“That was when she came to our attention,” Dupont said. “We’re always on the lookout for people who might be suitable for our research.”
BY NOW WE WERE approaching the main highway and a full moon made everything almost as clear as in daylight. This seemed the perfect moment to ask Dupont outright what exactly the purpose of Institute 77 was and what his function was within it. So I did.
He didn’t begin answering till we were on the main highway.
“Look, Harry, what’s going on at the institute is all very hushhush. We sign nondisclosure agreements when we agree to work there. But you’re not a scientist and we’re old friends, so I trust you to keep to yourself what I tell you. Okay?” he said.
I was gratified by his faith in me.
“It’s not a simple matter to explain, but I’ll do the best I can,” he said. “The institute is the base for a collaboration between the government and experts in the fields of medicine and anthropology. I’m in charge of the surgical side of an experimental procedure that deals with those areas of the brain that distinguish human beings from the other primates. Our patients — we prefer to call them volunteers — are individuals who’ve suffered from severe kinds of recurrent psychological problems that have ruined their lives. We ask them if they’re willing to act as subjects for a certain type of brain research we do. They all have to be clear-headed enough to understand what our program is about, and to participate of their own free will. Griffin’s a good example.” He glanced at me. “Following me so far?”
More or less.
Dupont now launched into a little lecture on the makeup of the primate brain and the various components of its two hemispheres. I tried to follow him as best I could, but the bevy of technical terms — ventromedial cortex, hippocampus, cerebellum, frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes, amygdala— soon overwhelmed me.
Eventually, Dupont put the matter more simply. Research had demonstrated that the brains of all primates contained the elements he’d mentioned. But in the homo sapiens brain alone, some subtle variant in the linking mechanism between the parts had led to the emergence of reason and morality, which in turn produced what we might call conscience.
This was the focus of the institute’s investigations. By careful, progressive pruning of the connective tissues in volunteers’ brains, experimenters hoped they might eventually understand precisely how the link functioned.
At first, non-surgical methods were used. The volunteers were plied with various drugs aimed specifically at modifying the linking tissues. But the drugs were too diffuse and numbed the surrounding areas of the brain, too. When their effects wore off, the patients had no recollection of whatever altered perceptions of the world the drugs might have induced.
A more precise, if irreversible, route was indicated — surgery. A research program was launched to find a procedure for targeting little parts of the brain for destruction while leaving its other functions intact. Dupont’s predecessors had tried the approved methods of the day — inserting electrodes or ice picks through the eye sockets into the designated target areas of the brain and gently stirring them around. Predictably, such a chopping method was still too random. Some of the volunteers died and others lost their sight, or sense of taste, or motor function, or control of the bowels.
Dupont shook his head. All in all, the results had been very disappointing for the experimenters.
I was appalled to hear him say this. Surely the disappointment of the experimenters was trivial compared to the horrors inflicted on the volunteers. But I kept my opinion to myself.
THE BIG BREAKTHROUGH occurred at the very time Dupont became head of the surgical team at Institute 77. The team began using the latest diamond-bladed skull saw to make an opening in the forehead, through which the most up-to-date lobotomizing instruments could be inserted robotically. These could be directed to slice out minuscule segments of the brain — just a cell or two, here and there. The method was found to be almost one hundred percent effective. Successful operations had now been performed on several volunteers.
“Preliminary analyses of the outcomes are still being done,” Dupont said. “These things take time, but everything looks very promising.”
I wondered exactly what “outcomes” he was looking for. He chose his words carefully.
“First of all, you have to understand this, Harry,” he said. “The purpose behind our work at Institute 77 diverges quite radically from traditional neurosurgery. The normal aim of brain procedures is to turn badly impaired patients back into mentally sound human beings, if possible.”
He hesitated again, making me even more curious. I really wanted to understand this research that Dupont was so involved in.
“In fact, our goal is the exact opposite of the traditional one,” he said. “Our volunteers are indeed significantly impaired when we accept them into the program. But what we try to do here is to transform them into mentally sound pre-human beings.” He paused to let that sink in. “We believe that if we succeed in eliminating from their brains the dominance of such traits as morality and reason — the very traits that signal mental health in human beings — they stand a good chance of becoming perfectly normal representatives of the primate class before conscience developed in it — in other words, the way our species used to be. Take the case of Griffin, for example. When she came to us she suffered from a debilitating guilt complex. After the procedure, she was ‘cured,’ in the traditional sense, for she no longer had a conscience to make her feel guilty — she was essentially what we’d call a sociopath. But there was much more to it than that.”
He saw how startled I was and became more passionate.
“Imagine what it must be like, Harry,” he said. “A modern human being, at last able to experience the world through the eyes of a not-yet-human primate! That’s the gift we’ve given Griffin and the other volunteers. Just think of the gifts they’ll be able to give us in return, for they still have language and will be able to articulate their primeval perceptions and sensations. What extraordinary contributions individuals like Griffin will be able to make to our understanding of exactly how our ancestors thought and behaved. Anthropology, above all, will be revolutionized.
“Already, even in the early stages of the experiment, we’ve made some strange discoveries. For example, we’re able to use only female volunteers for our procedure. It isn’t that we’ve had any scarcity of male volunteers. On the contrary — we’ve had hundreds of them. But X-rays of the male brain indicate that those parts of the brain we need to excise are already of negligible size. It’s a rather puzzling finding, but valuable, too. I’m sure it’ll become an important research topic in the future.”
While I was thinking about the implications of that, Dupont went on to talk about other fascinating and challenging findings. The fact that Griffin used words at all seemed to contradict the long-established view that language and conscience were interdependent. Though I must have noticed she now spoke with a strange accent — as did each of the other volunteers so far who’d undergone the procedure. They’d all been native speakers of English, but no longer seemed to use it quite as spontaneously. They spoke with deliberation, as if trying to remember the vocabulary of a foreign language.
This trait was so noteworthy that Dupont’s team planned, in the near future, to perform the procedure on a volunteer whose native language was French. A linguistic specialist from the Sorbonne would be on hand to study the after-effects, particularly whether the volunteer’s French accent would now sound like a foreigner’s.