CHAPTER 04

Following Instructions and Going with the Flow

experiments using LSD at the Spring Grove State Hospital. The protocol of the experiments was exposed to several committees for a decision as to whether or not the group that proposed the experiments would be authorized to do them. I went over the protocols of the proposal from the Spring Grove State Hospital. In no case was it proposed that investigators be exposed to the experimental procedure first.

This lack of involvement of the investigators in their own scientific research as first subjects comes from another line of tradition than the one that I have been brought up and trained in. The justification of the opposing school, if you wish, is as follows: The patient has a disease, say, cancer. The investigator does not have this disease, therefore if you are trying some new therapeutic procedure to try to cure the disease you can't use yourself because you don't have the disease to cure.

I do not agree with this argument at all. You should not do to a patient what you are not willing to do to yourself. You do not know whether or not you are willing to do it on yourself until you try it on yourself. Even if you don't have the disease, whatever the procedure is that you propose using, it should not be damaging enough to prevent you from doing it on yourself, If it is, it should not be done on others. Therefore, until you ve proved to your own satisfaction that it is not damaging on animals amd then proved to your own satisfaction that it is not damaging on yourself, it is better not to use it.

Back in the fifties, this was the argument that I used against putting brain electrodes into humans. I knew from my animal studies that no matter how you put brain electrodes in a brain some damage to the brain took place during the insertion procedure. Unless one was willing to undergo this amount of damage by inserting

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