José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado

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José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado (born August 8, 1915 in Ronda , Spain , † September 15, 2011 in San Diego , California ) was a Spanish physiologist and professor at Yale University . He was known for experimenting with electrical stimulation of the brain (similar to how Wilder Penfield and Walter Rudolf Hess had previously influenced him) and a pioneer of electronic brain implants.

Life

Delgado received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Madrid and then served as a doctor on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. He was imprisoned in a camp for five months after the war and lost his medical doctorate, which he had to acquire again. He also received a Ph.D. at the Cajal Institute in Madrid. There he turned to the neurosciences (with the Spanish Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramón y Cajal as a model), after he originally wanted to become an ophthalmologist like his father. In 1946 he went on a scholarship to Yale University, where he worked with John Farquhar Fulton on stimulating the brain with electrodes. He became a professor at Yale University before returning to Madrid in 1974 to help set up the medical faculty of the newly formed Autonomous University of Madrid . Another reason to go back to Spain was increasing hostility to his research and future visions, both in public and in professional circles in the USA. When he retired, he moved to San Diego, California.

plant

Delgado first experimented with electrodes in the brains of cats and monkeys and later on patients, later using lightweight mobile radio circuits for stimulation (and a recording device for EEG) that he called a stimoceiver. In doing so, he discovered that he could not only generate sensory impressions, but also trigger emotions in the patient by stimulating regions, for example in the amygdala and hippocampus (and in the part of the limbic system called septum pellucidum, strong euphoria) and physical reactions when the motor cortex was stimulated. The Swiss Walter Rudolf Hess (Nobel Prize 1949) had already carried out corresponding experiments to trigger emotions, and Erich von Holst in chickens and the experiments by Hess and Penfield stimulated Delgado, who not only stimulated the cerebral cortex, but much deeper areas of the brain. He carried out Delgado's experiments on patients in a psychiatric clinic in Rhode Island, where he implanted electrodes mainly in patients with schizophrenia or epilepsy. He believed that he could make a contribution to the treatment of epilepsy and other mental illnesses.

He was technologically innovative and also invented implants to inject drugs into the brain and a forerunner of the pacemaker. His devices could also recognize and respond to certain patterns of signals in the brain.

In a spectacular experiment in a bullring, he stopped a bull that was attacking him a few meters in front of him by stimulating the caudate nucleus with his Stimoceiver.

In another experiment, he conditioned a chimpanzee: if his device detected a certain signal from the amygdala, which he called a spindle , his stimulator sent a negative stimulus to the cerebral cortex, which led to dulled behavior. Delgado saw this as an opportunity to lessen panic attacks in patients. Delgado also conducted experiments in which the monkeys themselves could use the stimoceiver to sedate aggressive, high-ranking members of the Horde.

His experiments received a lot of attention: in 1963 he was on the cover of The New York Times . In a controversial book Physical Control of the Mind , he advocated starting to civilize people instead of adapting the environment to people , whereby he saw this primarily as a measure for the well-being of the respective person who, for example, controlled aggression themselves could. Others saw it as a terrifying Orwellian vision of the future - even if Delgado met this explicitly in his book by pointing out the limits of electrical stimulation. For this he was heavily criticized by psychologists like Carl Rogers , who saw such a vision as a danger similar to the atomic bomb. In the 1970s, the zeitgeist had changed and such surgical interventions were viewed with skepticism; instead, drug treatment prevailed. In addition, there were controversial theses from other scientists who were experimenting with electrical stimulation of the brain: Frank Ervin and Vernon Mark from Harvard Medical School proposed in their book Violence and the Brain in 1970 , for example, to appease and control the African-American participants in the racial riots at the time and the psychiatrist Robert Heath of Tulane University in New Orleans carried out experiments to "treat" homosexuality, which was then regarded as a disease. In 1972 there was a congressional hearing in which psychiatrists such as Peter Breggin spoke out vehemently against such surgical interventions for the treatment of mental illnesses (including the lobotomies that were common at the time ). He lumped Delgado with Ervin, Mark and Heath and called Delgado a great apologist of technological totalitarianism . In 1973, the neurophysiologist Elliot Valenstein (University of Michigan) published a detailed criticism of the alleged successes of electrical stimulation with implanted electrodes in his book Brain Control .

He has published over 500 articles and six books. He finished his research on electrical stimulation of the brain in the early 1990s. In an interview with science journalist John Horgan in 2005, however, he said that the reason his role as a pioneer of electronic brain implants was almost forgotten was not because his research was highly controversial in the 1970s, but simply because the current research has no historical interest.

Honors

In 1952 he received the Premio Ramón y Cajal, in 1974 the gold medal of the Society of Biological Psychiatry and in 1975 the Rodríguez Pascual Prize. In 1963 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1996 he became Hijo Predilecto de la Provincia de Málaga . A school in his hometown of Ronda is named after him.

Fonts

Books:

  • Physical control of the mind: towards a psychocivilized society, Harper and Row 1969, excerpt, Human Pleasure Evoked by ESB
    • Spanish edition: Planificación cerebral del hombre futuro, Madrid: Publicaciones de la Fundación Juan March 1973
  • Emotions, Iowa: WC Brown 1966
  • L'émotivité, Ed. HRW, 1975
  • Evolution of physical control of the brain, James Arthur Lecture, American Museum of Natural History, 1965
  • La Felicidad, Barcelona: Temas de Hoy, 1989
  • Mi cerebro y yo: cómo descubrir y utilizar los secretos de la mente, Madrid: Temas de Hoy 1994

Some essays:

  • Jose M. Delgado et al. a .: Intracerebral Radio Stimulation and recording in Completely Free Patients , Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Volume 147, 1968, pp. 329-340.
  • J. Delgado, Hannibal Hamlin: Surface and depth electrography of the frontal lobes in conscious patients , Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology Volume 8, 1956, pp. 371-384
  • J. Delgado: Free Behavior and Brain Stimulation . In: International review of neurobiology. Volume 6, 1964, pp. 349-449, PMID 14282364 (review).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wut auf Kommando, Der Spiegel, No. 29, 1965, July 14, 1965
  2. ↑ In the book he also describes his experiments with patients in detail.
  3. ↑ After Delgado he had nothing to do with their research, they were only in brief correspondence. The novelist Michael Crichton , a former student of Ervan, processed the research at the time in his book The Terminal Man
  4. ↑ Delgado claimed in an interview with Horgan (Scientific American October 2005) in 2005 that he had already made such reservations in his publications
  5. ^ Horgan, The forgotten era of brain, Scientific American, October 2005
  6. ↑ Honoring the Province of Málaga 1996, Spanish ( memento of November 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), with biography
  7. ↑ Das Glück-sein , the book saw 14 editions in Spain
personal data
SURNAME Rodríguez Delgado, José Manuel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish neuroscientist and physiologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 8, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Ronda
DATE OF DEATH September 15, 2011
Place of death San Diego