Scrambling the moral compass with a magnet

I suppose it was the title of the Mail article that piqued my interest. It looks like scientists have discovered a real-life 'moral compass' in the brain that controls how we judge other people's behaviour. The region, which lies just behind the right ear, becomes more active when we think about other people's misdemeanours or good works.

Strangely researchers were able to use powerful magnets to disrupt this area of the brain and make people temporarily less moral. It seems that our sense of right and wrong may not be based on upbringing, religion or philosophy, but by the biology of our brains.

The ”moral compass” lies in a part of the brain called the right temporo-parietal junction. It lies near the surface of the brain, just behind the right ear. The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used a non-invasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the area of the brain.

This generates a magnetic field on a small part of the skull which creates weak electric currents in the brain. These currents interfere with nearby brain cells and prevent them from firing normally.

In the first experiment, 12 volunteers were exposed to the magnetic field for 25 minutes before they were given a series of 'moral maze' style scenarios. For each of the 192 scenarios, they were asked to make a judgement about the character's actions on a scale of 1 for 'absolutely forbidden' to 7 for 'absolutely permissible'.

In the second experiment, the magnetic field was applied to their heads at the time they were asked to weigh up the behaviour of the characters in the scenario. In both experiments, the magnetic field made the volunteers less moral.

One scenario described a man who let his girlfriend walk over a bridge he knew was unsafe. The girl survived unharmed. Under normal conditions, most people rate the man's behaviour as unacceptable. But after getting the magnetic pulse, the volunteers tended to see nothing wrong with his actions - and judged his behaviour purely on whether his girlfriend survived.

Another scenario described two girls visiting a chemical plant where one girl asks her friend to put sugar in her coffee. The friend uses powder from a jar marked 'toxic' - but as the powder turns out to be sugar, the girls if unharmed. Volunteers with a disrupted moral compass tended to rate the girl's behaviour as permissible because her friend was not injured - even though she was aware the powder came from a jar labelled toxic.

Throughout the experiment, irresponsible or deliberate actions that might have resulted in harm were seen as morally acceptable if the story had a 'happy ending', they reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Somehow I get the feeling that this is not quite the full story. But the idea of scrambling people’s morality with a big magnet does appeal. I feel an evil plot for world domination coming on. All I need is a white Persian puss. MWUAHAHAHAHAHAHA

When mad science met the tobacco industry

Still feeling rough so I have decided to rehash yet another post from the early days of the Poor Mouth. This one featured the hugely powerful opioid Etorphine and Big Tobacco.



I've been fascinated by Etorphine ever since it was mentioned duting a pharmacology lecture in the second year of my Physiologu and Biochemistry degree course. It is an opioid that is it is a synthetic relative of Morphine. However, it is many thousands of times more powerful. First synthesised in 1963 it is best known as “Elephant Juice” the drug that can drop a rampaging elephant in a second. just 4mg of the stuff will bring down an elephant, a mere 1mg does for a rhino - that is how powerful the drug is!

Correct target demographic

Quite astonishingly the Molecule of the Month (yes it does exist and has been featuring a different molecule each month since 1996) entry on Etorphine included the sentence “Scientists at BAT (British American Tobacco) once debated adding it to tobacco as it might create an addictive craving for it”

Etorphine in cigarettes? I seriously thought that this was a joke until I came across a 2003 article in the BMJ journal Tobacco Control Online (The link now requires registration) :

“... Dr Sydney J Green, then British American Tobacco’s (BAT’s) senior scientist for research and development. Green informed his readers about"way-out" developments at BAT including :

"A way-out development is that of compounds (such as etorphine) which are 10,000 times as effective as analgesics [such] as morphine and which are very addictive. It is theoretically possible (if politically unthinkable) to add analytically undetectable quantities of such materials to cigarettes to create brand allegiance. But this thought may suggest the possibility of such compounds occurring naturally."

Me having a quick fag break in 1987

Green’s report followed an earlier memo from Keith D Kilburn to CI Ayres, expressing concern about what BAT’s competitors might be doing in order to create brand allegiance. Kilburn proposed that a regular etorphine dose of as little as 0.2 microgram per day would be sufficient to create an addictive craving for the source. He also claimed that the "required delivery per cigarette…would be analytically difficult to measure."

Etorphine is extraordinarily dangerous stuff: fatal overdoses to vets (as in vetinarians) attempting to dart animals have been recorded. As a consequence vets who are registered to use etorphine must now have an assistant standing by with a dose of antagonist in hand.

I suppose one should not be surprised that Big Tobacco might have considered using etorphine as an additive, despite it being sheer and utter madness! It is just as well they never implemented the plan. On the other hand one would probably go down well after a coke Coke and a McOpium'n'cheeze burger.....

The sewing needle is mightier than the sword

According to Friday’s Guardian British biological warfare scientists developed a poisoned dart to rain down on enemy troops during the second world war and used sewing machine needles to make prototypes.

A "most secret" War Office file, entitled "research into the use of anthrax and other poisons for biological warfare", shows that scientists at the Porton Down in Wiltshire were testing the use of poisoned darts to be dropped in cluster bombs.

Trials on goats and sheep demonstrated that even if the dart was removed, the victim was likely to collapse within five minutes. Where the dose was lethal, death followed within 30 minutes.

At first, scientists used a few needles bought at a branch of the Singer sewing machine company in nearby Salisbury, but soon realised that local stocks would not be sufficient.In January 1942 the man leading Britain's wartime chemical weapons programme, Dr Paul Fildes, made a direct approach to the sewing company. His letter opened with: "It is a little difficult to explain what I want sewing machine needles for ... "

The scientists admitted that, once used, people would quickly learn that light cover – such as trees, aircraft and lorries – would give almost complete protection against the darts. They were part of a programme that saw testing of anthrax and led to the creation of a hidden arsenal of anti-crop sprays, poison gas and germ weapons that experts say the government have been at pains to play down ever since.

Interestingly it was only in the 1990s that Gruinard Island in NW Scotland was made safe. It had been used for biological warfare tests during WWII

When the government really does beam voices into your head

According to a recent New Scientist article a declassified US Army report on the biological effects of non-lethal weapons revealed outlandish plans for "ray gun" devices, which would cause artificial fevers or beam voices into people's heads.

The Bioeffects Of Selected Nonlethal Weapons was released under the US Freedom of Information Act. Released by US Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Meade, Maryland, the 1998 report gives an overview of what was then the state of the art in directed energy weapons for crowd control and other applications.

Some of the technologies are conceptual, such as an electromagnetic pulse that causes a seizure like those experienced by people with epilepsy. Other ideas, like a microwave gun to "beam" words directly into people's ears, have been tested. It is claimed that the so-called "Frey Effect" – using close-range microwaves to produce audible sounds in a person's ears – has been used to project the spoken numbers 1 to 10 across a lab to volunteers'.

The report also discusses a microwave weapon able to produce a disabling "artificial fever" by heating a person's body. While tests of the idea are not mentioned, the report notes that the necessary equipment "is available today". It adds that while it would take at least fifteen minutes to achieve the desired "fever" effect, it could be used to incapacitate people for almost "any desired period consistent with safety."

However, the report does not mention any trials of weapons for producing artificial fever or seizures, or beaming voices into people's heads.

Steve Wright, a security expert at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, warned that the technologies described could be used for torture. In 1998 the European Parliament passed a motion banning potentially dangerous incapacitating technologies that interfere with the human brain."The epileptic seizure inducing device is grossly irresponsible and should never be fielded," says Steve Wright "We know from similar [chemically] artificially-induced fits that the victim subsequently remains "potentiated" and may spontaneously suffer epileptic fits again after the initial attack."

More hare-brained stuff from the people who didn’t bring you the Gay bomb . I suppose the words in ears thing is grist to the mill of the tinfoil hat brigade. On the other had I can imagine the advertising industry would love to get their hands on such a device!

The Pykecrete Carrier

Britons in their late 30s and older will almost certainly be familiar with scientist Magnus Pyke who appeared on “Don’t ask me” in the 70s. He definitely had the air of the mad scientist but he was always entertaining. On the other hand he did suggest using surplus human blood in black puddings during WWII. While the vampire community would be happy, I doubt it would have been a big seller, somehow...

Magnus Pyke had a first cousin Geoffrey Pyke who was very much in the same mad scientist mould. If one of his ideas during WWII had come to fruition then the Royal Navy would have had an aircraft carrier that would have dwarfed any vessel ever afloat.

The Battle of the Atlantic was the one German offensive of WWII that could have brought Britain to its knees. By 1942 Allied forces were losing an enormous amount of merchant shipping to U boats. In part this was due to inadequate air cover in the mid-Atlantic. A large part of the mid-Atlantic was beyond the range of land based aircraft and aircraft carriers were in short supply. Plans for an Allied invasion of Europe were also underway and it was felt that large floating platforms were needed to assist the assault forces.

Lord Louis Mountbatten was Chief of Combined Operations and part of the work of this department was to develop technology and equipment for offensive operations. He encouraged scientists to produce their ideas, however fantastical they might seem. Many ideas did not get past the drawing stage, but others were taken up and experimented with before being abandoned. One of these was the iceberg aircraft carrier which had been supported, Mountbatten and Churchill.

HMS Habbakuk (a misspelling of the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk who said “Behold ye among the heathen, and regard and wonder marvellously: for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told to you.”) was the brainchild of Geoffrey Pyke. His idea was that because ice was unsinkable, an iceberg vessel could be impervious to bomb and torpedo attacks. Repairs would be – just pour water into any holes and freeze it. Habbakuk and its sister ships could be up to 4000 feet long, 600 feet wide and 130 feet in depth and to carry up to 150 twin engine bombers or fighter aircraft.

The idea was taken up by Mountbatten and in December 1942, Churchill was convinced that the idea was worth pursuing. One problem had to be overcome. Ice split too easily. Exiled Austrian scientist Max Perutz had invented a composite material Pykrete which consisted of ice with 14% sawdust and was stronger that concrete. Plans were drawn up for a vessel with the dimensions of 2000 feet long with a displacement of 1,800,000 dead weight tons.

A model was built on Patricia Lake, Jaspar in Canada but because of the huge quantities of steel even an ice vessel would need it was essential that the Americans were brought on board. Mountbatten took a block of Pykecrete to the 1943 Quebec Conference to demonstrate its strength. He fired a revolver into a block of ice which, predictably, shattered. He then fired into a block of Pykecrete. The bullet did not penetrate the block; rather it ricocheted off the ice, and grazed the leg of Admiral King, the American Chief of Naval Operations.

The Americans were not convinced about the project. They felt that technical problems would delay the use of ice ships until 1945 by when the conventional carrier fleet would be large enough to make the need for ice aircraft carriers obsolete. Churchill also gave up on the project when he realised that the carriers would cost over £6m.

The model in Patricia Lake was “scuttled” in 1943 by removing all the machinery that had been used and leaving it to sink in place. In the 1970’s remains of the model were found and studied and in 1989, a plaque to commemorate the unusual ship was placed on the lake’s shore.

Geoffrey Pyke committed suicide in 1948.

The Tsunami Bomb

The not-wife, being fascinated in disasters, decided that the BBC programme “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Tsunamis” was appointment television. In the end it was more like one or two things we didn’t know about Tsunamis. One of these unknowns was the Tsunami Bomb .

During wartime the military will entertain ideas that would almost certainly be shown the door during peacetime. And so it was in 1944 and 1945 that top-secret experiments (Known as Project Seal) were conducted off the coast of Auckland at Whangaparaoa by Auckland University professor Thomas Leech. Leech conducted hundreds of underwater explosions in the hope of developing a weapon that would trigger tidal waves in 1944 and 1945. According to “Ten things” programme the experiments were an utter failure. After 4000 test explosions, none of which generated an appreciable effect and the project was closed down when it was determined that there were errors in the theoretical basis of the plan.

However, according to New Zealand papers released only in 1999 the US and British military were eager for Seal to be developed in the post-war years too. They even considered sending Professor Leech to Bikini Atoll to view the US nuclear tests and see if they had any application to his work. Leech did not make the visit, although a member of the US board of assessors of atomic tests, Dr Karl Compton, was sent to New Zealand.

"Dr Compton is impressed with Professor Leech's deductions on the Seal project and is prepared to recommend to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that all technical data from the test relevant to the Seal project should be made available to the New Zealand Government for further study by Professor Leech," said a July 1946 letter from Washington to Wellington.


Could have it ever succeeded? According to another New Zealand Herald article Tsunami researchers at the University of Waikato believed that the bomb was fundamentally feasible. A modern approach to the idea could produce waves up to 30m high.

Dr Willem de Lange, of the Department of Earth Sciences, said studies proved that while a single explosion was not necessarily effective, a series of explosions could have a significant impact. Dr de Lange said the waves were not high because the energy was projected upwards, not sideways. He believed the same principle would be true for a tsunami bomb.

"You can't confine the energy. Once the explosion gets big enough, all of its energy goes into the atmosphere and not into the water. But... if you had a series of explosions in the same place, it's much more effective and can produce much bigger waves."

To be honest this sounds like one of the wilder ideas of a mad scientist – the sort with an assistant called Igor and a lab full of Tesla coils. Personally I think the idea is pretty ludicrous. Even if a large amount of explosives could indeed create a tsunami, I would imagine dropping the bombs on the chosen would cause rather more damage. I’m surprised it hasn’t been touted more by the tinfoil hat brigade’s mill though