Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture

Groovy Science

Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture

David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, Editors

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Drawing Theories Apart, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and How the Hippies Saved Physics. W. Patrick McCray is professor in the department of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Visioneers Keep Watching the Skies.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-37288-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-37291-4 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-37307-2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226373072.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kaiser, David, editor. | McCray, Patrick (W. Patrick), editor.

Title: Groovy science: knowledge, innovation, and American counterculture / David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, editors.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015040309 | ISBN 9780226372884 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226372914 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226373072 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Science—Social aspects—United States. | Counterculture—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC Q175.5 .G756 2016 | DDC 303.48/3097309046—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040309

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray

Part One: Conversion

1 Adult Swim: How John C. Lilly Got Groovy (and Took the Dolphin with Him), 1958–1968

D. Graham Burnett

2 Blowing Foam and Blowing Minds: Better Surfing through Chemistry

Peter Neushul and Peter Westwick

3 Santa Barbara Physicists in the Vietnam Era

Cyrus C. M. Mody

Part Two: Seeking

4 Between the Counterculture and the Corporation: Abraham Maslow and Humanistic Psychology in the 1960s

Nadine Weidman

5 A Quest for Permanence: The Ecological Visioneering of John Todd and the New Alchemy Institute

Henry Trim

6 The Little Manual That Started a Revolution: How Hippie Midwifery Became Mainstream

Wendy Kline

Part Three: Personae

7 The Unseasonable Grooviness of Immanuel Velikovsky

Michael D. Gordin

8 Timothy Leary’s Transhumanist SMI²LE

W. Patrick McCray

9 Science of the Sexy Beast: Biological Masculinities and the Playboy Lifestyle

Erika Lorraine Milam

Part Four: Legacies

10 Alloyed: Countercultural Bricoleurs and the Design Science Revival

Andrew Kirk

11 How the Industrial Scientist Got His Groove: Entrepreneurial Journalism and the Fashioning of Technoscientific Innovators

Matthew Wisnioski

12 When Chèvre Was Weird: Hippie Taste, Technoscience, and the Revival of American Artisanal Food Making

Heather Paxson

Afterword: The Counterculture’s Looking Glass

David Farber and Beth Bailey

Contributors

Index

Introduction

David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray

groovy \´gru-vi\ adj 1: marvelous, wonderful, excellent. 2: hip, trendy, fashionable.

Something was happening. Otherwise, why would Theodore Roszak be agreeing with Edward Teller? What could the left-leaning history professor and favorite of Berkeley-area coffeehouse radicals possibly have in common with a nuclear-weapons designer whose dark visions helped inspire Stanley Kubrick’s sinister Dr. Strangelove? Something was happening. But what was it?

As the 1970s began, Teller and Roszak were about as far apart politically as two men could possibly be. Yet they found some quantum of concordance in their assessment that young Americans were relating to science and technology in a manner very different from that of just a decade earlier. When he surveyed the development of science in the United States since 1945, Teller concluded that all is not well. The problem was especially acute among our young people, for whom thorough and patient understanding is no longer considered relevant. To Teller—the very apotheosis of the military-industrial complex—this endemic lack of interest was the surest sign of decadence.¹

Roszak concurred. As he wrote in his 1969 book, The Making of a Counter Culture, the youth of his day were fleeing science as if from a place inhabited by plague, seeking subversion of the scientific world view itself.² Roszak’s counterculture—a monolithic term he deployed to capture what was actually an inchoate collection of individuals, interests, and ideologies—was antirationalist and opposed to both sterile technocracy and impersonal Big Science. Instead of astrophysics, engineering, or molecular biology, youthful members of the counterculture, Roszak held, were more likely to embrace astrology, Eastern religions, and chemically enhanced spirituality.

Starting from opposite ends of the political spectrum, Teller and Roszak both arrived at a common diagnosis: by the late 1960s, American youth—and American society in general—had turned away from the science and technology that had underpinned the expansion, power, and prosperity of the United States since 1945. But Roszak and Teller were wrong in their assessment. America’s youth had not turned away wholesale from science and technology. Everyone from vocal campus radicals to members of Nixon’s silent majority could see that a new type of science, a new way of engaging with technology, was emerging. Something new was percolating from 1970s-era dorm rooms, ’zine publishers, hot tubs, and experimental communities. This book explains what and why.

Our argument in this edited collection is that members of many strands of the American counterculture, although wary of a larger society that seemed to prize conformity, consumerism, and planned obsolescence, were not antiscience. Rather, we argue, many young people who self-identified as part of the counterculture in the United States, stretching from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, dismissed examples of science and technology that struck them as hulking, depersonalized, or militarized—a rejection of Cold War–era missiles and mainframes rather than of science and technology per se. Instead of the traditional science and technology promulgated by giant government programs, defense contractors, and corporate research labs, the counterculture embraced something new and different. We call this alternative groovy science.

Indeed, this book’s cover art reflects the blend of the conventional and the countercultural. Here is a stereotype of an Establishment scientist—white, male, hair closely cut—but his activities are blurred, distorted, and shifted by colorful, sometimes polarizing, and often groovy forces emanating from outside the lab.

Some of the most iconic, colorful, and controversial figures in the American countercultural movements were enamored of modern science and technology: people like psychedelics enthusiasts Timothy Leary and Andrew Weil, human-potential mavens Werner Erhard (of "est" fame) and Michael Murphy (cofounder of the Esalen Institute), and Whole Earth Catalog visionary Stewart Brand.³ Each of them actively sought out the latest advances in quantum mechanics, chaos theory, cybernetics, ecology, and beyond, often paying handsomely to encourage the work and learn of it firsthand. Following their lead, many young people who self-identified as members of the counterculture tended toward small-scale appropriate technology rather than the massive projects of the Sputnik era. When Leary solicited essays from tuned-in physicists on quantum entanglement in 1976, for example—while sitting in a California jail on drug charges—he was seeking the comprehensive worldviews of modern science, not the room-sized mainframes of Cold War technoscience; but his tastes can hardly be dismissed as antiscientific for all that.⁴ Likewise, the long-haired freethinkers who bought the makings for Buckminster Fuller–inspired geodesic domes from Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog or who eagerly snatched up copies of popular books about cybernetics and the brain by Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, and Stafford Beer were hardly fleeing from science, no matter how their activities might have appeared to observers like Teller and Roszak.⁵

We therefore borrow the term groovy to label this cluster of activities and aspirations. Originally a slang term used by African American jazz musicians in the 1930s and 1940s, by the late 1960s the word had become more closely associated with hippies and counterculture. The songwriting duo Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel released their 59th Street Bridge Song (also known as Feelin’ Groovy) in 1966; a few years later the Grateful Dead produced a cover. In 1971 a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California explained in The Underground Dictionary that among the largely white, middle-class celebrants of American counterculture, groovy had come to mean great, fantastic, joyful, happy. The term faded from common usage during the 1980s, and hence it provides a useful marker for the long 1970s on which we focus here.⁶

The essays in this volume do not aim to cover all aspects of the history of science in the United States during the 1970s. Rather, they lay a foundation for addressing the shifting practices and cultural valences of science and technology during this recent and underexplored period. Examples of groovy science can be found among mainstream researchers who sought ways to engage with different communities and nontraditional forms of science, as well as among fringe thinkers who sought a place in the mainstream’s spotlight. Groovy science, in other words, reflects the social exploration, experimentation, and eclecticism that were emblematic of the counterculture(s) during one of the most colorful periods of recent American history. To further characterize groovy science, we have highlighted four themes, around which this volume is organized: conversion, seeking, personae, and legacies.

Conversion. Although the era was marked by widespread protests against the military-industrial-academic complex, Cold War influences ran deep. One inspiration for this volume is the opportunity to revisit Cold War historiography. For nearly three decades, historians have interrogated the massive transformations of American science and technology that unfolded between the early 1940s and the early 1960s. From the ballooning of Pentagon-backed research to the fevered suspicions of domestic anti-Communism, the early nuclear era witnessed unprecedented realignments of science, politics, culture, and identity.⁷ The relationships between power, patronage, politics, and practice are far less understood for the late 1960s and 1970s. The essays in the opening section thus provide a bridge between some well-understood topics and new intellectual territory. While rejecting the megamachine, some forms of groovy science adapted resources and forms of knowledge that had been characteristic of earlier Cold War science and turned them toward new ends. In Adult Swim: How John C. Lilly Got Groovy (and Took the Dolphin with Him), 1958–1968, for example, D. Graham Burnett charts how Lilly derived his interests in consciousness and interspecies communication—culminating in his famous experiments with dolphins, LSD, and sensory-deprivation tanks—from military-sponsored research into brainwashing and mind control. Peter Neushul and Peter Westwick, in Blowing Foam and Blowing Minds: Better Surfing through Chemistry, document how formerly buttoned-down aerospace engineers in Southern California leaned on their expertise with space-age materials to launch the shortboard revolution in surfing. And in Santa Barbara Physicists in the Vietnam Era, Cyrus C. M. Mody describes how a relatively new academic department, which had been founded in the era of seemingly limitless Defense Department largesse, adapted to the new realities of the 1970s by crafting a low-budget, hands-on, experiential curriculum centered on socially relevant topics like environmental and biomedical applications, as well as on a few devices meant to help elucidate mystical and parapsychological phenomena.

Seeking. Many participants pursued some version of groovy science as a kind of secularized, quasi-spiritual quest. The search for authenticity, self-actualization, and sustainable self-sufficiency drove experiments in everything from psychology to environmental management to medical care. In Between the Counterculture and the Corporation: Abraham Maslow and Humanistic Psychology in the 1960s, Nadine Weidman describes Maslow’s decade-long dance with the flowering counterculture. The Brandeis University professor was by turns fascinated, inspired, and ultimately deeply ambivalent about the youth movement, even as many young people, encountering his work at places like the Esalen Institute, appropriated his ideas about humanistic psychology and his critiques of the traditional scientific method. Henry Trim, in A Quest for Permanence: The Ecological Visioneering of John Todd and the New Alchemy Institute, reveals some of the symbiotic ties between self-professed countercultural scientists, eager to carve out a kind of technoecological sublime, and traditional institutions like regional governments and Establishment foundations that helped to foot the bill. In The Little Manual That Started a Revolution: How Hippie Midwifery Became Mainstream, Wendy Kline follows an eclectic group of tuned-in seekers who were eager to appropriate indigenous and medical knowledge to launch a home birth movement.

Personae. Regardless of how one participated in it, the counterculture was a product of mass media as much as cultural and political forces. And, of course, these communication technologies and strategies were themselves products of the Cold War. With far-reaching media attention to the counterculture came the propensity for hero worship and fame seeking. Groovy science often orbited around charismatic individuals, self-proclaimed guru types who crafted hybrid identities: at once scientific experts and countercultural iconoclasts. As Michael Gordin discusses in The Unseasonable Grooviness of Immanuel Velikovsky, bookish elders like Velikovsky, with their brazenly heterodox theories of ancient history and celestial mechanics, became heroes to restless college students across North America. Meanwhile, hedonist charmers like Timothy Leary championed space exploration—and even space colonization—as the ultimate high, as W. Patrick McCray charts in Timothy Leary’s Transhumanist SMI²LE. At the same time, cultural entrepreneurs like Hugh Hefner looked to ethology—the study of animal behavior—to bolster their own notions of human nature and natural gender roles, as Erika Milam documents in "Science of the Sexy Beast: Biological Masculinities and the Playboy Lifestyle."

Legacies. Many once-radical ideas have since been absorbed into the mainstream, their countercultural roots obscured, ignored, or forgotten. In Alloyed: Countercultural Bricoleurs and the Design Science Revival, Andrew Kirk argues that today’s trends in sustainability and architectural design grew out of countercultural experiments inspired by maverick, omnidisciplinal Buckminster Fuller. In How the Industrial Scientist Got His Groove: Entrepreneurial Journalism and the Fashioning of Technoscientific Innovators, Matthew Wisnioski traces glossy, heroic portraits of today’s socially engaged knowledge workers to an ideological shift among American engineers, triggered by the disruptions of the late 1960s, when they scrambled to define a new role beyond the familiar defense contractor. And in When Chèvre Was Weird: Hippie Taste, Technoscience, and the Revival of American Artisanal Food Making, Heather Paxson reminds us that many types of food that are ubiquitous today—as well as labels like artisanal and organic—sprang from various people’s concerted efforts, back in the 1970s, to embrace a countercultural lifestyle apart from the perceived consumerism and rat race of conventional American middle-class routines.

Underlying all four of these sections is a common theme: consumption. As Thomas Frank’s book The Conquest of Cool made clear, business goals and counterculture grooviness were hardly polar opposites. Instead, they developed a symbiotic relationship through much of the 1960s and 1970s, as advertising executives appropriated elements of coolness and youthfulness to increase profitability and refine American capitalism.⁸ Likewise, the essays in this volume reveal ways in which many people sought to reconcile science, technology, and hipness, melding a certain form of hip consumerism with enthusiasm for science. Many of the personalities who engaged in groovy science were indeed selling something, be it artisan cheese, midwifery manuals, or ideologies of innovation. One person’s rebellion, idealism, or self-exploration was quite often another hipster’s day job or meal ticket. As Robert Heinlein, one of the counterculture’s favorite science fiction writers, put it, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.⁹

Understanding the historical contours and contributions of groovy science is important for several reasons. American historians have recently discovered the 1970s. A fast-growing literature now seeks to displace the 1960s as the pivotal decade for understanding the United States and the world during the years since World War II.¹⁰ While many of the recent books admirably disentangle subtle features of the labor market and financial institutions, political allegiances, religious and intellectual trends, and publishing practices, most pay little attention to science and technology—and those that do tend to revert to Teller’s and Roszak’s simplistic dichotomy, pitting counterculture against science.¹¹ Yet the long 1970s were a period of significant change in American science and technology as well. A growing literature by historians of science and technology has begun to reveal colorful and sometimes-unexpected entanglements between the youth movements, counterculture(s), and science and technology over the long 1970s.¹² Building on those exciting studies, our goal for Groovy Science is to intervene before American historians’ narrative of the 1970s settles into its own grooves, reifying Roszak’s attractive yet misleading caricature and overlooking the many ways in which an embrace of science and technology (of a particular type) became part of what it meant to be countercultural.

At the same time, we hope that Groovy Science will help spur other historians of science, technology, and medicine to focus on the long 1970s. Thanks to the contributions from at least two generations of scholars, we now know a great deal about science and technology during the height of American-Soviet tensions. The story of American science in the twentieth century has come to be dominated by the now-familiar narrative of skyrocketing expansion after World War II, followed by precipitous decline around 1970—that is, by the narrative arc of the High Cold War.¹³ Yet science and technology in the United States did not grind to a halt with the onset of détente and stagflation. New approaches, motivations, and institutions emerged, some with clear debts to prior patterns and others striving for genuine novelty. Groovy science represented improvisations, mutations, and hybridizations of what had only lately seemed to be the norm. The recent books on particular instances of what we have dubbed groovy science have opened a window on to a swirling, technicolor pastiche of ideas, people, and events. The time has come to chart common trends and themes across the physical, biological, and social sciences—common features that remain obscured if one relies only on a collection of tightly focused monographs.

Two caveats are in order. The first concerns lumping. We are mindful of the fact that there was no single, monolithic entity in the United States that could be called the counterculture. Instead, disparate, sometimes-inchoate, and ever-changing assemblages of people, organizations, and ideas all passed under the counterculture banner. Part of the counterculture, to be sure, was politically oriented, working to change the existing power structure, protest against the ravages of the Vietnam War, and increase minority representation via a variety of means. This group was more inclined to accept hierarchy and organizations and their attendant bureaucracies. In comparison, another wing of the counterculture eschewed formal organization and drifted toward communal living arrangements, social experimentation, and consciousness-expanding activities. Other useful distinctions can be drawn, between (say) the splintering of the New Left and the quirky outcroppings of the New Age.¹⁴ Folded into this mix was the diverse experience of minorities, gays, and women, groups that were drawn in varying degrees to groovy science yet for whom a great deal of historical exploration still remains to be done. The term counterculture retains heuristic power in the singular, though as lived experience for thousands of young people the word conjured a rich and complex ecosystem.

The second caveat addresses splitting—namely, our focus in this volume on people, places, and events that were largely operating within the United States. Certainly there were countercultures and, indeed, instances of groovy science that percolated in other countries. Many of the ideas and individuals presented in this volume had an appeal that spanned national borders, and many groovy-science acolytes were attuned to developments in other parts of the world.¹⁵ Nonetheless, because the essays in this volume range across the physical, biological, and social sciences, and because the historiography of the long 1970s has been an especially active area among American historians recently, we have focused on instantiations of groovy science within the United States for the sake of overall coherence. We hope that the examples gathered here will help galvanize broader, comparative discussions of science, technology, and counterculture.

Groovy science was an amalgam of earnestness and playfulness, an unsteady mix often fueled by a sense that society was on the brink of some new revolution. Roszak also thought that revolution was nigh: marked not by the emergence of a new kind of science but by a gaggle of Theosophists and fundamentalists, spiritualists and flat-earthers, occultists and satanists, whose radical rejection of science and technological values represented the most recent ascendancy of anti-rational elements in our midst.¹⁶ Yet the countercultural critics had their reasons to turn away from the hulking infrastructure of Cold War science; and their own efforts were hardly antirational. With historical distance, we can discern connections to a deeper past that many tuned-in practitioners wished to spurn, just as we can trace linkages to thriving, mainstream pursuits today. In all these ways, thinking about groovy science can help us identify the constant interweaving of science and technology with the fabric of daily life—even when that fabric was an exuberant, paisley-patterned polyester.

Notes

1. Edward Teller, The Era of Big Science, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 27, no. 4 (1971): 34–36.

2. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, NY: Anchor / Doubleday, 1969), 50, 215.

3. See, e.g., Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America (New York: HarperOne, 2010); Jeffrey Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). The remainder of this paragraph is based on David Kaiser, Consciousness on the Charles, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 41 (2011): 265–75, esp. 274–75.

4. Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics, xviii.

5. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture; Kirk, Counterculture Green; and Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

6. On the etymology of groovy, see Neil Hamilton, The ABC-Clio Companion to the 1960s Counterculture in America (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1997), 130. Eugene Landy’s The Underground Dictionary is quoted in Sam Binkley, Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 1.

7. See, e.g., Paul Forman, Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 18 (1987): 149–229; Daniel Kevles, Cold War and Hot Physics: Science, Security, and the American State, 1945–56, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 20 (1990): 239–64; Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); David Kaiser, Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33 (2002): 131–59; David Kaiser, The Postwar Suburbanization of American Physics, American Quarterly 56 (2004): 851–88; and David Kaiser, The Atomic Secret in Red Hands? American Suspicions of Theoretical Physicists during the Early Cold War, Representations 90 (2005): 28–60.

8. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

9. Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (New York: Putnam, 1966).

10. See, e.g., Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001); Beth Bailey and David Farber, eds., America in the Seventies (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Edward D. Berkowitz, Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Binkley, Getting Loose; Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008); Bruce Schulman and Julian Zeilzer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010); Niall Ferguson et al., eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); and Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

11. See, e.g., Richard Kyle, The New Age Movement in American Culture (New York: University Press of America, 1995), chaps. 6–7; Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 236–38; Schulman, The Seventies, 96–101; and Lattin, Harvard Psychedelic Club, 3, 220. A welcome exception to the trend is Bailey and Farber, America in the Seventies, which includes Timothy Moy’s important essay Culture, Technology, and the Cult of Tech in the 1970s, 208–27.

12. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture; Eric J. Vettel, Biotech: The Countercultural Origins of an Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Kirk, Counterculture Green; Kelly Moore, Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945–1975 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics; Patrick McCray, The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); and Michael Gordin, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

13. For a review of recent trends, see Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and David Kaiser, eds., Science and the American Century: Readings from Isis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

14. See Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 3–9; and Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics, xxi–xxiii.

15. Within the recent literature, Andrew Pickering’s Cybernetic Brain—which focuses mostly on developments in the United Kingdom—provides a helpful indication of cross-national trends, as does Peder Anker, The Call for a New Ecotheology in Norway, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 7 (2013): 187–207.

16. Roszak, Making of a Counter Culture, 50–51.

Part One: Conversion

1

Adult Swim: How John C. Lilly Got Groovy (and Took the Dolphin with Him), 1958–1968

D. Graham Burnett

What did it mean to be groovy circa 1970? It meant knowing how to hang, how to float, how to be at one with others, with animals, with the universe itself. I believe we can treat the following text as paradigmatic of the project as a whole:

I suspect that whales and dolphins quite naturally go in the directions we call spiritual, in that they get into meditative states quite simply and easily. If you go into the sea yourself, with a snorkel and face mask and warm water, you can find that dimension in yourself quite easily. Free floating is entrancing. . . . Now if you combine snorkeling and scuba with a spiritual trip with the right people, you could make the transition to understanding the dolphins and whales very rapidly.¹

Spiritual cetaceans? Trippy, collective, free-floating ethology of the odontocetes? Where are we?

The short answer is that we are located firmly in the head—the very heady head—of one of the most important, and one of the strangest, scientists of the 1960s: John C. Lilly, the man whose work with brains and behaviors of dolphins had lasting implications for cultural understanding of human beings’ nearest aquatic kin (fig. 1.1). A pioneering neurophysiologist, a troubled military psychologist, an apostate cetologist and animal fantasist, ultimately a Pied Piper of whale hugging and cosmonaut of heightened consciousness—John C. Lilly traced a fascinating trajectory across the postwar period. Retracing a parabolic portion of his path (he rose and he fell) will allow us, I think, to catch several striking views of what we may indeed want to call groovy science.

Figure 1.1 John C. Lilly at work in the lab. Reprinted by permission of the Flip Schulke Archives. © Flip Schulke.

Lilly and the Cetacean Brain

Born in 1915, Lilly, from a well-to-do family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, took a bachelor of science degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1938 and studied at Dartmouth Medical School for two years before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed his MD in 1942 and remained on the faculty. There, under the influence of Britton Chance and Detlev Bronk, Lilly pursued research in biophysics, including applied investigations into real-time physiological monitoring—work linked to wartime service in military aviation, where techniques for assaying the respiration of airmen were needed.² Lilly had contact through his family with the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in the later 1940s and developed an interest in neuroanatomy and the electrophysiology of the brain. By 1953 he had been appointed to the neurophysiology laboratory of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), where he worked under Wade Marshall as part of a joint research program with the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness.

By the mid-1950s Lilly’s lab in Bethesda, Maryland, was performing in vivo electrical stimulation of the brains of macaques—work aimed at cortical mapping by means of correlating point applications of currents at varying thresholds with specific behaviors and reactions in subject animals.³ Reporting on some of these investigations at a conference on the reticular formation of the brain, held in Detroit in 1957, Lilly would explain,

The neurophysiologist has been given a powerful investigative tool: the whole animal can be trained to give behavioral signs of what goes on inside. . . . We are in the position of being able to guess with less margin of error what a man might feel and experience if he were stimulated in these regions.⁴

This was, in many ways, unpleasant business, Lilly acknowledged, pointing out that he had spent a very large fraction of my working time for the last eight years with unanaesthetized monkeys with implanted electrodes. In addressing the nebulous region where neurology, psychology, and animal behavior overlapped, Lilly permitted himself some observations on the affective universe of his scientific subjects:

When an intact monkey grimaces, shrieks, and obviously tries to escape, one knows it is fearful or in pain or both. When one lives day in and day out with one of these monkeys, hurting it and feeding it and caring for it, its experience of pain or fear is so obvious that it is hardly worth mentioning.⁵

It would not be the last time that Lilly would reflect on the inner lives of his experimental animals with considerable confidence. But his experimental animal was about to change. Like a number of American psychology researchers in the mid-1950s—including the echolocation researcher Winthrop Kellogg—Lilly was in the process of leaving monkeys behind for the bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus.

His first brush with the study of cetaceans came in 1949 when, during a visit to a neurosurgeon friend on Cape Cod, Lilly learned that a recent storm had beached a whale on the coast of southern Maine. A plan took shape for an impromptu expedition north, with a view toward collecting a novel brain.⁶ As it happened, Lilly was acquainted from his days at the University of Pennsylvania with the Swedish-Norwegian physiologist and oceanographer Per F. Pete Scholander, who had also worked with Detlev Bronk in aviation physiology during World War II and had then moved to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.⁷ Scholander—something of a daredevil, and fascinated by the physiology of extreme environments—had published research on dive physiology and decompression, and while still living in Scandinavia he had conducted a number of pioneering studies on the deep-diving capabilities of marine mammals, particularly whales.⁸ Lilly looked up Scholander and recruited him for the trip, and the three men suited up for a drive to Maine. Shortly after reaching the carcass (a large pilot whale), exposing the skull, and beginning to chip away toward the brain, they were joined by two other researchers who had independently made the drive up from Woods Hole: William Schevill and his wife and collaborator, Barbara Lawrence. They were, reportedly, somewhat miffed to discover that they had been beaten to the punch and were particularly concerned that the hacksaw dissection might have damaged the airways of the upper head, which they had come to examine. In the end, however, the cadaver would be theirs, since Lilly and his partners found that the brain had largely been dissolved through autolysis; the smell alone overpowered them.

Though he headed home with little to show for the trip, Lilly had brushed the shores of cetology, and his curiosity did not dissipate. At a meeting of the International Physiological Congress four years later, in 1953, Lilly and Scholander again crossed paths, and Scholander suggested that Lilly get in touch with a leading expert on captive dolphins, Forrest G. Wood, who at that time handled the animals at Marine Studios. Lilly did, and as a result, he was one of eight investigators to participate in what came to be known informally as the Johns Hopkins expedition in the autumn of 1955. Like prewar projects, the expedition featured a mixed crew of physiologists and medical men gearing up to vivisect some bottlenose dolphins, only this time it would be in the carnival environs of a Florida ocean theme park rather than a remote fishing village on a barrier island.⁹

In preparation for this 1955 trip, Lilly spent the summer in correspondence not only with Wood (securing access to a set of dolphins for experimental work) but also with Schevill at Woods Hole (concerning the anatomy of the airways of the common dolphin)¹⁰ and with Scholander (concerning restraint techniques and the respiratory characteristics of the odontocetes).¹¹ Using this information, Lilly worked up a dolphin respirator that would, it was hoped, permit the surgeons and neuroscientists of the party to expose the brain of an anesthetized animal in order to begin the work of cortical mapping by neurophysiological techniques. It appears that no one in Europe or the United States up to this point had attempted a surgical intervention on a dolphin or porpoise.

The Johns Hopkins expedition of 1955 was at best a qualified success. Lilly and the other investigators were unsuccessful with their anesthetics and their respirator, and in the end they euthanized, without dexterity, five dolphins, apparently alienating a number of the Marine Studios personnel in the process.¹² But if the 1955 investigations were not a triumph, they did deepen Lilly’s continuing interest in the cetacean brain.¹³ Having heard a set of Wood’s recordings of bottlenose dolphins at Marine Studios, Lilly was much struck—as were a considerable number of others at this time—by the range and apparent complexity of dolphin phonation. In October 1957 and again in 1958—after a visit with Schevill and Lawrence in Massachusetts, where they were conducting work on the auditory range and echolocatory capabilities of a bottlenose dolphin in a facility near Woods Hole—Lilly returned to Marine Studios. This time he was equipped to undertake investigations of the dolphin brain and behavior using techniques like those he had deployed and refined with macaques at NIMH: namely, percutaneous electrodes, driven by stereotaxis, that could probe the brain tissue of an unanesthetized, living animal.¹⁴ Over the two visits, three more animals were sacrificed, and Lilly experienced a kind of scientific epiphany that would shape his scientific life, even as its reverberations eventually unmade his scientific reputation.¹⁵

Compressing a complicated encounter that took place over several days—and which continued to draw Lilly’s reflections and reconstructions for years—is not easy, but we can summarize Lilly’s sense of his findings this way: First, Lilly persuaded himself that, in comparison to his experience with monkeys, the dolphins appeared to learn very rapidly how to press a switch to stimulate a positive region in their brains (and to turn off stimulation to a region causing pain).¹⁶ Second, he claimed to have been much struck by the sense that an injured experimental subject, when returned to the tank with other dolphins, called to them and received their ministrations, suggesting an intraspecies language.¹⁷ Third, on reviewing the tapes made of these investigations, Lilly grew increasingly certain that his experimental subjects had been parroting his speech and other human sounds in the laboratory. These three elements—intelligence, an intraspecies language, and (perhaps most significantly) what he took to be fleeting glimpses of an attempt at interspecies communication—left Lilly with a feeling that he was on the cusp of something vast. Reflecting on the work of 1955, 1957, and 1958 in his Lasker Lecture in April 1962, Lilly tried to explain:

We began to have feelings which I believe are best described by the word weirdness. The feeling was that we were up against the edge of a vast uncharted region in which we were about to embark with a good deal of mistrust concerning the appropriateness of our own equipment. The feeling of weirdness came on us as the sounds of this small whale seemed more and more to be forming words in our own language.¹⁸

After hammering his way into hundreds of mammalian brains, Lilly suddenly heard a voice.

Odd as this breakthrough may seem, Lilly was not alone in his sense of the magnitude of what had happened in the Marine Studios laboratory in the late 1950s. One of Lilly’s medical friends who had been in attendance in October 1957, during work on dolphin number six, later mused to him in a letter, I keep thinking of that first moment when the first, clearly purposeful switch-pressing response occurred. This is one of the extraordinary moments in science.¹⁹ Loren Eiseley, the anthropologist who had become the provost of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote publicly that the import of these discoveries is tremendous, and may not be adequately known for a long time.²⁰ And in 1961 Lilly would write of the discoveries in still-grander world-historical terms, situating his own research at the cusp of the fourth great displacement in the history of science: citing Freud, Lilly explained that although man had, over the last five hundred years, been thrust from the center of the universe, from the center of nature, and finally from the center of his own mind, modern man still thought of himself as the center of all intelligence. This (final?) pillar of human exceptionalism now teetered beside the dolphin tanks. It was his predilection for claims like this—sweeping, visionary, laced with self-aggrandizing enthusiasm—that eventually seriously tried the patience of Lilly’s colleagues, who placed increasing pressure on him in the early 1960s to deliver some reproducible scientific results.

Those results were slow in coming. Lilly’s first published report on his dolphin experiences appeared in December 1958 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, in an article entitled Some Considerations regarding Basic Mechanisms of Positive and Negative Types of Motivations. It is a deeply strange document, one that opens a window obliquely on to the world of brain research during the Cold War. Because it attracted a spate of articles in newspapers and magazines across the country—and launched the writing project that culminated in Man and Dolphin a little over two years later—it is worth examining this initial presentation in some detail.²¹

In view of the paper’s reception and impact, it is striking that the discussion of the dolphin work at Marine Studios represents less than one-third of its total length, and that this section is sandwiched in the middle of a wide-ranging discussion of the positive and negative motivation regions of the mammalian brain. Lilly’s primary concern in this paper was to reflect on the fact that neurophysiological work over the previous five years had established the existence of brain regions that, under stimulation, trigger negative-painful-stop responses, whereas other regions trigger positive-pleasurable-start responses. At issue, finally, was the balance between the aggregate sizes (and influences) of these two parts of the brain. So one reads, for instance, Of course we like to think that in the total action of the brain, the positive tends to overbalance the negative, and that the intellectual functions might be neutral ones, neither positive nor negative, found in excess of the positive and the negative.²²

Lilly then posed a question: Would point stimulation within the neocortex and the cerebellum—the regions of higher brain function—generate neutral, or perhaps mildly positive, effects? It appeared, strangely in his view, that in monkeys it did neither: strong negative response zones could be found in these sophisticated regions. So what? Well, this was troubling, according to Lilly’s analysis. Were the centers of abstract reasoning laced with halt zones? This seemed to raise a striking possibility: the tractability of sophisticated cognitive functioning by means of electrical stimulation. Enter the specter of mind control.

But perhaps, Lilly went on to reason, these issues—the positive versus the negative in higher brain function and, crucially, the plasticity of subjects under electrical stimulation—could only really be addressed in a brain larger and more complex than that of the macaque. As Lilly put it, May not a larger brain be more impervious to such tampering with its innards? May not the trained, sublimating, and sometimes even sublime human mind resist, and even conquer such artificially evoked crassly primitive impulses? Human experimentation was the only way to get sure answers to these questions. Acknowledging that this remained too risky to contemplate, Lilly then introduced Tursiops truncatus: So far we have found only one animal that has a brain the size of ours who will cooperate and not frighten me to the point where I can’t work with him—this animal is the dolphin. A description of Lilly’s work at Marine Studios followed, emphasizing the success he and his collaborators had had in finding both positive and negative regions in this large brain. Two paragraphs at the end of this section became the core of the newspaper articles that followed, so they are quoted here in their entirety:

In this abbreviated account, I cannot convey to you all of the evidence for my feeling that if we are to ever communicate with a non-human species of this planet, the dolphin is probably our best present gamble. In a sense, it is a joke when I fantasy that it may be best to hurry and finish our work on their brains before one of them learns to speak our language—else he will demand equal rights with men for their brains and lives under our ethical and legal codes!

Before our man in the space program becomes too successful, it may be wise to spend some time, talent, and money on research with the dolphins; not only are they a large-brained species living their lives in a situation with attenuated effects of gravity, but they may be a group with whom we can learn basic techniques of communicating with really alien intelligent life forms. I personally hope we do not encounter any such extraterrestrials before we are better prepared than we are now. Too automatically, too soon, too many of us attribute too much negative systems activity to foreign language aliens of strange and unfamiliar appearance and use this as an excuse for increasing our own negative, punishing, attacking activities on them.²³

With that, Lilly was finished with dolphins, and he returned to the shadow subject of his presentation: What does all this mean in terms of us, our species? Was it possible, without percutaneous electrodes, to investigate the positive and negative systems of our own brains? Turning inward, examining our minds, their deep and primitive workings, can we see evidence of the actions and inner workings of the positive, pleasure-like, start, and the negative, pain-fear-like, stop systems?²⁴ Lilly’s answer was yes, and the technology for doing so preoccupied him for the last third of his talk: isolation tanks—large, temperature-regulated tanks in which neutrally buoyant subjects were confined, in a breathing hood, in total darkness and without sound or sensory input, for as long as they could stand it (fig. 1.2).²⁵

Figure 1.2 Sensory deprivation in a flotation tank.

Military Minds

We may seem to be impossibly remote from the study of whales and dolphins, and yet the links are tighter and stranger than one might expect. Lilly was the inventor of the water-immersion technique of sensory deprivation, and he was a significant early contributor to the broader area of sensory-deprivation research, opening the third major center for such investigations (after McGill and Princeton) in the world and spawning a number of labs (most importantly that of Jay Shurley at the Oklahoma City VA hospital) that built tanks to his specifications. While working on such systems for several years at NIMH (from 1955–56 forward), Lilly conducted extensive self-experimentation in his tank, developed new equipment for it, advised on the building of similar systems, and lectured around the country on their use.

Such experimental environments seem, in retrospect, macabre, but it is necessary to recall the impetus for this sort of work. The earliest such investigations (at McGill, from 1951 forward) were stimulated by an interest in Russian and Chinese brainwashing,²⁶ and there can be no doubt that Lilly’s move into this area was linked to such preoccupations, which were firmly established on the national stage in the United States in the mid-1950s. One of the files in the Lilly papers is labeled Indoctrination, Forced, and it contains material on solitude, isolation, and brainwashing. An adjacent file, labeled Solitude, contains, most interestingly, Lilly’s notes on a conversation with Dr. Sperling in the Research and Development office of the Surgeon General’s office, dated 23 April 1956. The notes read, called this date, re: brainwashing, etc, mentioned by Dr. Felix before senate appropriations committee two weeks ago. A set of newspaper clippings makes it clear that this exchange took place at the height of Manchurian Candidate fears over the practices of Chinese mind control scientists.²⁷ Other correspondence reveals that systems like Lilly’s were wanted for two purposes: first, as a tool for screening tests and personality assessments (in order to find individuals particularly resistant to such situations and techniques) and, second, as training instruments to improve the resistance of those who might face sensory-deprivation conditions—not just soldiers, spies, and diplomats but others subjected to the rigors of solitary environments, particularly pilots, astronauts, and those manning remote meteorological or monitoring stations.²⁸

Precisely how close Lilly’s ties to the world of intelligence operations actually were remains obscure. In his autobiography, he wrote that his decision to leave NIMH in 1958 was motivated by his growing unease with the encroachment of application-oriented, apparently government-linked, investigators seeking information about the work of his Bethesda laboratory.²⁹ Lilly was involved, well into 1959, in advising members of the security establishment about the potential uses of his neurophysiological investigations, though an unseemly flap over his security clearance in May of that year certainly added friction to those relationships.³⁰ As of 27 August 1959, Lilly had Secret clearance, and documentation in Lilly’s FBI records indicates both that J. Edgar Hoover personally attended to his file and that he was to be treated as persona non grata by the bureau after 1960.³¹

What emerges from a close reading of Lilly’s 1958 paper in this context is the remarkable way in which his early dolphin investigations were entangled with this set of seemingly remote preoccupations—brainwashing, reprogramming, and mind control—that were reverberating through the sciences of brain and behavior in the mid-1950s. For instance, the questions Lilly posed after reporting his work with macaques—Can humans resist or conquer such situations? Do different people discover different degrees of egophilic or egophobic affect in isolation tanks?—were questions wholly tied to the pressing