In a message of Sat, 14 Oct 2017 19:40:40 -0400, Ken Hornstein writes: >>Also, while the department of Zoology and the dept of Medicine may >>indeed have well figured out that it would be a good idea to share >>software, they in no way informed me, or >>Marcus-whose-last-name-I-forget (Wall? Wald?), the two of us being the >>ones that wrote the software in the first place. I do not think that >>any 'set this up' was ever done, aside from handing over a copy of the >>software. Which was really general purpose AD and DA conversion >>routines in the first place .... unlikely to get you in trouble > >I know this was over 30 (!) years ago, but there is one thing about this >story I have a question about. We've got the brain wave sensors on the >monkey caps, which are connected to A->D converters and then piggybacked >onto the VAX disk drive. The part I am missing is ... why would WRITING >to the disk drive cause voltage to be output to those devices, thus zapping >the monkeys? That's the part I never really understood. > >--Ken
I didn't do that part, but there really were experiments where you would embed the sensor in an experiemental subject and then apply voltage as part of an attempt to map what parts of the brain were actually good for, and what is an epileptic seizure, back in the days when this was much less well understood. So somebody out there really might have had the idea that the capability would be a good thing to have. But the only software I had that was doing anything like that was being used by people studying the behaviour of certain pests that bothered the tobacco crops. Worms. I cannot remember exactly why the researchers wanted to give elecrtical shocks to the worms, but it was probably part of figuring out how certain pesticides worked, and thus whether they were likely to pose a risk to other life. You couldn't get in trouble with the ethics committee for mistreating worms, even if you killed lots of them via electical shocks, especially since the whole point of the research was to figure out better ways to kill the things. However, there was a huge complicated procedure for dealing with any sort of vertebrate, and it got more restrictive for mammals and even more for primates. So what happened shouldn't have been possible. At the time I thought that what must have happened was that the people doing the research got somebody to cobble something together, based on stuff we had written, who didn't quite understand what he or she was doing well enough to realise that this was possible. This should have been caught in the review, but looks like that was also done by somebody who wasn't clued in. Nobody ever asked Marcus or I to come over, explain what we had written, how it worked, and more importantly what parts still didn't work properly. I suspect that the fact that both of us were under 18 at the time we wrote the stuff may have influenced that decision. Laura _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
