When Science Attacks
By What happens if you give an elephant LSD? On Friday August 3, 1962, a group of Oklahoma City researchers decided to find out.
Warren Thomas, Director of the City Zoo, fired a cartridge-syringe containing 297 milligrams of LSD into Tusko the Elephant’s rump. With Thomas were two scientific colleagues from the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce.
297 milligrams is a lot of LSD — about 3000 times the level of a typical human dose. In fact, it remains the largest dose of LSD ever given to a living creature. The researchers figured that, if they were going to give an elephant LSD, they better not give him too little. . . .
Whatever the reason for the experiment, it almost immediately went awry. Tusko reacted to the shot as if a bee had stung him. He trumpeted around his pen for a few minutes, and then keeled over on his side. Horrified, the researchers tried to revive him, but about an hour later he was dead. The three scientists sheepishly concluded that, “It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD.”
There are 19 more of these, all from Alex Boese’s list of “Top 20 Most Bizarre Experiments of All Time.” Several classics from 20th century American social psychologists make the list — the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments are included, naturally — but the Soviet scientists really take the cake. There’s Vladimir Demikhov, who grafted the head and torso of a puppy onto a German shepherd in 1954 Sergei Brukhonenko, who chopped the head off a dog and kept it alive with a crude heart-lung machine in 1928; and Ilya Ivanov, who sought in the 1930s to interbreed humans and various apes.
And the less said about Stubbins Ffirth — Philadelphia’s “vomit-drinking doctor” — the better.
(via The Kircher Society)