U.S. government-sponsored mind control and Tulane

...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 "[s]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]...

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