José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado, Spanish scientist and professor, died he was 96.

José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado was a Spanish professor of physiology at Yale University, famed for his research into mind control through electrical stimulation of regions in the brain  died he was 96.

(August 8, 1915 – September 15, 2011) 

Biography

Delgado was born in Ronda, a province of Málaga, Spain in 1915. He received a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Madrid just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. During the Spanish Civil War he served as a medical corpsman on the Republican side while he was a medical student. Delgado was held in a concentration camp for five months after the war ended.^[2] After serving in the camp, he had to repeat his M.D. degree, and then took a Ph.D. at the Cajal Institute in Madrid.
Delgado's father was an eye doctor and he had planned to follow in his footsteps. However, once he discovered the writings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal and spent some time in a physiology laboratory, Delgado no longer wanted to be an eye doctor. Delgado became captivated by "the many mysteries of the brain. How little was known then. How little is known now!”^[3]
In 1946 Delgado won a fellowship at Yale University. In 1950, Delgado accepted a position in the physiology department which at the time was headed by John Fulton. By 1952, he had co-authored his first paper on implanting electrodes into humans.^[4]
The Spanish minister of health, Villar Palasi, asked Delgado to help organize a new medical school at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Delgado accepted Palasi's proposal and relocated to Spian with his wife and two children in 1974.^[5]
Delgado had last moved with his wife, Caroline, to San Diego, California before his death on September 15, 2011. ^[6]

Research

Delgado's research interests centered on the use of electrical signals to evoke responses in the brain. His earliest work was with cats, but he later did experiments with monkeys and humans, including mental patients.
Much of Delgado's work was with an invention he called a stimoceiver, a radio which joined a stimulator of brain waves with a receiver which monitored E.E.G. waves and sent them back on separate radio channels. Some of these stimoceivers were as small as half-dollars. This allowed the subject of the experiment full freedom of movement while allowing the experimenter to control the experiment. This was a great improvement from his early equipment which included implanted electrodes whose wires ran from the brain to bulky equipment that both recorded data and delivered the desired electrical charges to the brain. This early equipment, while not allowing for a free range of movement, was also the cause of infection in many subjects.^[7]
The stimoceiver could be used to stimulate emotions and control behavior. According to Delgado, "Radio Stimulation of different points in the amygdala and hippocampus in the four patients produced a variety of effects, including pleasant sensations, elation, deep, thoughtful concentration, odd feelings, super relaxation, colored visions, and other responses." Delgado stated that "brain transmitters can remain in a person's head for life. The energy to activate the brain transmitter is transmitted by way of radio frequencies."^[8]
Using the stimoceiver, Delgado found that he could not only elicit emotions, but he could also elicit specific physical reactions. These specific physical reactions, such as the movement of a limb or the clenching of a fist, were achieved when Delgado stimulated the motor cortex. A human whose implants were stimulated to produce a reaction were unable to resist the reaction and so one patient said “I guess, doctor, that your electricity is stronger than my will”. Some consider one of Delgado's most promising finds is that of an area called the septum within the limbic region. This area, when stimulated by Delgado, produced feelings of strong euphoria. These euphoric feelings were sometimes strong enough to overcome physical pain and depression.^[9]
Delgado created many inventions and was called a “technological wizard” by one of his Yale colleagues. Other than the stimoceiver, Delgado also created a "chemitrode" which was an implantable device that released controlled amounts of a drug into specific brain areas. Delgado also invented an early version of what is now a cardiac pacemaker.^[10]
In Rhode Island, Delgado did some work at what is now a closed mental hospital. He chose patients who were "desperately ill patients whose disorders had resisted all previous treatments" and implanted electrodes in about 25 of them. Most of these patients were either schizophrenics or epileptics. To determine the best placement of electrodes within the human patients, Delgado initially looked to the work of Wilder Penfield, who studied epileptics' brains in the 1930s, as well as earlier animal experiments, and studies of brain-damaged people.^[11]
The most famous example of the stimoceiver in action occurred at a Cordoba bull breeding ranch. Delgado stepped into the ring with a bull which had had a stimoceiver implanted within its brain. The bull charged Delgado, who pressed a remote control button which caused the bull to stop its charge. The region of the brain Delgado stimulated when he pressed the handheld transmitter was the caudate nucleus. This region was chosen to be stimulated because the caudate nucleus is involved in controlling voluntary movements.^[12] Delgado claimed that the stimulus caused the bull to lose its aggressive instinct.
Although the bull incident was widely mentioned in the popular media, Delgado believed that his experiment with a female chimpanzee named Paddy was more significant. Paddy was fitted with a stimoceiver linked to a computer that detected the brain signal called a spindle which was emitted by her part of the brain called the amygdala. When the spindle was recognized, the stimoceiver sent a signal to the central gray area of Paddy's brain, producing an 'aversive reaction'. In this case, the aversive reaction was an unpleasant or painful feeling. The result of the aversive reaction to the stimulus was a negative feedback to the brain.^[13] Within hours her brain was producing fewer spindles as a result of the negative feedback.^[14] As a result, Paddy became “quieter, less attentive and less motivated during behavioral testing”. Although Paddy's reaction was not exactly ideal, Delgado hypothesized that the method used on Paddy could be used on others to stop panic attacks, seizures, and other disorders controlled by certain signals within the brain.^[15]

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