Word: delgados
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Monkey Business as Usual. From Yale Medical School to Chicago went a young Spanish physiologist to tell of what he has learned from monkeys. Dr. José M. Rodrigues Delgado has drilled holes in the skulls of anesthetized rhesus monkeys, jabbed fine electrodes (1/200 of an inch in diameter) deep into their brains, and carried connecting wires out to a tiny socket of the type used in midget radios. The sockets are attached at the back of the animal's head. The monkeys recover quickly from the operation, appear to feel no discomfort, and go about their monkey business...
With as many as 40 leads into the brain of a single monkey, Dr. Delgado has found that by passing a current through different parts of the cortex, he can stimulate a resting monkey to raise his paws, scratch himself, turn around, yawn, or start trying to catch imaginary insects. In some monkeys he stimulated the lateral hypothalamus for an hour a day, and the animals ate up to ten times as much as usual. A few days after stimulation is stopped, the monkeys' appetites go back to normal. The seat of a monkey's love for bananas...
Applied to most parts of the brain, electric stimulation has no effect on the monkey's emotions, but the hippocampal region (midway between the ears) is an exception. An electric tickle there turned a ferocious rhesus into a macaque Milquetoast; he even let Dr. Delgado take the liberty of stroking his face. The moment the current was turned off, he tried to bite...
From monkeys, and eventually from human subjects, Dr. Delgado hopes to find precise spots in the brain where electrical stimulation or destruction can be used as a refined form of surgery, instead of the drastic lobotomy (TIME, May 28, 1951), for victims of schizophrenia. Dr. Delgado and some other researchers have already gone on from animals to men as subjects for studies in deep electro-encephalography...
...Rodriguez Fernández, a Venezuelan dentist, announced that he has concocted "a fluid which will destroy putrefaction from the face of the earth." He has the well-preserved carcasses of a donkey, a dog and a 1,500-lb. horse once ridden by Venezuela's late President Delgado-Chalbaud as mute monuments to his success...