare research and experimentation were conducted, and the CIA and

various military intelligence services. By 1951 the sometimes

cooperative, sometimes competitive military-CIA nexus had given rise

to a coordinated army-navy-air force-CIA endeavor called Project

Artichoke. As summarized in a 1952 memorandum, the project's major

objectives included, " [e]valuation and development of any method by

which we can get information from a person against his will and

without his knowledge. ... Can we get control of an individual to the

point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against

such fundamental laws of nature such as self-preservation? " [115]

 

 

The following year, in 1953, Project Artichoke grew into to a larger

and more ambitious undertaking known as Project MKULTRA, the scope

and nature of which remained hidden until the summer of 1977. In the

wake of two congressional investigations and the reluctant disclosure

of some 16,000 pages of records obtained through the Freedom of

Information Act, CIA director Stansfield Turner disclosed the broad

outlines of a twenty-five-year, multimillion-dollar program of

research on germ warfare and on methods to alter or control human

memory and behavior through the use of drugs, electricity, sensory

deprivation, hypnosis, and other means. Involving 185 researchers at

88 non-governmental institutions, including 44 colleges and

universities, the project's scope and duration seemed to justify the

conclusion of former State Department officer John Marks that " the

intelligence community ... changed the face of the scientific

community during the 1950s and early 1960s. " [116]

 

 

Certainly the Tulane experience lends support to Marks's conclusion

that " [n]early every scientist on the frontiers of brain research

found men from the secret agencies looking over his shoulders [and]

impinging on the research. " [117] Precisely when the government

became interested in the Tulane schizophrenia studies remains

unclear, but in March 1954 Heath was the principal speaker at a

seminar conducted by the Army Chemical Corps at its Edgewood Arsenal

medical laboratories. His subject was " Some Aspects of Electrical

Stimulation and Recording in the Brain of Man. " [118] Within a few

months Tulane had signed an army " facility security clearance " for

the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology. In 1955 Dr. Russell R.

Monroe, a psychiatrist on Heath's research team, became the principal

investigator for army contract DA-18-108-CML-5596, a project listed

in university records under the title, " Clinical Studies of

Neurological and Psychiatric Changes during the Administration of

Certain Drugs. " Classified army records were somewhat more specific,

listing the contract's purpose as to " tudy behavior during

administration, LSD-25 & mescaline. " [119] In retrospect the army's

interest in Heath's work is not difficult to understand. At the time

Heath gave his 1954 seminar presentation at Edgewood Arsenal,

behavior control of a rather primitive kind had already been achieved

through electrical stimulation of the brains of lower animals. At

McGill University, James Olds and Peter C Milner had reported that

rats with electrodes implanted in the brain's septal region would

press levers at a rate of 2,000 times per hour to receive

stimulation. [120] At the National Institutes of Health, Dr. John

Lilly had attracted intense interest from the CIA and other agencies

through his use of similar techniques on primates. After implanting

multiple electrodes in the brains of monkeys, Lilly was able to

identify the precise location of centers of pain, fear, anxiety,

anger, and sexual arousal. In one experiment a monkey with access to

a simple switch stimulated himself to produce virtually continuous

orgasms, at a rate of one every three minutes for sixteen hours per

day. Animal tests comprised an integral part of most academic

research sponsored by military and CIA sources. In contrast, Project

MKULTRA was primarily concerned with conducting drug, electrical, and

other experiments involving human subjects. [121]

FOOTNOTES

FN114. On the controversy surrounding Heath's work, see Elliot

Valenstein, Brain Control: A Critical Examination of Brain

Stimulation and Psychosurgery (New York: John Wiley, 1973), 60-1, 164-

8; Dr. Peter Roger Breggin, " The Return of Lobotomy and

Psychosurgery, " reprinted from Congressional Record, 24 February

1972, in Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Quality of

Health Care—Human Experimentation, 1973: Hearings before the

Subcommittee on Health, 93rd Cong., 1st sess., 23 February and 6

March 1973, part 2, pp. 469-71; and Heath's own testimony, ibid., 363-

8.

FN115. Harvey M. Weinstein, M.D., Psychiatry and the CIA: Victims of

Mind Control (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1990),

129 (quotation); Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States

Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945-1990 (New

York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 162-5; John Marks, The Search for

the " Manchurian Candidate " : The CIA and Mind Control (New York: Times

Books, 1979) remains the most comprehensive treatment of the subject.

See esp. chaps. 2 and 4.

FN116. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Committee on

Human Resources, Project MKULTRA, The C.I.A.'s Program of Research in

Behavioral Modification: Joint Hearings before the Select Committee

on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific

Research of the Committee on Human Resources, 95th Cong., 1st sess.,

3 August 1977, 4-8; Marks, Manchurian Candidate, 151.

FN117. Marks, Manchurian Candidate, 151.

FN118. " Speakers at Seminars Chemical Corps Medical Laboratories,

1954, " typescript document in authors' possession.

FN119. BOA [board of Administrators] Minutes, 11 April 1956, item

15b of president's monthly report; Office of the Surgeon General,

Department of the Army, Review of Reports on Department of the Army

Grant (DA-18-CML 5596) to the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology,

Tulane University, 1955-1959—Information Memorandum, dated 22 August

1975 and included with Colonel James R. Taylor and Major William N.

Johnson, " Research Report Concerning the Use of Volunteers in

Chemical Agent Research, " 160, 165 (quotation), document in authors'

possession.

FN120. James Olds and Peter Milner, " Positive Reinforcement Produced

by Electrical Stimulation of the Septal Area and Other Regions of the

Rat Brain, " Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 47

(1954): 419-28. Studies by other researchers during the 1960s

established that rats would choose electrical stimulation of the

brain over food and water even after lengthy periods of

semistarvation. Later research demonstrated that female rats would

abandon their offspring immediately after giving birth in order to

obtain brain stimulation, thereby acting in opposition to what had

been regarded as their most powerful natural drive. T. B.

Sonderegger, " Intracranial Stimulation and Maternal Behavior, " APA

Convention Proceedings, 78th Meeting (1970): 245-6.

FN121. Marks, Manchurian Candidate, 33-6, 61-9, 151; Weinstein,

Psychiatry and the CIA, 129.

----

In 1995, Robert Heath acknowledged that he had received money from

the CIA for his work [1]. Heath had contributed to the CIA's mind

control program by pioneering in techniques that subsequently were

employed as instruments of torture [2]. In 2002, the CIA contact at

Tulane was Political Science Professor and former Deputy Provost

Robert S. Robins, a former intelligence officer who at the time was

conducting CIA-related research from the Provost's Office in Tulane's

Norman Mayer Building [3].

Footnotes

Colin A. Ross, BLUEBIRD: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality

by Psychiatrists, Manitou Communications, Inc, Richardson, TX, 2000,

p. 98.

For the role of physicians in mind control and torture, see: Gordon

Thomas, Journey into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind

Control and Medical Abuse, Bantam Books, 1989, 388 pp.

See: AFIO Weekly Intelligence Notes #18-02 6 May 2002,

http://www.afio.com/sections/wins/2002/2002-18.html, accessed Aug. 4,

2004. [Note: AFIO=Association of Former Intelligence Officers.]

Help Balance the Scales of Justice!

Web site created November, 1998 This section last modified

August, 2004

This Web site is not associated with Tulane University or its

affiliates

© 1998-2007 Carl Bernofsky - All rights reserved