T
o help my students appreciate how
science reflects cultural prejudices,
I often cite examples from psychia-
try. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, or DSM, which the Amer-
ican Psychiatric Association compiles as a
guide to diagnosis and treatment of illness,
listed homosexuality as a “sociopathic per-
sonality disturbance” in the DSM-I, pub-
lished in 1952, and as a “sexual deviation”
in the DSM-II, published in 1968 (see Fur-
ther Reading).
Homosexuality has been treated with
lobotomies, chemical castration, electrical
shocks and nausea-inducing drugs as well
as psychotherapy. I then tell my students
about a bizarre gay-conversion experiment
carried out in 1970 by a leading brain-im-
plant researcher, Dr. Robert G. Heath of Tu-
lane University in New Orleans.
I mentioned Heath in my recent profile
of Jose Delgado, a pioneer in the use of
brain implants to manipulate patients’
minds and behavior. Heath was arguably
even more ambitious than Delgado in his
experiments, and he was not a fringe fig-
ure. He had degrees in psychiatry and neu-
rology from Columbia and the University
of Pennsylvania.
In 1949 he founded Tulaneʼs department
of psychiatry and neurology. He oversaw
the department until 1980 but continued
working into the 1990s. In his 1996 book
Exploring the Mind-Brain Relationship, he
reviews his career and speculates that
someday “biological methods” might make
it possible “for man to live in harmony with
his fellow man.”
I first learned about Heath’s work from
The 3-Pound Universe, a marvelous 1986
overview of brain research by journalists
Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi. Beginning
in 1950, they report, Heath implanted elec-
trodes in patients, most of whom “came
out of the dimly lit back wards of the state
mental hospitals. With dental burrs, Heath
and his co-workers drilled through the pa-
tients’ skulls, guided the electrodes into
specific sites, and then left them there, at
first for a few days, later for years at a time.”
Early on Heath recorded signals from
the brain to determine which sites were
associated with sensations such as rage,
fear, pain and pleasure. Eventually he used
electrodes to stimulate the brain with elec-
tricity. He claimed that stimulation could
induce fear, rage, sexual pleasure, hilarity
and other emotions and ameliorate schizo-
phrenia and other severe mental illnesses.
Heath was particularly interested in the
septal region, which had been linked to
pleasure. Heath claimed stimulation of the
septal region “could make homicidal ma-
nia, suicide attempts, depressions or delu-
sions go away—sometime for a long time,”
Hooper and Teresi stated.
Heath filmed patients as he stimulated
their brains. Many observers of the films
saw Heath as a disturbing, “Strangelovian
figure,” Hooper and Teresi said, but they
found him to be “compassionate” and “al-
most courtly” in interactions with patients.
(In 2005 I tried without success to get per-
mission from Tulane to view Heath’s films.
Heath described his homosexuality ex-
periment in two papers published in 1972:
“Septal Stimulation for the Initiation of
Heterosexual Behavior in a Homosexual
Male,” co-written with Charles Moan, in
Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimen-
tal Psychiatry; and “Pleasure and Brain Ac-
tivity in Man,” in Journal of Nervous and
Mental Disease. The following information
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the
Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of
Science and The End of War.
