(rhythmic music)
- Imagine a man who experiments
by sticking monkey heads somewhere they don't belong.
- He starts thinking, can the brain still live
outside of the body?
If so, for how long?
(finger snap)
- Or a CIA plan to use a cat as a spy.
- The CIA pumps $20 million into training and preparing cats.
And they're looking for that perfect cat agent.
- Or how about an experiment that tests
if the average person could be induced to hurt
or kill total strangers?
(machine buzzing)
- [Teacher] Wrong.
(Learner screaming)
- [Learner] You have no right to keep me here!
Let me out!
- These are the experiments so surprising,
they are truly unbelievable.
(suspenseful music)
Humans have been searching
for the key to eternal youth for eons.
And that quest has led to some extremely odd experiments
trying to hold back time.
Perhaps the strangest is one attempted
by a Russian named Serge a century ago.
(rhythmic music)
- Serge Voronoff is a surgeon of Russian descent
living in Paris.
And he sets his sights on the question
of whether there is a way to slow
or reverse the aging process.
- As a young medical professional,
he seeks out guidance from
a famous doctor of the time
known as Alexis Carrel.
- Working under Carrel,
Serge learns a variety of techniques,
including transplant,
which is a very new surgical science
in the early 20th century.
And immediately, Serge begins to ponder possibilities.
- [Dan] Serge also uncovers something surprising
when he studies Egyptian eunuchs,
men who've been castrated.
- He realizes that eunuchs, after castration,
are beset with a host of medical maladies,
a stooping gait, respiratory problems,
skin problems, cognitive problems.
- It almost seems like
they're aging faster
than non-castrated males.
- [Dan] This gives Serge a crazy aha moment.
Is it possible he has just found the fountain of youth?
- So Serge recognizes that
if a lack of testicles
makes you age more quickly,
perhaps if you have new, younger testicles,
you'd age more slowly
or maybe even turn back the clock on aging.
- [Dan] Hoping to unlock the key to virility,
Serge starts to experiment with animals.
- He takes animals that are older and he invigorates them
with the young testicles of other animals.
And it turns out that it's working.
Their coat is glossy and shiny.
They have energy again.
They're running around.
They seem more sexually vigorous as well.
- He knows that there has to be a way
of helping humans experience this same rejuvenation.
The problem is human testicles
really aren't readily available.
- He makes his next natural leap.
And his wish is to essentially transplant
a simian or monkey testicles onto a human subject.
(monkeys howling)
- [Dan] However, realizing no man in his right mind
will consider a full testicle transplant with a monkey,
Serge needs a workaround.
- He intends to take slivers of tissue
from the testicles of monkeys,
just a few millimeters in size,
and interpose these slivers onto the testicles
of human subjects.
- [Dan] Serge is certain his experiment will work.
He just needs to find a subject.
And in 1920, he finally finds his man, his older brother.
And the results?
They surprise even Serge.
- His brother suddenly has this full ruddy face,
is stronger,
is really seeming much younger than his age.
- So Serge moves to monetize his procedure.
And so, he starts approaching
all these rich men and showing them,
here, here is the proof.
I have before and after photographs.
Serge just found the little blue pills of the 1920s.
- [Dan] Wealthy tycoons from around the world
sign up for the surgery,
and monkey glands for
millionaires is born.
(eerie music)
- Now he has a huge customer base,
and he needs a supply of testicles.
He buys a huge estate and park
and names it Voronoff Castle, where he can raise monkeys,
specially produced for his monkey gland surgeries.
- [Dan] Two decades and 2,000 surgeries later,
Serge considers his testicle procedure a success.
Has he really unlocked the secret to youth?
- Men believed they were gaining vitality
so they felt like they were more vital and more vigorous,
but it's a placebo effect.
And eventually, people figure out
that his procedure does not work.
Serge's gig is up.
No one's buying it.
He's a laughingstock.
And he falls into obscurity.
- Meanwhile, another doctor takes Serge's work
to the next level, in an unlikely setting,
death row at one of California's most notorious prisons.
- In 1928, Buck Kelly, a 23-year-old,
is executed at San Quentin.
They take him to the gallows, he's hanged.
After that's done, they take down his body
and hand it over to the
resident medical expert,
Leo Stanley.
He performs the autopsy as one would expect
and then does one other little thing.
He removes Buck's testicles.
- [Dan] Just who is Leo Stanley
and why is he collecting testicles from a dead inmate?
- Leo Stanley is a guy who goes to college
originally at Stanford, but then he drops out.
And later, he goes to Cooper College
and actually gets a medical degree.
And he is looking forward to being a doctor.
- He thinks he's gonna live a life
of just a town physician somewhere,
and then an opening appears at San Quentin.
And he applies for it, and he gets it.
- [Dan] But Stanley's not just there to treat criminals.
He's also determined to curb their bad behavior.
And he has some odd ideas on how to do it.
- He feels that there is a direct link
between the age of a man's glands and gonads
and his tendency to commit horrible and heinous crimes.
He writes a book called "Men at their Worst."
And he even says things like pedophilia only occurs
when outworn glands start looking for relief
in the worst places.
(ominous music)
(gates clanging)
- Just like Serge, Leo comes up with the idea
of doing testicle transplants.
But unlike Serge, he goes straight human to human.
(eerie music)
But Leo doesn't use slivers,
he uses entire whole testicles.
(eerie music)
- Stanley believes that his surgical process
will actually be a floor of social rehabilitation,
that these prisoners who had
been stuck in San Quentin,
once they had a new set of testicles,
could go out, be productive members of society,
and would not return to San Quentin.
- Ranging from voluntary to involuntary,
Dr. Stanley carries out this experiment
at least a thousand times,
taking them off of freshly executed prisoners
and putting them onto those who are still alive and well.
- [Dan] Eventually, the Mad Testicle Transplanter
of San Quentin
runs into a bit of a supply problem.
- He doesn't have enough source of young male testicles.
They're not executing a young inmate
every day or every week even.
So what does he do?
He turns to animals.
Goats, deer, bears,
water buffalo, you name it.
If it has balls, he's putting it in an old dude.
- [Dan] When Stanley's patients don't respond as he hoped,
he comes up with a different approach.
- He does something incredibly bizarre
and, you know, kind of gross.
He takes a bunch of testicles,
and he blends them up into kind of a paste,
and he injects this testicle paste
into the abdomen of prisoners.
(eerie music)
And, no! No!
(eerie music)
- Leo's testicle mash paste injection idea
doesn't work either, so he comes up with a new idea.
Okay, if I can't restore your vitality,
I can at least restore your looks.
- And so, he starts offering plastic surgeries
to the inmates so they can look more handsome,
so that when they get out, they could maybe find a wife,
or get a job, or be somewhat normal.
This guy, his chain of reasoning is not exactly strong.
Why he wasn't fired almost immediately is a mystery.
(eerie music)
(gentle music)
- [Dan] After 40 years, Dr. Leo Stanley's experiments
finally come to an end.
- He's kind of your real Dr. Frankenstein.
He sees inmates as things that he can experiment on,
that he can play with.
He's carving up human beings.
And he does this 10,000 times across his career.
- Can the average person be talked
into killing a total stranger?
In 1961, a psychologist named Stanley Milgram
goes to unbelievable lengths to find out.
(rhythmic music)
- Dr. Stanley Milgram is born in the 1930s
and grows up in New York City in a Jewish household,
with the specter of
Nazis lingering over him
and really the specter of the Holocaust.
And he devotes his career
to trying to figure out this problem.
What makes people do awful things?
(rhythmic music)
- Milgram puts an ad in the local newspaper
looking for subjects, specifically men.
He offers subjects $4 a pop to come in
and participate in an experiment.
- Alright.
Sit right here.
- People answer the ad,
and they're paired with somebody else.
Each is assigned a role, teacher and learner.
- Could you open those and tell me
which of you is which please?
- Teacher.
- Learner.
- [Dan] With roles assigned,
the unconventional experiment begins.
- The learner has to memorize words, a pair of words.
And throughout the experiment,
the teacher will give the first word,
and the learner is supposed to reply with the second word.
- Cat, dog, high, low.
It's a very simple word association list.
- The learner is sat down in a chair
that looks a lot like an electric chair.
- The teacher is then brought into another room
alone with just Dr. Milgram
and shown an electrical apparatus.
- [Scientist] When you press one of the switches
all the way down, the learner gets a shock.
- [Dan] So just how far will someone go
to obey an authority figure?
- Attention, learner, your teacher
is about to begin the test.
Try and remember the word pairs.
Ready?
Begin.
- Blue girl.
- Teacher ask the learner a question.
(machine buzzing)
- [Teacher] Incorrect.
- Learner gets it wrong.
Milgram's in the room and says shock the person.
(machine buzzing)
- Well, now, you'll get a shock of 75 volts.
(machine buzzing)
(man grunts)
Soft air.
- With each successive wrong answer,
the voltage level is increased,
from 15 volts initially all the way up to 450 volts.
- [Dan] To put it in perspective,
450 volts is enough to power
two single family homes in North America.
- As the teacher is administering
increasingly severe shocks,
(zap) (Learner grunts)
he hears via speaker the learner in the next room
emitting screams.
(machine buzzing)
(Learner shrieking)
- The teachers are sweating it out.
They are feeling terrible.
Some of them dig their fingernails into their palms.
They're really, really upset.
- They are inflicting injury on another human being,
but Dr. Milgram is there, assuring them
that, you know, it's okay, this is part of the experiment.
This conflict is tremendous.
- [Learner] Let me out of here.
You have no right to keep me here.
Let me out.
- [Dan] But there's a twist.
- It's all fake.
It's all a setup.
What the teacher doesn't know
is that the learner is an actor hired by Dr. Milgram.
There are no electric shocks.
The learner is simply crying out in pain,
starting with like,
ow, that hurts,
but going all the way up to sobbing
and saying, I don't feel right,
something's wrong with my heart.
Please stop, you have to stop.
(button buzzing)
(learner shrieking)
- Milgram does the experiment up to 40 times.
Some of the teachers clearly hate it,
but some of them actually enjoy it.
- 150 volts.
(machine buzzing)
(learner grunts)
- Next one. - [Learner] (indistinct),
I refuse to answer.
- You're gonna keep getting a shock if you don't answer.
(machine buzzing)
(learner screams)
- Over half of the participants in the teacher role
make it up to the 450 volt level,
which is effectively a fatal shock.
- 450 volts.
(button buzzing)
- What Milgram captures
is that ordinary, everyday, law-abiding people
can be induced to acts of brutality
just because they're obeying authority.
- [Scientist] But why didn't you just stop?
- He wouldn't let me.
I wanted to stop.
I kept insisting to stop, but he says no.
- [Scientist] We'll have to discontinue the experiment.
- As the Cold War heats up in the 60s,
experiments get even stranger.
From poisonous umbrellas
to a plan to attack Fidel Castro's beard,
nothing is off limits, not even cats.
(cat meowing)
- Cats are notoriously difficult to train.
They just kind of wanna do their own thing,
but they're also very curious.
And so, in the 1960s, the CIA hatches a plan
to train cats to become spies.
(eerie music)
- The idea behind Project Acoustic Kitty
is that cats are pretty innocuous.
And they can roam around lots of places
without concerning anybody.
So if the cats can get themselves close enough
to private conversations,
they might be able to overhear important information.
- Now, the cat's not gonna just go into a CIA debrief
and say the subject said this.
The cat's not gonna do that.
So the cat is turned into a living listening device.
- [Dan] Fighting communism is the top priority
for US intelligence at the time,
so creating a spy cat that can take down the Iron Curtain
sounds reasonable.
- The CIA pumps $20 million into training
and preparing cats that can be these spies.
And as they do this, they're vetting.
They're looking for that perfect cat agent.
- The CIA ultimately determines
that one particular kitty cat
is ready to conduct its first operation.
(eerie music)
- In order to make this work,
the CIA has to figure out a way
to implant this listening device into the cat.
And what they end up having to do is do surgery.
They put the listening device in the ear,
and put a transmitter at the base of the animal's skull,
and then run the antenna down an incision on the cat's back
so that it's hidden by the fur.
Not really fun for the cat, I'm sure.
- [Dan] With the cat wired up and trained,
it's time for this secret agent's first assignment.
- The goal is for the cat to eavesdrop
on two men sitting on a park bench
outside of the Soviet embassy.
So the CIA agents drive up with the cat in their white van.
- The van pulls up across the street from the park
where the two men are sitting.
- It's time to deploy the acoustic kitty.
They get the cat ready.
They issue the cat the command.
It knows where to go.
They open the van.
The cat jumps out.
- And it immediately gets hit by a taxi.
(wheels screeching)
$20 million out the window.
With all of this research, they never think,
hey, you know what, we should pull over
on the same side of the street
that the cat has to get out.
- [Dan] And just what does the CIA after-action report
identify as the fatal flaw in an otherwise excellent plan?
- Quote, cats are not trainable
and they don't have the same deep-seated desire to please
a human master as a dog does.
- We spent $20 million to learn that cats don't care.
Great use of money.
- We spent $20 million to two heads are better than one.g
In 1954, a Soviet scientist and organ transplant pioneer
sets out to prove that, literally.
(eerie music)
- It is the height of the Cold War, and a Soviet surgeon
named Vladimir Demikhov begins to probe questions
of how far you can go with organ transplants.
- Vladimir Demikhov is
actually one of the pioneers
of transplant surgery.
He's transplanting hearts
and lungs between dogs.
And he's doing it as a good doctor,
doing really meaningful, good work.
(rhythmic music)
- [Dan] Vladimir Demikhov's next goal?
A full head transplant on a dog.
But since he's never done it before,
he needs to experiment a little first.
- Demikhov and his team essentially do an experiment
of creating a two-headed dog.
- He wants to be able to see
if he is able to take one head
and graft that onto another
and if he can keep that alive.
- He arranges to experiment with this
on two dogs, one smaller 9-year-old dog named Shavka
and one stray larger German Shepherd named Brodyaga.
- Vladimir detaches Shavka's head,
and he attaches Shavka's head
to Brodyaga's vertebrae.
- [Dan] Three and a half hours later,
the two-headed dog experiment is complete.
But does it actually work?
- It sounds awful.
She's just a head attached to this body,
but she eats, she drinks, she barks.
- [Dan] Vladimir's two-headed dog only lives for four days,
but that doesn't stop him from trying again,
and again.
- He does these exact kinds of experiments 23 more times
between 1954 and 1959.
And even though none of them are actually a success,
he firmly believes that he's proving to the world
that head transplants are possible.
- He is not seen as a hero for this.
In fact, it swings hard in the opposite direction.
He is seen as a charlatan,
and it basically ruins his career.
- While Vladimir's two-headed dog experiment
eventually gets shut down,
it inspires another surgeon in Cleveland, Ohio,
Dr. Robert White.
- When he looks at what's happening in the Soviet Union,
with them creating a two-headed dog,
he starts thinking, if the brain is still alive
inside of this broken body,
can the brain still live outside of the human body?
Could he keep a brain alive?
And, if so, for how long?
- [Dan] To find out, he obviously can't use humans,
so he turns to another species.
- What he does is removes the brain
of one rhesus monkey and puts it in a machine
where it's fed oxygenated blood
coming from the body of another one.
- So you have the naked bulb of brain
flushed with blood, pink.
He hooks it up to electrodes,
and those electrodes go peaking along,
and there're peaks and valleys showing you
that that brain, without any body attached at all,
is still thinking.
- [Dan] The reaction from the medical community
is a little disappointing.
- He takes this amazing experiment
and all that it has discovered to a conference,
and he shows them the graphs,
and none of his colleagues believe him.
- So he decides to transplant a full head.
So when you transplant a full head,
you can actually see the new head doing stuff.
So you don't have to question
whether or not there's activity occurring.
It's obvious to see.
- [Dan] On March 14th, 1970,
Dr. Robert White is finally ready to perform
the first ever head transplant.
- It's kind of gruesome.
He takes two monkeys, Monkey A and Monkey B,
and restrains them.
He attaches a tube from Monkey A to the brain of Monkey B,
then he severs the heads of both monkeys,
and attaches Monkey B's head onto the body of Monkey A.
- [Dan] About an hour later, it's time for Dr. White
to wake up his hybrid monkey and find out,
has he accomplished the unbelievable?
- Once he has stimulated this brain
with electrical activity, the eyes do, in fact, open up.
And it appears that there is actually consciousness
and awareness in the monkey's brain.
- Dr. White approaches the monkey
and it immediately tries to hiss and bite him.
So he recognizes Dr. White.
This monkey's head, which is essentially just a head
plumbed into another monkey's body,
is alive and still with us.
- Dr. White is thrilled.
He starts to perform a series of experiments.
He moves a pen, and the monkey is able to follow it.
(finger snap)
He makes sounds, and the monkey reacts to it.
(finger snap)
This is it.
He did it.
He successfully transplanted the head of one creature
onto the body of another.
- Because the experiment requires severing
the spinal cord,
the monkey actually can't move,
and it can't feel anything below the neck.
But what it can do is see, smell, hear, and taste.
- [Dan] An immune response causes the monkey
to die nine days later.
But there's still more for Dr. White to learn.
- He does this procedure and others like it 300 times,
severed monkey's heads, trying to keep a monkey head alive,
because he wants to do this on human beings.
And as horrible as that sounds to us,
his reasons are very much tied
to prolonging the life of victims of horrible diseases.
- It's different from the two-headed dog
because in this case, he really is trying to do
a medical service.
- What's stranger than performing testicle transplants
or creating two-headed dogs?
Perhaps it's insisting that you be experimented on
after you're dead.
That's just
what famed English philosopher Jeremy Bentham does in 1832.
(eerie music)
- The year before his death,
Jeremy writes a pamphlet,
"Auto-Icon, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living."
- An auto-icon is essentially
a taxidermied version of yourself,
where you are dressed in your favorite clothes
and you can still participate
in the daily lives
of those you've left behind.
- [Dan] The point of Jeremy's auto-icon experiment?
To see if it's possible to remain relevant
after you're gone.
- So he leaves very specific details in his will
as to how to treat his body,
how to turn him into an auto-icon.
First step is to send his body
to the anatomy school at the
University College London
and allow it to be dissected.
(eerie music)
- After the dissection, the body is taxidermied,
and dressed in his suit, and seated upright in a glass case.
When they are taxidermying the head,
something goes terribly wrong.
(eerie music)
- It comes out all weird and grotesque.
It's half melted, and most of the hair is gone,
and it doesn't look like Jeremy at all.
It looks like a strange creature.
- So the head is actually removed
and replaced with a wax one.
And so, it's a wax face that still actually looks like him
that's looking out on campus.
- [Dan] So what happens to his real head?
- They realized that they can't toss it
because that goes against Bentham's will.
So what do they do?
They put that hideous looking head
between the philosopher's feet.
- [Dan] In the end, is Jeremy's experiment a success?
Well, he has been sitting in the same spot
for almost 200 years.
- His body is still on display to this day at UCL.
He's seen by people coming and going across campus.
In many ways, him being on display like this
has helped keep him as even more central figure
than he otherwise would have been anyhow.
- Clearly, Jeremy is as present in death as he was in life.
Up next, a different kind of experiment
performed by a doctor known as the Lobotomy King.
(melancholy music)
- The US experiences a mental health crisis
during the 1930s and '40s.
Lobotomy is, at the time,
considered a very humane procedure
and a very legitimate treatment of severe mental illness.
(rhythmic music)
- The procedure consists of drilling two holes in the skull
(drilling)
and then inserting implements into those holes
to cut off the frontal lobe of the brain
to disconnect a person from reality, to calm them down.
- [Dan] And there's one man who has just performed
the most famous lobotomy of all time.
- In 1941, Rosemary Kennedy, John Kennedy's oldest sister,
has been battling for years
a whole host of mental health issues.
Joseph Kennedy reaches out to Walter Freeman,
a doctor who had been experimenting with lobotomies.
And Joseph Kennedy submits Rosemary to a lobotomy.
- Dr. Freeman's lobotomy doesn't go exactly as planned,
and she is permanently disabled for the rest of her life.
But despite that, the lobotomy is considered a miracle
of modern science and medicine.
- [Dan] Suddenly, Dr. Freeman finds himself in high demand.
But lobotomies are time consuming.
- Walter Freeman keeps thinking
there's gotta be a way to make this more expedient.
And one day, while he's at home,
he opens up a drawer in the kitchen
and he sees something kind of interesting.
It's an ice pick.
And he thinks, what if we were able to do
a quickie lobotomy?
(apprehensive music)
- He is basically gonna put an ice pick
in the back of the eye socket
and swish it around in the front of the brain,
so basically an ice pick to the brain.
- [Dan] Freeman calls it the transorbital lobotomy.
Because it takes just 10 minutes to perform,
he decides to hop in his van and take this show on the road.
- Freeman becomes a kind of surgical troubadour
and travels around to asylums across the country.
- [Dan] First, there was the Planters NUTmobile,
then the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, and now...
- The vehicle that he uses to drive around
is dubbed by onlookers as the Lobotomobile.
- This is the era of Route 66
and Detroit manufacturing at its peak.
We have fast food, we have drive-in restaurants,
and now we have mobile fast lobotomies.
- Freeman drives his Lobotomobile
across the United States and Canada,
doing as many as 25 lobotomies in a day, 25.
- [Dan] But by 1967, after 21 years,
Dr. Freeman's road trip hits some speed bumps.
- Freeman performs about 4,000 of these lobotomies.
It's partly performance.
It's a little snake oil salesman.
And unfortunately, about a hundred of his patients
die from the treatment.
- He finds himself getting banned
from hospital after hospital after hospital.
And he ends his career as a pariah of the medical community.
- Luckily, the Lobotomobile hits a dead end,
and Walter Freeman's strange road trip is over.
- Do you believe that you have a soul?
And if so, can you scientifically prove it?
In the beginning of the 20th century,
one ambitious physician intends to find out.
(gentle music)
- In 1901, Dr. Duncan MacDougall,
a Massachusetts physician,
decides to test the premise of the soul.
He said, if there's a human soul,
it has to have some kind of physical presence.
It has to have a weight.
- He's so convinced of this that he decides
to conduct some experiments.
He wants to weigh human bodies
just at the moment of death
so that he can see if there's a perceptible shift
in their body weight.
- He proceeds to select patients
from among nursing homes or old folks' homes.
- MacDougall gets six volunteers,
people who are dying from tuberculosis and diabetes,
to be his test subjects.
- [Dan] When the test subject seems close to death,
their bed is placed onto a precisely calibrated scale
built for livestock.
- Dr. MacDougall is at the ready with his stethoscope
and other means of measuring vital bodily functions.
And he takes a measurement
immediately before and after death.
- The results are inconclusive.
Two of the volunteers show no difference in weight
before and after death.
Two others, the results have to be discarded
because of technical difficulties.
- He has one, however,
that drops 21.3 grams
at the moment of death.
He just sets aside all of the data
that doesn't fit his hypothesis
and he latches onto this one death
that does fit his hypothesis.
And this gives him the idea that the soul,
the human soul, weighs 21 grams.
- The experiment is widely regarded as flawed
because of the small sample size,
because of the unscientific results.
- [Dan] Dr. MacDougall is
determined to prove his theory,
but there's a problem.
The nursing home where
he's experimenting
is no longer on board
with his shenanigans.
- So he decides to turn to dogs.
And he weighs 15 dogs at the moment of death.
- Now, here, he's not finding any sort of drop in weight.
And so, this leads him to conclude
that dogs do not have souls.
And of course we all know that's ridiculous
'cause we've seen the movie "All Dogs Go to Heaven."
- Scientifically, the whole experiment fails,
but that doesn't mean that people didn't start to believe
that, yes, the human soul weighs 21 grams.
- [Dan] What if I told you that you don't need to die
to lose 21 grams?
Just try a popular experiment from the 19th century.
- In the Victorian period,
you have a strange fad
for looking a bit like
a tuberculosis patient,
pale, and fragile, and very, very thin.
- We have all sorts of different ideas
to try and achieve that look, whether it's wearing a corset,
whether it's actually taking poison.
- [Dan] However, there's an even stranger method
used to achieve that tuberculosis look.
And it involves a little help from a friend.
- You just swallow a little pill
that has a tapeworm egg inside of it.
And if all goes right, that tapeworm egg will hatch
and start to grow inside of your intestines
and consume a portion of everything you eat.
- You're not just eating for one, you're eating for two.
- You have no restrictions.
You don't have to watch your calories.
You don't have to avoid any particular type of foods.
You can eat as much,
eat what you want,
and the tapeworm is going
to do all the work for you.
- [Dan] But once you hit your goal weight,
there's a problem.
How do you now get that pesky parasite out of you?
- They recommend patients not eat for a few days
so that the tapeworm is very hungry.
Then they take food and put it in a capsule
that they swallow, with the idea that the capsule
will travel all the way through your system
and out the other side,
and the tapeworm, so hungry,
will follow it right out of your body.
- Another more homespun way to do this
is a belief that tapeworms really like milk.
- So the woman would place a glass of milk
on either side of her body where it opens up,
at those orifices,
and wait for the worm to be attracted,
one way or the other, to then wiggle its way up or down
and out of the body.
- [Dan] Experimenting with tapeworms
is not just a diet fad of Victorian times.
It makes a comeback in the 21st century.
- In 2013, a woman in Iowa purchases
a tapeworm egg off the internet and swallowed it,
but she immediately regrets it.
And she goes to her doctor,
who prescribes antiparasitics to get rid of it.
- At least now there's modern methods
for properly deworming somebody
who has tried to use the tapeworm remedy
that doesn't involve a glass of milk under your bum.
- It's a hot summer day in 1963
at a bull ring outside of Cordoba, Spain.
A battle is about to occur between a giant beast
and Spain's top neurologist.
(eerie music)
(suspenseful music)
- [Commentator] A bull ring in his native Spain
provides the setting
for Delgado's most spectacular demonstration.
- He's this little guy, he's wearing a sweater and a tie,
and he comes out with a traditional cape,
but also holding a radio transmitter.
- [Dan] Certainly, this tiny scientist
is no match for the bull.
Luckily for Dr. Jose Delgado, he has a secret weapon,
mind control.
- The scene is set up to be a bloodbath.
The bull begins to charge at Dr. Delgado.
(suspenseful music)
And he presses a button
on a little transmitter he's holding,
and the bull immediately stops in its tracks,
shakes its head in confusion, and then calmly walks away.
- [Dan] We've all heard of a remote-controlled car,
but a remote-controlled bull?
- He has previously implanted electrodes
in this particular bull's head, in its caudate nucleus,
that are intended to cut the bull's natural aggression.
- [Dan] However, the area of the brain
that Delgado is targeting has another function.
- The reality here is that the caudate nucleus
is partially responsible for motor control.
And so, what Dr. Delgado is actually doing
is causing the bull to freeze in place.
- When Delgado presses the button,
a signal short circuits that area in the bull's brain,
just momentarily, but just enough to stop the charge.
(bull snorting)
- That freeze button might sound like a dream
to some married people.
But for one couple, it's a reality.
(eerie music)
- Kevin Warwick is a professor of cybernetics
at Redding University in England.
And in 1998, he decides to go from lecturing about a subject
to being part of it.
- Dr. Warwick transplants
a hundred electrodes
into his left forearm.
The electrodes are connected to a smart building,
and so his arm can communicate via radio signals
to the technology in the building.
- So when he enters the building,
the doors will open, the lights turn on,
his computer goes to his favorite website.
- [Dan] Remarkable, sure, but in 2002,
Dr. Warwick kicks it up a notch.
- Professor Warwick has a more advanced micro-electrode
surgically implanted into his body,
and this now allows him
to directly communicate with his computer
just by thinking about it.
- So try and think of something.
Think of moving your hand.
That is your brain working.
- The connection is so good
between the human mind and technology
that he is able to send commands
to open and close a robotic hand in New York.
So the power of his mind is jumping the Atlantic
and moving a piece of cybernetic technology.
- This is the beginning.
but he wants this terminal
not to be hooked up to some machine
but to be connected to another human being,
- [Dan] Not just any human being.
Dr. Warwick, or Captain Cyborg, as he's dubbed by his peers,
has the perfect person in mind.
- Captain Cyborg does something that most married men
are reluctant to do.
He has a processor inserted into his wife Irena.
- He and his wife are literally in communication
at the level that you only ever get with your own body.
- The communication that happens is when his wife
thinks about opening or closing her hand,
which then sends a signal back into Warwick's arm,
causing his hand to open and close.
- His wife has control over his body.
I don't like giving anyone that I'm dating
control of the remote control.
- [Dan] Kevin Warwick's experiments
give us a glimpse into a future where cyborg technology,
as strange as it may seem, is part of our everyday lives.
- We are moving toward a cyborg future for humanity,
where we have chips implanted in our bodies
and we communicate with the world around us.
Imagine if you can actually just think
and turn on the lights, run your bath, make your coffee.
We have the old commercial,
help me, I've fallen
and can't get up.
Imagine if you could just think that
and rescuers come for you.
The future of humanity is unlimited
'cause humans are so smart and amazing.
(rhythmic music)
- We've seen experiments that are weird and disturbing,
some that can control minds, some that even do good.
But no matter what their original intent,
these experiments all share one thing in common.
They're truly unbelievable.