"Dr. Mary's Monkey"

[Jan Klimkowski]

Adele - I don't want to contaminate information, so I'll be discreet online.

Here's a little more though.

Ecke was involved in a proto-"MK ULTRA" case - ie MK ULTRA before it existed. Namely the Dimitrov affair. See here, for example.

Re Harry Harlow, I posted the below elsewhere on DPF. In that thread, I start to sketch out a philosophical and scientific framework for understanding the purposes and context of "MK-ULTRA".

Harlow received lots of military money and resources.

I am highly suspicious of the real intentions and uses of his "research", and suspect covert experimentation occurred and was shared within the "MK-ULTRA" network:

In Harlow's classic experiment, two groups of baby rhesus monkeys were removed from their mothers. In the first group, a terrycloth mother provided no food, while a wire mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle containing milk. In the second group, a terrycloth mother provided food; the wire mother did not. It was found that the young monkeys clung to the terrycloth mother whether or not it provided them with food, and that the young monkeys chose the wire surrogate only when it provided food.

Whenever a frightening stimulus was brought into the cage, the monkeys ran to the cloth mother for protection and comfort, no matter which mother provided them with food. This response decreased as the monkeys grew older.

When the monkeys were placed in an unfamiliar room with their cloth surrogate, they clung to it until they felt secure enough to explore. Once they began to explore, they occasionally returned to the cloth mother for comfort. Monkeys placed in an unfamiliar room without their cloth mothers acted very differently. They froze in fear and cried, crouched down, or sucked their thumbs. Some even ran from object to object, apparently searching for the cloth mother, as they cried and screamed. Monkeys placed in this situation with their wire mothers exhibited the same behavior as the monkeys with no mother.

Once the monkeys reached an age where they could eat solid foods, they were separated from their cloth mothers for three days. When they were reunited with their mothers, they clung to them and did not venture off to explore as they had in previous situations. Harlow concluded from this that the need for contact comfort was stronger than the need to explore.

The study found that monkeys who were raised with either a wire mother or a cloth mother gained weight at the same rate. However, the monkeys that had only a wire mother had trouble digesting the milk and suffered from diarrhea more frequently. Harlow's interpretation of this behavior, which is still widely accepted, was that lack of contact comfort was psychologically stressful to the monkeys.

The importance of these findings is that they contradicted both the then common pedagogic advice of limiting or avoiding bodily contact in an attempt to avoid spoiling children and the insistence of the then dominant behaviorist school of psychology that emotions were negligible. Feeding was thought to be the most important factor in the formation of a mother-child bond. Harlow concluded, however, that nursing strengthened the mother-child bond because of the intimate body contact that it provided. He described his experiments as a study of love. He also believed that contact comfort could be provided by either mother or father. Though widely accepted now, this idea was revolutionary at the time.

Critics of Harlow's research have observed that clinging is a matter of survival in young rhesus monkeys, but not in humans, and have suggested that his conclusions, when applied to humans, overestimate the importance of contact comfort and underestimate the importance of nursing.[3]

Harlow first reported the results of these experiments in "The nature of love," the title of his address to the sixty-sixth Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., August 31, 1958.

From around 1960 onwards, Harlow and his students began publishing their observations on the effects of partial and total social isolation. Partial isolation involved raising monkeys in bare wire cages that allowed them to see, smell, and hear other monkeys, but provided no opportunity for physical contact. Total social isolation involved rearing monkeys in isolation chambers that precluded any and all contact with other monkeys.

Harlow et al. reported that partial isolation resulted in various abnormalities such as blank staring, stereotyped repetitive circling in their cages, and self-mutilation. These monkeys were then observed in various settings. Some of the monkeys remained in solitary confinement for 15 years.[4]

In the total isolation experiments baby monkeys would be left alone for three, six, 12, or 24[5][6] months of "total social deprivation." The experiments produced monkeys that were severely psychologically disturbed. Harlow wrote:

No monkey has died during isolation. When initially removed from total social isolation, however, they usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by ... autistic self-clutching and rocking. One of six monkeys isolated for 3 months refused to eat after release and died 5 days later. The autopsy report attributed death to emotional anorexia. ... The effects of 6 months of total social isolation were so devastating and debilitating that we had assumed initially that 12 months of isolation would not produce any additional decrement. This assumption proved to be false; 12 months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially ...[1]

The pit of despair is a colloquial term for the vertical chamber apparatus, a device used in experiments conducted on rhesus macaque monkeys during the 1970s by American comparative psychologist Harry Harlow and his students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.[1] The term was first used by Harlow himself to describe his intentions for its use, and was subsequently adopted by critics of his research. The aim of the research was to produce an animal model of human clinical depression.

The vertical chamber was little more than a stainless-steel trough with sides that sloped to a rounded bottom. A 3/8 in. wire mesh floor 1 in. above the bottom of the chamber allowed waste material to drop through the drain and out of holes drilled in the stainless-steel. The chamber was equipped with a food box and a water-bottle holder, and was covered with a pyramid top [removed in the accompanying photograph], designed to discourage incarcerated subjects from hanging from the upper part of the chamber. [2]

Harlow placed baby monkeys in the chamber alone for up to one year. Within a few days, they stopped moving about and remained huddled in a corner. The monkeys were found to be psychotic when removed from the chamber, and most did not recover.

Harry Harlow was also, visibly, from time to time, the US Army's Head of Human Resources Research and a consultant to the US Army Scientific Advisory Panel.

Let's just break that down. There were periods when Harlow officially ran the US Army's scientific research into "human resources"?

Monkeys?

Yes. And more.

Regarding Schwitzgebel, the following passage is from Martin Cannon's unpublished manuscript The Controllers:

Other researchers have made notable contributions to this field. Robert G. "Bob" Heath, of Tulane University, who has implanted as many as 125 electrodes in his subjects, achieved his greatest notoriety by attempting to "cure" homosexuality through ESB. In his experiments, he discovered that he could control his patients' memory, (a feat which, applied in the ufological context, may account for the phenomenon of "missing time"); he could also induce sexual arousal, fear, pleasure, and hallucinations [34].

Heath and another researcher, James Olds [35], have independently illustrated that areas of the brain in and near the hypothalamus have, when electronically stimulated, what has been described as "rewarding" and "aversive" effects. Both animals and men, when given the means to induce their own ESB of the brain's pleasure centers, will stimulate themselves at a tremendous rate, ignoring such basic drives as hunger and thirst [36]. (Using fixed electrodes of his own invention, John C. Lilly had accomplished similar effects in the early 1950s[37].) Anyone who has studied the abduction phenomenon will find himself on familiar territory here, for the abductee accounts are replete with stories of bewildering and inappropriate sexual response countered by extremely painful stimuli -- operant conditioning, at its most extreme, and most insidious, for here we see a form of conditioning in which the manipulator renders himself invisible. Indeed, B.F. Skinner-esque aversive therapy, remotely applied, was Heath's prescription for "healing" homosexuality [38].

Ralph Schwitzgebel and his brother Robert have produced a panoply of devices for tracking individuals over long ranges; they may be considered the creators of the "electronic house arrest" devices recently approved by the courts [39]. Schwitzgebel devices could be used for tracking all the physical and neurological signs of a "patient" within a quarter of a mile [40], thereby lifting the distance limitations which restricted Delgado.

In Ralph Schwitzgebel's initial work, application of this technology to ESB seems to have been limited to cumbersome brain implants with protruding wires. But the technology was soon miniaturized, and a scheme was proposed whereby radio receivers would be mounted on utility poles throughout a given city, thereby providing 24-hour-a-day monitoring capability [41]. Like Heath, Schwitzgebel was much exercised about homosexuality and the use of intracranial devices to combat sexual deviation. But he has also spoken ominously about applying his devices to "socially troublesome persons"... which, of course, could mean anyone [42].

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34. Thomas, JOURNEY INTO MADNESS, 276.

35. James Olds, "Hypothalamic Substrates of Reward," PHYSIOLOGICAL REVIEWS, 1962, 42:554; "Emotional Centers in the Brain," SCIENCE JOURNAL, 1967, 3 (5).

36. Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin, VIOLENCE AND THE BRAIN (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), chapter 12, excerpted in INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND THE FEDERAL ROLE IN BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION, prepared by the Staff of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Committee of the Judiciary, United States Senate (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1974).

37. John Lilly, THE SCIENTIST (Berkeley, Ronin Publishing, 1988 [revised edition]), 90. Monkeys allowed to stimulate themselves continually via ESB brought themselves to orgasm once every three minutes, sixteen hours a day. Scientific gatherings throughout the world saw motion pictures of these experiments, which surely made spectacular cinema.

38. Scheflin and Opton, THE MIND MANIPULATORS, 336-337. Heath even monitored his patient's brain responses during the subject's first heterosexual encounter. Such is the nature of the brave new world before us.

39. Robert L. Schwitzgebel and Richard M. Bird, "Sociotechnical Design Factors in Remote Instrumentation with Humans in Natural Environments," BEHAVIOR RESEARCH METHODS AND INSTRUMENTATION, 1970, 2, 99-105.

40. Thomas, JOURNEY INTO MADNESS, 277. In the BEHAVIOR RESEARCH METHODS AND INSTRUMENTATION article referenced above, Schwitzgebel details how the radio signals may be fed into a telephone via a modem and thus analyzed by a computer anywhere in the world.

41. Scheflin and Opton, THE MIND MANIPULATORS, 347-349.

42. Louis Tackwood and the Citizen's Research and Investigation Committee, THE GLASS HOUSE TAPES (New York: Avon, 1973), 226.