Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

In 1900, Eli Lilly, working in collaboration with Bayer, began distributing heroin without prescription in the United States, promoting it side by side with aspirin as a treatment for colds and the flu. Lilly claimed that the drug could be given safely not only to children, but also to infants and pregnant women.

So many of our problems are self-inflected.

Heroin became a standard of care. In 1906, the Journal of the American Medical Association stated that heroin was “recommended chiefly for the treatment of diseases of bronchitis, pneumonia, consumption [tuberculosis], asthma, whooping cough, laryngitis, and certain forms of hay fever.”

Heroin for hay fever? Gah.

William Procter walked into the office of a man who had been selling cooking oils for most of his life, tossed a hard white block onto his desk, and said, “There is some cottonseed oil.” They called it Crisco, a contraction of Crystallized cottonseed oil.

They marketed Crisco with phrases like, “It’s all vegetable! It’s digestible!” and “An Absolutely New Product, a Scientific Discovery Which Will Affect Every Kitchen in America.” Also, because Crisco is kosher, they promoted it with this tagline: “The Hebrew Race has been waiting 4,000 years for Crisco.”

But what these advocates didn’t realize at the time was that there are two different types of LDL cholesterol. There’s the big, fluffy type, which isn’t harmful, and the small, dense type—called very low-density lipoprotein or vLDL cholesterol—which is quite harmful. Saturated fats increase the not-so-bad type of LDL cholesterol but don’t increase the very bad vLDL cholesterol.

Germany had imported more than 350,000 tons of nitrates; by 1912, the number rose to 900,000 tons. As a consequence of its reliance on Chilean nitrates, Germany was particularly vulnerable during war—and WWI was just around the corner. Foreign navies could prevent German ships from traveling to Chile, essentially starving German citizens.

By 1928, about 400 colleges and universities in the United States offered courses in eugenics, and 70 percent of all high school biology textbooks embraced the pseudoscience. Eugenicists sponsored “Fitter Families” competitions and traveled to state fairs, Kiwanis conventions, PTA meetings, museums, and movie theaters.

One of the first to testify was Harry Laughlin, who had traveled down from the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor. Laughlin said that Carrie was “immoral, untruthful, and a low-grade moron,” even though he had never met her. At the time of the hearing, Carrie routinely read the newspaper and did the crossword puzzles. Laughlin said that Carrie’s ancestors belonged to “the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites in the South,” arguing that the Bucks were living proof of “Mendelian inheritance.”

During the trial, Carrie Buck’s lawyer made an ominous prediction about what would happen if forced sterilizations were allowed to proceed. “A reign of doctors will be inaugurated in the name of science,” he warned, “even races may be brought within the scope of such regulation, and the worst forms of tyranny practiced.” The Court was unmoved. On May 2, 1927, by a vote of 8 to 1, justices ruled in favor of Carrie Buck’s sterilization. Even Louis Brandeis, the Court’s most liberal justice, sided with the majority.

But in 1917—with the passage of the first of a series of restrictive immigration laws—the focus began to change. And when it did, the stage was set for a level of evil that was unprecedented and will likely remain forever unmatched.

In 1916, Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race. Framed as a scientific treatise, Grant made the case that Americans were committing what he called “race suicide.” Undesirable traits weren’t just shared among certain families; according to Grant’s book, they were shared among certain races. If Americans really wanted to purify the gene pool, they needed to prohibit the entry of undesirable races into their country. Grant argued that America needed to become America again. And that the only way this was going to happen was if we removed the weeds and allowed people of Grant’s race to flourish.

And here we are in 2018 having to listen to these arguments again. It's hate that needs to be weeded, not people.

Thomas Hunt Morgan, a geneticist who would later win the Nobel Prize for his work on chromosomes, noted that there was no such thing as the Nordic race or the Aryan race. Biologically speaking, all humans were products of an intermixture of many genetic backgrounds. There was only one race: the human race. Emily Greene Balch, a Wellesley economist who would also later win the Nobel Prize, saw eugenics as just another sad example of the powerful exploiting the weak: “Rash is the man who passes lightly from skull measurements to vast unprovable sociological and historical generalizations. The pseudoscience [that] makes it the function of the strong man to purge the world of the weak, might, one hoped, by this time have gone out of date.” H. L. Mencken, a satirist, essayist, and editor of the American Mercury, was sickened by the hauteur and superiority of those who had been born on third base and thought they had hit a triple: “My impression, though I am blond and Nordic myself, is that the genuine member of that great race, at least in modern times, is often indistinguishable from a cockroach.”

Even in these dark times, people stood for the light.

IN 1925, MADISON GRANT’S The Passing of the Great Race was translated into German where it was read by a disgruntled corporal who had recently been sent to prison for his part in a riot against the government in Bavaria: Adolf Hitler. After reading the book, the 36-year-old revolutionary sent a fan letter to Grant: “This book is my Bible,” he wrote. During his nine months in prison, Hitler had read several books by American eugenicists, calling his prison stay “his university.” Hitler would soon launch a national movement that would forever damn the field of eugenics to the lower reaches of hell. But, despite popular belief, what was about to happen in Germany didn’t start on a rallying stand in Munich; it started in a law office in New York City.

The real experiment came next. Fulton and Jacobsen wanted to understand the role of specific areas of the brain in performing tasks that required memory. So they removed Lucy and Becky’s frontal lobes (located just behind the forehead). Following the operation, Lucy no longer remembered how to get the food. The scientists concluded that Lucy’s frontal lobes were responsible for synthesizing and storing recent memories. They also noticed something else. Becky still had trouble getting the food, but now she didn’t care. “It was as though [she] had joined a happiness cult,” said Jacobsen. John Fulton and Carlyle Jacobsen, it appeared, had invented a surgical treatment for anxiety.

Lucy and Becky were monkies. This was still barbaric.

By the late 1930s, lobotomies had been performed in Cuba, Brazil, Italy, Romania, and the United States. Portugal, however, banned them. The psychiatrist who had initially referred patients to Moniz and Lima refused to provide any more. Soon, other Portuguese psychiatrists refused to provide patients. All had become horrified by the results. It was only later that the reasons for Portugal’s ban became clear. By then, however, it was far too late.

Some lobotomy patients were able to leave home and go to work, but never at the level of performance seen before the operation. Professors waited on tables. Cashiers couldn’t keep numbers straight. Saleswomen could no longer give correct change. Musicians could still play, but their music had become mechanical and heartless. Most of those who tried to go back to work were fired.

This is heartbreaking. And yet the lobotomies went on.