While Margaret Howe was sealing the upstairs rooms at Dolphin Point in the spring of 1965, John Lilly was running a second experiment on the same animals, and talking about it in public. This piece sets out what he said and when, from his own transcript, and how the two experiments ended together.

The talk

In May 1965 the second international conference on the use of LSD in psychotherapy and alcoholism met, and Lilly, listed as Director of the Communication Research Institute, Miami, gave a short paper and took questions. The proceedings, edited by Harold A. Abramson, were published in 1967. The paper begins: “We are exploring the dolphins with LSD 25 in several areas.”

The first area was physiological. Lilly’s hypothesis was that anything that changed the nervous system as radically as LSD might stop a dolphin breathing, as barbiturates did at ten milligrams per kilogram, and he had a respirator ready. The opposite happened. In the first animal, with “100 mcg dose in a 400-pound animal,” the breathing rate rose by about half at first and fourfold at the peak, and the heart rate by a fifth. He had reported the acceleration to a colleague, Dr. Cohen, before the controls were run. The animal had been out of the water and in pain from pressure lesions, which he found out later.

The second area was vocal, and here he had a number. Recording the animal’s sounds, he found that under LSD it “regularized his vocal output at a steady 10 to 30 percent duty cycle,” while controls swung between zero and 70 per cent. The duty cycle, “the fraction of the time we spend talking or vocalizing per minute,” became his measure. A stimulus raised it for about five minutes under the drug and for about fifteen seconds without. In a large tank with room to swim the index fell toward zero and stayed there; a dose of 300 micrograms gave a longer effect “at a very low level near zero.” If a person entered the tank the index rose and stayed up; if a second dolphin was added, the index stood “right around 70 percent for the full three hours,” and the other animal answered. With a placebo, about 10 per cent. The range of the variable, he said, was about four log units, and the running averages were best done by computer.

The third area was the one the room wanted to hear. A female dolphin, received two and a half years before, had been shot three times through the tail with a spear gun before she came; the Institute had known her before the injury. Afterwards she would not come near a human being, stayed on the far side of the pool and shot away if approached, and had done so for two years. She was given 100 micrograms as a control. Forty minutes after the injection “the dolphin came over to me. She had not approached me before,” and stayed with one eye out of the water looking at him for ten minutes, following him round the edge of the tank. “She will now come within five feet of me instead of staying twenty feet away.” Frank Fremont-Smith asked whether she had had only one treatment. One. Lilly did not name her. The clinical note he later printed on Pamela says she had been “badly traumatized” before she joined the laboratory, had been “through two traumatic episodes,” and was “distant” and “remote”; the resemblance is close, and the record does not close it.

It was in this talk that Lilly described the St Thomas work to a medical audience for the first time, in the language of care rather than of language. “We have several dedicated women at our laboratory who give ‘tender loving care’ to the dolphins under all sorts of conditions. I have rather an ideal ‘mother’ over at St. Thomas who is quite willing to live with them and to give them very close attention.” Then the details: “that girl in St. Thomas spent a full week, twenty-four hours a day, with the dolphin, in sixteen inches of water. She cooked and slept in that area, wet.” She had learned “how to live wet,” what to wear, that she could have no electrical appliances, “so we have given her a propane stove.” The two rooms were being made “into a tank with two feet of water in it,” and “the human-dolphin relationship seems to develop best in eighteen to twenty-four inches of water.” The dolphins, he said, would tell you when they wanted you in the pool and when they did not, by nudging and stroking, and “we have developed a ‘silent’ language, half of which the dolphins have taught us.” Fremont-Smith found the parallel with LSD therapy for humans “extraordinarily appropriate.” Lilly closed: “The day you frighten the patient is the day your therapy won’t work.”

Where the drug came from, and the tape

D. Graham Burnett, who read Lilly’s papers for his history of twentieth-century cetacean science, says that Lilly obtained the LSD, then a controlled substance, from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals under a contract with the National Institute of Mental Health, the same agency whose five-year Career Award, from 1962 to 1967, Lilly thanked for “the essential freedom to plan, to organize, to integrate, and to think out this program.” Howe said in 2014 that he had been using the drug on the dolphins since 1964, that she was against it, that she insisted it not be given to Peter and he agreed, and that as a young woman in her twenties in his laboratory she felt powerless to stop him giving it to the other two.

The Stanford catalogue of Lilly’s papers lists among the digitised reels a recording of the dolphin Peter after LSD, made at the Institute on St Thomas on April 19, 1965, with Lilly audible on the tape. Howe’s chronology has Peter brought upstairs into the fibreglass tank for his spring lessons on April 20, the next day. The recording and the memory cannot both be right as stated, and nothing published settles which is. The finding aid’s description of the reel cases says that Lilly’s notes name the experiments, and that “LSD” is among the names.

How the two experiments ended

The finding aid shows the second track thickening as the first thinned. Among Lilly’s typescripts are “LSD-25, therapeutic use,” October 1965; “The Need for an Adequate Model of the Human End of the Interspecies Communication Program,” 1965 to 1966; a programme for an LSD conference at Berkeley in June 1966; “Basic Problems in Education for Responsibility caused by LSD-25,” August 30, 1966; “LSD-25, mind-brain effects,” lecture notes, November 1966; a transcript of a discussion with Sidney Cohen on LSD, February 1967; and “The Human Bio-Computer: Programming and Metaprogramming with LSD-25,” 1967. The last of these was, as Bruce Clarke has shown, the final research report owed to the National Institute of Mental Health at the end of the Career Award, and it became the book for which Lilly is now best known. The Institute’s audit reports are filed under December 1966.

Howe’s account of the same months is one sentence long. “It didn’t have the zing to it that LSD did at that time,” she said of Lilly’s interest in her progress with Peter. “And in the end the zing won.” Burnett dates the collapse of the grants to a review at the end of 1965; Howe remembers the closure being announced in the autumn of 1966; the dolphins went to Miami; Peter died there within weeks. Lilly wrote in 1975 that in 1967 to 1968 he decided to stop dolphin work because “I no longer wanted to run a concentration camp for my friends,” and that “five of the dolphins in our eight-dolphin colony committed suicide” soon after.

Two things are worth holding apart. The first is that the LSD work, whatever one thinks of it, was in one respect better designed than the live-in: it had a physical measure, the duty cycle, with controls and a placebo, and Lilly reported where the measure went to zero as well as where it rose. The second is that the same man ran both, and the same funders paid for both, and when he had to choose which experiment to think about, the one with the drug in it won. The flooded room was never given the independent listeners it needed. The dolphins on LSD were never given a hypothesis about language. The two tracks ran side by side for two years and met only in the person who left one for the other.

Sources

• John C. Lilly, “Dolphin-Human Relation and LSD 25,” with discussion, in Harold A. Abramson, ed., The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism, Bobbs-Merrill, 1967, 47–52, the proceedings of the second international conference of May 1965. All the figures and quotations from the talk. In copyright; quoted briefly, from the scan in the MAPS bibliography. bibliography.maps.org
• John C. Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin, Doubleday, 1967: the clinical note on Pamela, the chronology of April 1965, and the acknowledgment of the Career Award. archive.org
• D. Graham Burnett, “A Mind in the Water,” Orion, May–June 2010, for the Sandoz LSD under an NIMH contract and the grant review at the end of 1965. orionmagazine.org
• Christopher Riley, “The dolphin who loved me,” The Observer, June 8, 2014, for Howe’s statements on the drug and on Lilly’s attention. theguardian.com
• John C. Lilly Papers, M0786, Stanford University Libraries, finding aid: the LSD typescripts and folders of 1965 to 1967, the audit reports, and the scope note on the reel cases. oac.cdlib.org
• “Recording of the dolphin Peter after being given LSD, 1965 April 19,” Psychedelic History Archive, citing the Lilly Papers at Stanford. psychedelicarchive.com
• Bruce Clarke, “John Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin, and Communication Out of Bounds,” communication +1 3 (1), 2014, for the Career Award’s final report. doi.org
• John C. Lilly, Lilly on Dolphins, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975, introduction, read in the search-inside snippets of the Open Library copy. openlibrary.org