© 2006/2007
J.S. Ketchum
J.S. Ketchum
Documenting a Lost Decade of Clinical Research
Review by Arnold Mandell, MD
Reviewed by Arnold J. Mandell, MD, currently Vice President and Director of Research in Mathematical and Theoretical Neuroscience and Protein Biophysics and Research Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Emory University, Atlanta, GA; He was previously Chief and Professor Emeritus at the University of California in San Diego, CA. La Jolla, CA and has received numerous prestigious awards, including a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in Theoretical Neuroscience (1984-1989). His work has involved enzyme regulation, neurochemistry, neurophysiology, neuropharmacology, and protein structure and function.
I saw this unique volume as a completely credible revelation of the intriguing interface between university interest in the chemical causes of the major psychiatric disorders and the “look and see” school of military psychochemical warfare research. Fearing a perceived threat of hidden Russian experiments, America’s defense planners first funded research into such “far out” areas as remote viewing, telekinesis, paranormal phenomena and only later initiated the more systematic study of the potential psychochemical incapacitants described in the book. Ketchum's narrative does not focus on the comedy of errors by the CIA, but rather gives a detailed account of serious collaboration between a heroic group of well-trained scientists and an equally heroic cohort of intelligent and well-informed enlisted volunteers. Together they explored the human phenomenology of consciousness-distorting agents, including many anticholinergic drugs such as BZ, as well as psychedelic agents such as LSD and several cannabinoid compounds related to marijuana. Dozens of drugs and almost 7000 subjects were included in this quest.
The author views the clinical research happenings from an uncynical, upbeat perspective, completely non-defensive, even in his self revelations. His benign point of view invites the reader to be a non-judgmental student. We no longer think of the subjects of these studies to be exploited guinea pigs but rather healthy, informed, eagerly participating volunteers -- “astronauts of inner space.” This is a much needed rewrite of often repeated but inaccurately documented beliefs about the work of the Army Chemical Corps at Maryland’s Edgewood Arsenal. It credibly sets the record straight about the support of careful, serious and humane research in reversible drug-induced human incapacity. Explaining the manner in which it was conducted, Ketchum makes us see the benign and constructive aspects of human socio-psychological chemical research.
The potential power for good of Ketchum’s brand of psychochemical warfare is suggested by the author’s imaginary battlefield scenario, in which a powerful opioid-anesthetic cloud might be used to incapacitate and disarm an enemy, followed by quickly reawakening those affected by injecting naloxone, the standard emergency room antidote for morphine overdosage. He relates this to the actual use by the Russians of an opiate cloud to disarm the Chechen terrorists and rescue of the great majority of civilians trapped in a Moscow theater in 2002. Without such intervention, he points out, the likelihood was great that all would have died in a suicidal explosion of the entire building.
The author’s style is amusingly naive in its accounts of human foibles in the clinical research unit, the pretensions of some military authority figures, the envy and competition among professional siblings and the gradual progression of the writer to the role of Chief of his clinical unit.
For me, one of the most remarkable things about the book is the array of internationally important neuroscientists that appear in a natural way along the course of this very readable autobiographical history. We should recall that neuroscience came into its own as an important academic specialty only in the post WWII 1960s, the period covered by Ketchum’s account of the Army’s psychochemical program. We wander, for example into the presence of David Rioch and Bob Galambos, key members of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research -- a singular, post-war incubator of brain sciences. At Edgewood Arsenal we next encounter Dr. Van M. Sim in his underwear, serving as chief of the clinical unit and explorer of the effects on himself of experimental brain drugs, ranging from the deadly nerve gas sarin to relatively safe agents such as BZ and LSD. In one incident, Ketchum amusingly describes finding Sim, wandering on the test ward in the middle of the night in his underwear, as he tries to ascertain whether LSD can be absorbed percutaneously from beneath a watch glass taped to his wrist!
Later, we observe the author at Stanford, studying under Karl Pribram, the charismatic neurosurgeon who saw the integration of brain function as a form of holography. Still later he works and teaches with Sidney Cohen, major researcher at the National Institutes on Drug Abuse and later renowned professor at UCLA. Other familiar personalities include David Smith, founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic (first of its kind and later imitated by thousands of others across America); Tim Leary and his doings (and mis-doings); Milton Greenblatt, the psychiatry guru from Harvard for whom Ketchum worked at UCLA -- and many, many others.
The book is actually a wonderful picture of the neurochemical-psychochemical birth pangs and its obstetrical practitioners in the 1960s and beyond. Insofar as this was a time when researchers first revealed in detail what humans can know and see through “psychoactive chemistry,” the author’s narrative can be analogized to a handbook on the revolution of modern art. Ketchum may be one of the first to write insightfully about the dynamics of this historic psychopharmacological era.
A combination of rapidly disappearing documents and the aging and death of the participants also makes Ketchum’s book important as a unique reminder of an exciting scientific era and a portrait of the people who lived through it. I feel fortunate indeed to have it in my library.
I saw this unique volume as a completely credible revelation of the intriguing interface between university interest in the chemical causes of the major psychiatric disorders and the “look and see” school of military psychochemical warfare research. Fearing a perceived threat of hidden Russian experiments, America’s defense planners first funded research into such “far out” areas as remote viewing, telekinesis, paranormal phenomena and only later initiated the more systematic study of the potential psychochemical incapacitants described in the book. Ketchum's narrative does not focus on the comedy of errors by the CIA, but rather gives a detailed account of serious collaboration between a heroic group of well-trained scientists and an equally heroic cohort of intelligent and well-informed enlisted volunteers. Together they explored the human phenomenology of consciousness-distorting agents, including many anticholinergic drugs such as BZ, as well as psychedelic agents such as LSD and several cannabinoid compounds related to marijuana. Dozens of drugs and almost 7000 subjects were included in this quest.
The author views the clinical research happenings from an uncynical, upbeat perspective, completely non-defensive, even in his self revelations. His benign point of view invites the reader to be a non-judgmental student. We no longer think of the subjects of these studies to be exploited guinea pigs but rather healthy, informed, eagerly participating volunteers -- “astronauts of inner space.” This is a much needed rewrite of often repeated but inaccurately documented beliefs about the work of the Army Chemical Corps at Maryland’s Edgewood Arsenal. It credibly sets the record straight about the support of careful, serious and humane research in reversible drug-induced human incapacity. Explaining the manner in which it was conducted, Ketchum makes us see the benign and constructive aspects of human socio-psychological chemical research.
The potential power for good of Ketchum’s brand of psychochemical warfare is suggested by the author’s imaginary battlefield scenario, in which a powerful opioid-anesthetic cloud might be used to incapacitate and disarm an enemy, followed by quickly reawakening those affected by injecting naloxone, the standard emergency room antidote for morphine overdosage. He relates this to the actual use by the Russians of an opiate cloud to disarm the Chechen terrorists and rescue of the great majority of civilians trapped in a Moscow theater in 2002. Without such intervention, he points out, the likelihood was great that all would have died in a suicidal explosion of the entire building.
The author’s style is amusingly naive in its accounts of human foibles in the clinical research unit, the pretensions of some military authority figures, the envy and competition among professional siblings and the gradual progression of the writer to the role of Chief of his clinical unit.
For me, one of the most remarkable things about the book is the array of internationally important neuroscientists that appear in a natural way along the course of this very readable autobiographical history. We should recall that neuroscience came into its own as an important academic specialty only in the post WWII 1960s, the period covered by Ketchum’s account of the Army’s psychochemical program. We wander, for example into the presence of David Rioch and Bob Galambos, key members of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research -- a singular, post-war incubator of brain sciences. At Edgewood Arsenal we next encounter Dr. Van M. Sim in his underwear, serving as chief of the clinical unit and explorer of the effects on himself of experimental brain drugs, ranging from the deadly nerve gas sarin to relatively safe agents such as BZ and LSD. In one incident, Ketchum amusingly describes finding Sim, wandering on the test ward in the middle of the night in his underwear, as he tries to ascertain whether LSD can be absorbed percutaneously from beneath a watch glass taped to his wrist!
Later, we observe the author at Stanford, studying under Karl Pribram, the charismatic neurosurgeon who saw the integration of brain function as a form of holography. Still later he works and teaches with Sidney Cohen, major researcher at the National Institutes on Drug Abuse and later renowned professor at UCLA. Other familiar personalities include David Smith, founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic (first of its kind and later imitated by thousands of others across America); Tim Leary and his doings (and mis-doings); Milton Greenblatt, the psychiatry guru from Harvard for whom Ketchum worked at UCLA -- and many, many others.
The book is actually a wonderful picture of the neurochemical-psychochemical birth pangs and its obstetrical practitioners in the 1960s and beyond. Insofar as this was a time when researchers first revealed in detail what humans can know and see through “psychoactive chemistry,” the author’s narrative can be analogized to a handbook on the revolution of modern art. Ketchum may be one of the first to write insightfully about the dynamics of this historic psychopharmacological era.
A combination of rapidly disappearing documents and the aging and death of the participants also makes Ketchum’s book important as a unique reminder of an exciting scientific era and a portrait of the people who lived through it. I feel fortunate indeed to have it in my library.