Do Sparrows Like Bach?: The Strange and Wonderful Things that Are Discovered When Scientists Break Free

by Unknown

  The dead-researcher approach is clearly not the way to go. A more promising tack might be to focus on those who have not quite died, but merely managed a sneak preview—in the form of a near-death experience.

  Out-of-body experiences (and weighing the soul)

  If someone could prove that a near-death experience is, in verifiable fact, a round-trip visit to some other dimension and not a mirage of the dying mind, that would surely be something to hang one’s hopes on. But how does the person who claims to have glimpsed the beyond go about proving it? There seems to be no afterlife gift shop, no snow globes full of angel dandruff. Best to focus on one of those near-death trips that take the traveller only as far as the ceiling, enabling a reconnaissance-type view of one’s corporeal hull down below. If one could at least prove that one had seen the details of the room from up there—and not remembered or hallucinated or some combination of the two—then that would at least establish the possibility of the seeming impossibility of a consciousness existing independent of its biological moorings.

  And that is why a laptop computer was duct-taped to the highest monitor in a cardiology operating room at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The computer had been programmed to show, for the duration of each operation, one of 12 images, chosen at random and unknown to anyone, including the researchers. The laptop would be flat open with the screen facing the ceiling, such that the only way a surgery patient might view the image would be as a disembodied consciousness. As patients came out of anaesthesia, psychologist Bruce Greyson interviewed them about what they remembered of their time in the operating room. So far there have been no surprises. Other, that is, than the surprising cooperation of a team of cardiac surgeons. Heart surgeons who believe that a consciousness can occasionally perceive things in an extrasensory manner, independent of a brain and eyeballs, are less rare than you might think.

  But even then, how would we know that the near-death experience isn’t a hallmark of dying, not death—a stopover, not a final destination? How do we know that several minutes later the bright light doesn’t dim and the euphoria fade and you’re just flat-out non-existent? ‘We don’t know,’ concedes Greyson. ‘It’s possible it’s like going to the Paris airport and thinking you’ve seen France.’

  Another way to approach the afterlife would be to consider the vehicle: the soul (or consciousness, if you like). If the soul were something you could weigh, like a pancreas or a wart, then proving that it abandons the corpse at death would be a simple matter of placing a dying person on a scale and watching to see if the needle went down at the moment he died (while also accounting for the minute amount of weight lost via moisture in exhalations and sweat).

  This is exactly what a Massachusetts physician named Duncan MacDougall did, beginning in 1901, using a tricked-out industrial silk scale (see Chapter 2). His post at a tuberculosis sanatorium provided MacDougall with a steady source of study subjects. He weighed six men as they died, and there was, he said in a series of articles in American Medicine, always a down-tick of the needle. However, only one of his trials went off without a significant hitch. Twice the authorities barged into the room and tried to stop the proceedings. Oafish accomplices jostled the scale. Subjects died as the scale was being zeroed. And so MacDougall’s claimed proof—that the soul exists, and that it weighs about 20 grams—is really no more than anecdote.

  Sheep souls and thermodynamics

  Some 90 years later, a sheep rancher in Bend, Oregon, tried to replicate MacDougall’s work. When a local hospital rebuffed his solicitation for terminal patients, Lewis Hollander Jr turned to his flock. Interestingly, he found that sheep momentarily gain a small amount of weight at the moment they die, suggesting that the answer to the question ‘What happens when we die?’ might in fact be: ‘Our souls go into sheep.’

  Of course, it’s a stretch to think that the weight of a soul would register on a scale built for the likes of livestock or bolts of cloth. But what if you were to get your hands on a scale calibrated not in ounces or grams, but in picograms—trillionths of a gram? If you consider consciousness to be information energy, as some do, then it would have a (very, very, very teeny tiny) mass. And if you were to build a closed system, such that no known sources of energy could leave or enter undetected, and you rigged it up to your picogram scale, and put a dying organism inside this system, then you could, in theory, do the MacDougall.

  In 2006, Duke University professor Gerry Nahum was very keen to undertake a consciousness-weighing project of his own (using not sheep nor men but leeches). Though he taught gynaecology and obstetrics, Nahum had a background in thermodynamics and information theory and had even worked out a 25-page proposal of exactly how to do it, if only someone would fund him the $100,000 he estimated it would cost.

  If consciousness is energy, then you probably don’t need proof that it survives death, because proof already exists: the First Law of Thermodynamics—energy is neither created nor destroyed. Though it’s hard to take much comfort from this. Who wants to spend eternity as a blip, a gnat’s fart, of disordered energy, with no brain at their disposal to help them remember or imagine or solve the Sunday crossword? What would it be like? Would there even be a be? Nahum used the analogy of the computer: perhaps you’d be the operating system, stripped of its programs and interfaces. Heaven as the back of the closet where the broken-down Dells and Compaqs go.

  If we are to eventually have our answer, our proof, it will no doubt come to us courtesy of quantum theory, or whatever takes its place. Few of us will understand it well enough to take much comfort, however, if indeed comfort is what it offers. Try to enjoy life without worrying about the ‘after’ bit, and keep in mind that one day altogether too soon, bad luck or genetics will hand you the answer. In the meantime, be nice to sheep.

  Cripes. Who knows what’s going on? Perhaps we’d be better off visiting Dr Cornish.

  Reversing death

  Robert E. Cornish, a researcher at the Berkeley campus of the University of California during the 1930s, believed he had found a way to restore life to the dead—at least in cases where major organ damage was not involved. His technique involved seesawing corpses up and down to circulate the blood while injecting a mixture of adrenalin and anticoagulants. He tested his method on a series of fox terriers, all of whom he named Lazarus after the biblical character brought back to life by Jesus.

  First Cornish asphyxiated the dogs and left them dead for ten minutes. Then he attempted to revive them. His first two trials failed, but numbers three and four were a success. With a whine and a feeble bark, the dogs stirred back to life. Though blind and severely brain damaged, they lived on for months as pets in his home, reportedly inspiring terror in other dogs.

  Cornish’s research provoked such controversy that the University of California eventually ordered him off the campus. He continued his work in a tin shack attached to his house, despite complaints from neighbours that mystery fumes from his experiments were causing the paint on their homes to peel.

  Many years later, in 1947, Cornish announced he was ready to experiment on a human being. He now had a new tool in his arsenal: a home-made heart-lung machine built out of a vacuum cleaner blower, radiator tubing, an iron wheel, rollers and 60,000 shoelace eyes. Thomas McMonigle, a prisoner awaiting execution on death row, volunteered to be his guinea pig, and Cornish asked the state of California for permission to proceed with his experiment. After some deliberation, the state turned him down. Apparently officials were worried that, should McMonigle come back to life, they might have to free him.

  Disheartened, Cornish retreated to his home, where he eked out a living selling a toothpaste of his own invention.

  We find it most surprising that he couldn’t find anyone other than a death-row prisoner to be a volunteer. That aside, we’re not sure why Cornish didn’t attempt the process on himself if he was so certain—perhaps he didn’t have the confidence of the brave researchers who follow…

  Hard to swallowr />
  As a junior doctor at the Royal Perth Hospital, Western Australia, Barry Marshall was so sure the medical establishment was wrong about the cause of stomach ulcers that he swallowed the bacteria he believed were to blame. It still took years to convince everyone—but it was to win him a share in a Nobel prize, alongside Robin Warren. New Scientist interviewed him in 2006.

  What made you decide to swallow the bacteria?

  It was so frustrating to see ulcer patients having surgery, or even dying, when I knew a simple antibiotic treatment could fix the problem. Back in 1984, conventional medical wisdom was that ulcers were caused by stress, bad diet, smoking, alcohol and susceptible genes—and that no bacteria could survive in the stomach. Working with pathologist Robin Warren, I found a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori in all duodenal ulcer patients and in 77 per cent of those with gastric ulcers. We tried to infect animals to prove this bacterium was the culprit but that failed, so we had to find a human volunteer.

  Why did it have to be you?

  I was the only person informed enough to consent, so I decided to be my own guinea pig. I didn’t seek approval from the hospital’s ethics committee because I didn’t want to risk being turned down, and I didn’t even tell my wife until I had swallowed the bacteria. By then I had successfully treated several patients suffering from H. pylori infections using antibiotics, so it seemed that I had a cure.

  What happened after you swallowed the bacteria?

  I was fine for three days, then began to feel nauseous, and soon began vomiting. My wife told me I had ‘putrid breath’. After ten days, a biopsy confirmed the bacteria had infected my stomach, and the stomach wall was inflamed with gastritis, which can eventually lead to ulcers. My experiment overturned 100 years of knowledge about ulcers. We published our results in The Lancet.

  Was it hard to convince the world that such a ‘miracle cure’ existed?

  Yes. When The Lancet finally used the word ‘cure’ in 1989 we thought that everybody must believe us now, but it was another 8 long years before most people in western countries were aware that H. pylori caused ulcers. In the meantime, millions of people had taken unnecessary drugs or had surgery, at a cost of billions of dollars.

  Did you find that infuriating?

  At the time I thought it was somewhat immoral, because doctors who were sceptical about H. pylori were making decisions that permanently affected the lives of their patients. It was very easy for them to stick with the old treatments. I was annoyed about the level of opposition to our theory, and that people were not testing it, but now I realise that it takes time for an idea to gain acceptance.

  And Barry Marshall wasn’t the only one prepared to swallow something horrid.

  The vomit-drinking doctor

  How far would you go to prove your point? Stubbins Ffirth, a doctor-in-training living in Philadelphia during the early 19th century, went further than most. Way further.

  Having observed that yellow fever ran riot during the summer, but disappeared over the winter, Ffirth hypothesised it was not a contagious disease. He reckoned it was caused by an excess of stimulants such as heat, food and noise. To prove his hunch, Ffirth set out to demonstrate that no matter how much he exposed himself to yellow fever, he wouldn’t catch it.

  He started by making a small incision in his arm and pouring ‘fresh black vomit’ obtained from a yellow-fever patient into the cut. He didn’t get sick.

  But he didn’t stop there. His experiments grew progressively bolder. He made deeper incisions in his arms into which he poured black vomit. He dribbled the stuff in his eyes. He filled a room with heated ‘regurgitation vapours’—a vomit sauna—and remained there for two hours, breathing in the air. He experienced a ‘great pain in my head, some nausea, and perspired very freely’, but was otherwise OK.

  Next Ffirth began ingesting the vomit. He fashioned some of the black matter into pills and swallowed them down. He mixed half an ounce of fresh vomit with water and drank it. ‘The taste was very slightly acid,’ he wrote. ‘It is probable that if I had not, previous to the two last experiments, accustomed myself to tasting and smelling it, that emesis would have been the consequence.’ Finally, he gathered his courage and quaffed pure, undiluted black vomit fresh from a patient’s mouth. Still he didn’t get sick.

  Ffirth rounded out his experiment by liberally smearing himself with other yellow-fever tainted fluids: blood, saliva, perspiration and urine. Healthy as ever, he declared his hypothesis proven in his 1804 thesis.

  He was wrong. Yellow fever, as we now know, is very contagious, but it requires direct transmission into the bloodstream, usually by a mosquito, to cause infection.

  Considering the strenuous efforts Ffirth took to infect himself, it must be considered something of a miracle he remained alive. The bright spot for him was that, after all he put himself through, the University of Pennsylvania did award him the degree of Doctor of Medicine. What his patients made of him unfortunately remains unrecorded.

  It’s a cliché, but some people really are prepared to put their bodies on the line.

  This won’t hurt a bit

  Two surgeons had finished work for the day. But instead of going home, they began to prepare for one more operation—a little out-of-hours experiment intended to advance the art of anaesthesia. August Bier was a rising star at the Royal Surgical Clinic in Kiel, north Germany. His young assistant, August Hildebrandt, had agreed to help him.

  What happened next was not so much heroic as comic. Just one little mistake and courageous selflessness turned to black comedy. It made Bier’s name. But the events of that evening would be forever etched on Hildebrandt’s memory, not to mention several other parts of his body.

  In the 1890s, general anaesthesia was decidedly dodgy. Chloroform sent patients gently to sleep—but there was no room for mistakes. A few drops too many and the patient would be dead before the surgeon picked up the scalpel. Ether wasn’t quite so dangerous, but it was slow to act—surgeons sometimes started to operate before their patients had gone under. The survivors suffered unpleasant side effects—from violent headaches and vomiting to ether pneumonia.

  Bier reasoned it should be possible to banish sensation from most of the body without knocking the patient out completely by injecting a small dose of cocaine into the cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the spinal cord. He tried his technique on half a dozen patients. They lost sensation from the lower part of their bodies long enough for him to carve out chunks of diseased bone from their ankles, knees and shins—and even the thigh and pelvis. ‘On the other hand, so many complaints had arisen in association with this method that they equalled the complaints usually occurring after general anaesthesia,’ he wrote. ‘To arrive at a valid opinion, I decided to conduct an experiment on my own body.’

  The procedure was simple enough. Hildebrandt had to make a lumbar puncture by plunging a large needle through the membranes that protected Bier’s spinal cord into the fluid-filled space beneath. Then he had to fit a syringe on the needle and inject a solution of cocaine. But preparations for the experiment had been less than meticulous.

  Hildebrandt made the lumbar puncture. Then, with his finger over the hub of the needle to prevent fluid from leaking out, he took up the syringe of cocaine—only to find it was the wrong fit. As he fumbled with the needles, Bier’s cerebrospinal fluid began to squirt out. Horrified, Hildebrandt stopped and plugged the wound. This was when the pair should have called it a day. Instead, Hildebrandt offered to take Bier’s place.

  At 7.38 pm, after checking the needles more carefully, Bier began. The cocaine worked fast. ‘After 7 minutes: Needle pricks in the thigh were felt as pressure; tickling of the soles of the feet was hardly felt.’ Bier jabbed Hildebrandt in the thigh with a needle. Nothing. He tried harder, stabbing the thigh with the surgical equivalent of a stiletto. Still no response. Then, 13 minutes into the experiment, Bier stubbed out a cigar on Hildebrandt’s leg.

  Bier now wanted to know how far the insensitivity exte
nded, and invented a simple test. ‘Pulling out pubic hairs was felt in the form of elevation of a skinfold; pulling of chest hair above the nipples caused vivid pain.’ So now he knew. It was more than 20 minutes since Hildebrandt had stopped feeling pain. How much more could he take? Bier increased his efforts. He smashed a heavy iron hammer into Hildebrandt’s shin bone and then, when that failed to have any effect, gave his testicles a sharp tug. In a final burst of enthusiasm, Bier stabbed the thigh right to the bone, squashed hard on a testicle and, for good measure, rained blows on Hildebrandt’s shin with his knuckles.

  After 45 minutes, the effect of the cocaine began to wear off. The two surgeons, one missing a significant amount of cerebrospinal fluid, the other battered, burnt and suffering from serious stab wounds, went out for dinner. ‘We drank wine and smoked several cigars,’ wrote Bier.

  The next morning, Bier woke feeling bright and breezy. By the afternoon he had turned pale, his pulse was weak and he felt dizzy whenever he stood up. ‘All these symptoms disappeared as soon as I lay down horizontally, but they returned when I arose. In the late afternoon, therefore, I had to go to bed.’ He stayed there for the next 9 days. When he finally got up again he felt quite well. ‘I was perfectly able to tolerate the strain of a week’s hunting in the mountains,’ he wrote.

  Hildebrandt didn’t escape so lightly. The first night he was violently ill. He had a splitting headache and was sick. But someone had to tend to the clinic’s patients and, with Bier in bed, the job fell to him. Each morning for the next week, Hildebrandt dragged himself to work. Each afternoon, he staggered home and collapsed into bed. ‘Dr Hildebrandt’s legs were painful, and bruises appeared in several places,’ wrote Bier, rather understating the case.