"In the middle of the 19th century two brothers, Orson and Lorenzo Fowler made and sold busts like this one." "Supposedly by reading this map of the head and face you could evaluate someone's character and personality even predict his behavior." "Here is where you would look to see if he had selfish sentiments." "Over here is domestic propensities." "This one, of course, is for intuitive reasoning and reflective faculties moral and religious sentiments self-esteem, power of will." "The system is called phrenology and it was one of the more popular theories about human behavior at the time." "Too bad it wasn't based on scientific evidence." "Actually, it's only towards the end of the 19th century that scientists turn their gaze on human behavior-- traditionally the province of philosophers, poets these scientists tried to make the seemingly irrational rational." "They tried to sort out what in human behavior is fixed at birth and what is learned through experience." "It is a journey that twists and turns throughout the century as they and we go "in search of ourselves."" "At the turn of the century docte mysteries of the human mind are drawn to this venerable hospital in Paris:" "Salpetriere." "Built as an arsenal in the 16th century salpetriere is anything but an ordinary hospital." "By the late 19th century it has been transformed into the leading center for the study of a strange and perplexing malady-- hysteria." "A malady which becomes the passion of its iron-willed director, Jean Martin charcot." "Charcot, by all accounts of contemporaries was a coldauthoritarian fig ure and this is what caused him to be called the Napoleon of the neuroses." "Woman:" "In the salpetriere there was a huge population of patients who suffer one of the murkiest disorders still around." "That was hysteria." "And it was a new opportunity." "It was an opportunity for charcot to bring all the skills he had as a neurologist to finally unpack the secrets of one of the most frustrating disorders for clinicians of the time." "Osgood:" "Charcot observes patients with a dizzying array of- spasms..." "Paralysis..." "Blindness..." "Amnesia..." "Every physical and behavioral abnormality imaginable all without a traceable cause." "At the height of his career charcot turns his full attention to hysteria certain he can find its cause." "He is not the first to try." "Woman:" "The greeks believed sed woman:" "Theby the uterusvedwas cau by the uterus as an unattached organ kind of like a beach ball inside the body and shifting around." "So that Monday it might be in your neck and Tuesday it might be in your wrist and Wednesday it might be in your stomach." "And wherever this uterus happened to end up it created symptoms" ""the wandering womb," as they used to call it." "Hysteria is still tied to female sexuality." "Makes her especially vulnerable is widely held." ""After all," remarks one of charcot?" "Colleagues" ""how could men have hysteria?" "They have no uterus."" "Micale:" "Many doctors of the time, in fact believed that hysteria wasn't a real disease at all." "Hysteria they dismissed as artificial or simulating behavior or perhaps, whent appeared in female patients as a form of sexual promiscuity that was therefore contemptible on moral grounds." "Charcot, however, argued throughout the course of his career that hysteria, in fact was a subject of legitimate scientific study." "Osgood:" "Hysteria cannot be a woman's disease because men suffer, too." "Charcot believes instead that a brain disease causes hysteria and that only certain people succumb to it-- those from tainted stock." "It is passed down from generation to generation." "Yet charcot is not bothered when he cannot find hysteria in the extended families of his patients." "Micale:" "Charcot could argue that hysteria could transmute into other totally different pathological forms such as epilepsy or Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis." "With the hindsight of a hundred years, of course this seems absolutely ridiculous." "These are totally separate pathological categories with different causes and different courses and different therapeutics." "A hundred years ago, however they were very indiscriminately lumped together." "Charcot was going to take this vast amorphous wastebasket category of symptoms that was called hysteria ation of every clinician ustr in every major hospital for centuries, effectively and he was going to replace it with an elegant neurophysiologically based model" "of its etiology and course." "He was basically going to make hysteria lie down and reveal its laws." "Osgood:" "Now, c of hysteria's cause charcot turns to categorizing its symptoms." "He sketches every movement of his patients in vivid detail." "When the new art of scientific photography appears charcot finds an even better method to capture the nuances of behavior." "He hires a photographer to work full tie at salpetriere." "Charcot was avisuel." "He loved to see things with his eye and see them in such a way that he could then study them exactly." "And photography enabled you to stop time." "That is, it enabled you to take a symptom stop it, isolate it and then to look at it in detail." "Osgood:" "Charcot declares, "the camera does not lie."" "It would become as crucial to his study of hysteria as the microscope is for biologists." "Augustine was one of charcot's favorite patients." "She was his supermodel." "Augustine was young, she was pretty she was very well developed." "He points all of this out in his books." "And she responded well to the camera." "Osgood:" "Charcot will take some 10,000 photographs of his patients..." "Searching for a pattern in the panoply of symptoms." "Curiously, these symptoms seem to reflect the culture of the time." "He was producing photographs of beautiful, sometimes, women in very odd, but also in some ways very familiar positions." "If you study the photographs of the hysterics in the salpetriere you will see they resemble very much the women in paintings of the renaissance." "This is not an accident." "Charcot was a great admirer of painting." "He saw himself as a man who was cultivated, artistic, learned and he wanted his own work to intersect with French culture generally and it did." "Osgood:" "Intellectuals and the public alike take great interest in charcot's scientific endeavor." "He becomes a celebrity himself on the streets of Paris and beyond." "Renowned for his theatrical flair he attracts a wide audience every Tuesday when he offers a lecture demonstration for doctors who come from around the world to see the proclaimed "prince of science."" "Sometimes patients he had never seen before and he would diagnose them." "And sometimes patients came in hehadtreated before and they would be hypnotized and charcot would instruct them to have hysterical seizures." "And he would explain what was going on to the audience." "So it became the hottest ticket in Paris." "Everybody went." "Everybody who was in the medical world had to go." "But novelists went, journalists went, painters went." "Everyone who was anyone in late-19th-century Paris had to go." "Osgood:" "One member of the audience captivated by charcot is a young doctor from Vienna who is just embarking on his own clinical career" "Sigmund Freud." "Freud has been trained in neurology atories Freud has been trained in neurologypean labor studying the brains of eels, fish and eventually humans." "But in time, Freud turns away from his microscope." "Man:" "He did all the traditional things that people who are going to go into biological science would do at that time and he was trying to apply the thinking that he was doing to issues of behavioral abnormalities-- disturbances that he saw" "in people that he was working with-- and he was very frustrated that although he could study the brain and try to look at its anatomy, he just NY way that that work could be directly applicable to the clinical problems that he was concerned with." "Osgood:" "While studying with charcot in Paris" "Freud becomes fascinated by the patients at salpetriere." "But the brain-lesion theory of his French mentor does not make sense." "Patients with paralyzed hands can still move their arms." "Those with paralyzed feet can still move their legs-- movements that would be completely impossible if their paralysis were truly caused by a brain disorder." "Harrington:" "The symptoms of hysteria didn't follow biological logic." "It followed a kind of a layman's sense of how paralysis probably should happen." "Osgood:" "Freud's doubts increase when autopsy after autopsy of hysterical patients yield nothing." "The hoped-for brain lesion never materializes." "But perhaps what is most troubling to Freud is something much closer to home." "Many Europeans-- from the man on the street to the medical elite-- share charcot's belief that certain types of people are more prone to degenerate into madness..." "People who come from weakened stock bad blood." "Jews, as a group, are singled out." "And the Jewish community in Vienna of which Freud is a member, is no exception." "Micale:" "According to degenerationist theory" "Jews were more prone to nervous and neurotic breakdown." "They were included in a category of character types that were particularly susceptible to nervous degeneration." "Understandably, Freud is not sympathetic to this idea." "He senses an anti-semitic content in it and I'm almost certain that this is a personal factor that allows him osgood:" "With this, Freud concludes his colleagues have failed to explain mental disorders." "They have focused only on the physical body ignoring the complexity of the mind." "Finding hysteria's true cause, he believes requires a radically new approach which Freud will undertake in his private practice in Vienna." "In the process, he will seek not only to explain hysteria but also present this century's first distinctly psychological theory of human behavior." "His first clue comes from fellow neurologist Josef breuer and breuer's patient, Bertha pappenheim referred to as "Anna o."" "Micale:" "Pappenheim is a very young woman;" "had searched out Josef breuer and presented to breuer an extraordinary idiosyncratic series of symptoms." "She was having difficulty sleeping." "She was suffering from nightmares." "It was impossible for her to drink water and in the more severe stages of her disorder she had lost the ability to speak her native German." "And later tells to a young Sigmund Freud." "Osgood:" "Through hypnosis, breuer coaxed Anna o." "To remember when her symptoms first appeared..." "To a time when her father became gravely ill." "Once she remembered this traumatic episode and talked openly about it, her symptoms vanished." "This becomes known as the "talking cure."" "Freud never actually meets Anna o." "But what impresses him most is the particularity of her symptoms and their link to a personal trauma." "Harrington:" "To Freud, the symptoms of hysteria reveal not what's wrong with a patient's brain but, in a sense, what had gone wrong in the patient's life." "They become symptoms of traumatic events emotionally intolerable events that a patient had repressed and therefore, that rather than finding expression in appropriateemotional aff... uh, expression found expression in bodily symptoms." "Osgood:" "After seeing patient after patient" "Freud believes that symptoms are invariably born out of psychological trauma." "Theeaningful in and of themselves but act as a road map to a submerged inner life that is troubled." "Roth:" "Freud says that hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences;" "that is, what causes a symptom is something in the past of the patient that he or she cannot get over, cannot face, cannot think about and that it takes an enormous amount of energy to stay away from that part of their past." "Osgood:" "So toxic is this memory, it is banished to a part of the mind which Freud calls "the unconscious."" "Where dreams and slips of the tongue take shape..." "The home of fantasies and fears..." "Of uncensored thoughts and sexual desires..." "The birthplace, Freud believes, of all emotional trauma." "From his idea of the unconscious" "Freud develops psychoanalysis, a new theory of the mind and a technique to gain access to it-- a theory that many t." "Micale:" "Freud is attacked in his own time on a great many different grounds." "Certainly the most immediate and the best known of the grounds was that his ideas were pornographic." "Because he discusses sexuality so extensively and in such a cold, neutral, analytic tone they see this as morally impermissible." "Osgood:" "Freud is also attacked for other reasons." "The unconscious cannot be seen or tested." "You cannot study it under a microscope, or dissect for it." "There is no material proof of its existence." "To some, Freud's psychoanalysis seems too theoretical, too philosophical, too unscientific." "Roth:" "He was not a successful theoretician in the early years." "His work did, however, attract the interest of a faithful band of adherents and Freud used their commitment to him and to psychoanalysis as the basis for developing a psychoanalytic movement that resembles unfortunately, in my view, in many ways" "a church in its early years-- people who have to be committed to the cardinal concepts of psychoanalysis in order to be treated as faithful adherents." "Harrington:" "Freud was able to create a kind of religious zeal in intellectuals many of whom were Jewish or felt, in the context of viennese society somewhat marginalized." "Here they could be at the center of something very exciting that was potentially going to transform the way in which we think the mind works." "Osgood:" "By 1914, Freud's following is still relatively small but that will all change soon." "Political events will thrust Freud's psychological theories onto a world stage providing a brutal living laboratory for the efficacy of Freud's ideas." "World war I." "Germany is pitted against most of Europe, Russia and later, the United States." "Roth:" "The first world war was" "Europe's encounter with mass destruction through technology." "You didn't kill someone close up." "You were often just lying in a ditch and suddenly someone next to you would die because an explosion would send shrapnel and kill that person." "Or you would be in a ditch for days, and then suddenly you were told, "get up and walk across that field."" "Osgood:" "The war lasts longer than anyone had anticipated." "Days become months, and months stretch in" "the human toll is enormous." "Soldiers write home:" ""The sights were awful" ""dead men all over the place, some half-buried by shells." ""It was simply a case of looking death in the face and waiting to be hit."" "Early in the war an English psychologist named Charles meyers-- based at the front-- reports seeing soldiers come out of their trenches with mysterious symptoms." "He thinks the cause may be a poison gas or chemicals-- all of which are tested for to no avail." "Doctors see soldiers with unexplained tremors;" "some who have gone blind or deaf overnight;" "others mute, paralyzed, crying." "Meyers speculates that these behaviors are somehow related to exploding shells on the front so he calls it "shell shock."" "But then, soldiers who have yet to see combat appear with similar symptoms." "Roth:" "Shell shock, in many ways resembled the symptoms of hysteria." "That was very embarrassing." "Hysteria was something that happened to women." "Even though the 19th century saw theories that showed that men could be hysterics, too the crumbling of the psyche was thought to be something that women were prone to." "This was sexist, even misogynistic science." "Doctors tried to find another name for it so as to spare their soldiers the shame of being called hysterics." "Showalter:" "They absolutely couldn't believe that men could be hysterical and when they began to see the symptoms in men all the doctors said, "this looks like hysteria."" "But at some level they would not allow themselves to believe it." "Osgood:" ""War neurosis"" ""buried-alive neurosis"" ""soldier's heart"-- all names to describe male hysteria." "Some 80,000 soldiers would succumb during the course of the war." "Military doctors look long and hard for a physical explanation for the symptoms;" "dence of damage for a physical explanation to the nervous system;" "E evi for evidence of tainted heredity." "They were so persuaded that there had to be an organic cause and in some ways, so prejudiced against a psychological cause that as they eliminated and eliminated and eliminated possible sources they just continued to look." "The only explanation left is cowardice." "To many officers, these soldiers are malingerers who should be tried, court-martialed and executed." "And in fact, some are." "But among doctors, there are a pioneering few familiar with Freud's theories who believe that shell shock is psychological." "For them, the war offers an unusual opportunity." "Showalter:" "Freud had worked with a very small number of patients and with women patients who came from quite a limited segment of viennese society-- upper-middle-class women from Jewish families basically who were leading lives of boredom and leisure." "And suddenly here you have the war-- 80,000 shell-shock cases in the European armies." "So they provided an extraordinary wealth of experimental material, so to speak and doctors, at the same time that they were appalled were fascinated." "They recognized the opportunity they had before them to study precisely the kinds of conflicts that Freud had written about in this very, very large sample of the population." "Harrington:" "We might be able to understand what was happening psychologically to these young men in the trenches that were causing them to develop these symptoms." "Everything in your body is saying" ""get out of there;" "Save yourself"" "and everything in your training is saying" ""you've got to stay in the trenches and defend your country," and the conflict is so unbearable that as the psychoanalysts would ultimately say the organism takes a flight into illness." "Showalter:" "Shell shock is the body language of powerlessness and powerlessness can come in a lot of different situations." "You can have power in the world" "where you are powerless, for a variety of reasons to speak your real feelings the body will convert those feelings into symptoms." "These soldiers, who were brave, who were fit who were patriotic, found themselves dealing with fear, anxiety, grief, loneliness, disorientation and all these kinds of feelings which were new to them and which were not part of the society's definition" "of what it meant to be a man." "They couldn't articulate those feelings." "Osgood:" "Doctors try any method-- from crude forms of electric shock to talking therapy-- to restore the soldier to fighting shape and back to the front." "For thousands of soldiers like these it is the talking cure that works when nothing else does." "Simply talking can save them." "Many soldiers frozen in fear can now be healed." "Soldiers immobilized by memories can now move on." "The laboratory of war demonstrates that many of Freud's ideas are more than abstract theories;" "they can offer a practical basis for treatment." "About the hidden sources of human behavior for decades to come." "I think it showed up to people on a massive scale that emotional and environmental factors were extremely important in determining our mental lives." "It's as an experience of the war that psychology and psychiatry now cease being simply medical specialties applied to a very tiny number of people but a way to understand, in general ourselves, our minds and our world." "When world war I comes to a close a battle of a different sort begins only this time the weapons are words and the soldiers are scientists." "This new battle will rage between two diametrically opposed views of human behavior." "On one side are the scientists who see our personalities as unchanging, fixed at birth, biologically determined." "And on the other side are those who believe we can change that we are influenced by our experiences and what we learn along the way." "When the debate heats up in the United States life is changing rapidly and dramatically." "It's an unsettling time for most people." "We yearn for stability and normalcy and certainty." "What scientists have to say about human behavior-- whether it's fixed at birth and predictable or shaped by the environment and changeable-- will have a profound effect on how people view the future how they see each other, and even how they live their lives." "Osgood:" "In 1918, the war to end all wars is finally over." "American soldiers return to a country eager to take its place as a leader in a rapidly changing world." "But America's optimistic hopes for the future are soon undercut by some unexpected and disturbing news." "The army publishes the results of tests it conducted during wartime assessing the mental capacity of its recruits." "Usion:" "Assessing the mental capacity of its recruits.Ng concl nearly half of all American soldiers are feebleminded." "Army psychologists have fired the first shot entific war that army psychologists will le.Ired the first shot sci when the army tests results were published, and it was stated that a goodly portion of inductees into the U.S. army had a mental age of under 12" "ergo, moron by popular definition of psychologists-- there was a sense of shock." "How could it be that so many American boys had such low intelligence?" "They led people to believe that we had a major problem namely, we had too many morons;" "the country was filled with morons." "The theory that the army tests have proven that the country is really a lot dumber than people thought is going to feed into a lot of fears" "osgood:" "The fears mu the fear that America's gene pool is being weakened by an unending influx of immigrants;" "the hat Americans will lack the mental faculties to perform the complex tasks of modern life." "When the army commissioned the tests during the war the generals faced a staggering logistical task." "Deluged with some two million recruits they tried to match each man to the job choosing potential officers and weeding out potential misfits." "In desperation, the army turned to a group of psychologists to get the job done:" "A standardized intelligence test." "Henry Goddard, father of the first American intelligence test is part of a new wave of psychologists eager to be of service to their country." "Zenderland:" "They had one clear, practical goal for their science-- to sort the entire army, quickly, in an hour." "They had to find a test that could be done fast and that could immediately distinguish different levels of mental skill." "Osgood:" "They spring into action." "They test general knowledge with questions like:" ""What is crisco?"" ""What is the product advertised by velvet Joe?"" "Or "what is a dibble?"" "Zenderland:" "The army tests required an immense amount of cultural information." "One had to know American sports one had to know American advertising one had to know that velvet Joe was a character who advertised tobacco." "Osgood:" "In addition, they also ask questions of practical judgment:" ""Is black the same as white?"" "And "why is beef better food than cabbage?"" "The inherent fallacy, certainly of the tests of those days was the fact they were filled with the culture of a particular class and location and were treated as though they were universal and fair." "And people who were not from those classes or groups did not do well." "Native, inborn intelligence, not acquired knowledge..." "And this intelligence should be as measurable as a bar of steel." "Man:" "It was believed that there was an entity called intelligence and that tests were measuring it in the same way that there's an entity called potatoes-- when you put them on a scale there's a scale that's measuring them." "Narrator:" "The scale for intelligence is developed by Henry Goddard at the training school for feebleminded boys and girls in vineland, New Jersey." "Through his observations, he comes to believe that intelligence-- and its opposite, feeblemindedness-- is inherited." "But as a scientist, Goddard wants proof." "He confesses to his friend, Charles Davenport:" ""When it comes to the genetics of intelligence" "I have much more zeal than knowledge."" "Charles Davenport is a pioneer field Charles dof genetics.A pioneerg he, too, belike intelligenc e can be passed down from one generation to the next." "If, as the experiments of Gregor mendel have shown e gene for wrinkled if, as the experiments peas and another for smooth on one gene for blue eyes and another for brown then perhaps there are also genes for other traits" "like intelligence." "A respected biologist frf chi cago the heredity traits of animals-- chickens, canaries and rabbits." "Through his research, Davenport becomes convinced that mendelian genetics will explain n in plants and animals but also in human beings." "Man:" "They tried to find biological bases of things that they called nomadism-- the tendency of people to move from place to place." "And at least one geneticist found a genetic basis for what he called thalassophilia, love of the sea that was expressed in naval officers and which he contended must be a sex-linked trait-- that is, to males" "because only males became officers in the Navy." "Narrator:" "And Davenport believes that other traits are linked, too." "He believes that low intelligence causes poverty, criminality and prostitution and if intelligence is fixed at birth then these behaviors must be genetic in origin as well." "The traits were believed to be unchangeable." "We had, as a matter of fact, the phrase:" ""The leopard cannot change his spots."" "Therefore, people cannot change what was given to them by nature." "There was a belief we were products of nature predestined to be what we were born and that environment had no effect on it." "Osgood:" "Davenport's ideas catch fire among those looking for scientific ways to improve society." "He recruits graduates of vassar and Harvard eager to join him on the varesearch." "He persuades the carnegie institution of Washington to fund a new research station in cold spring harbor, New York." "All for the promotion of eugenics a movement to improve the quality of the human race by selective breeding." "But not everyone believes that biology is destiny." "For many scientists, it's your experiences in life that count-- your upbringing, your education, ur environment." "Chief among these scientists is psychologist John Watson who offers a theory that is the mirror opposite of eugenics." "This was the heyday of hereditarians and geneticists who said that human beings were constrained by their genetic inheritance." "And Watson was saying that this is baloney;" "that human beings were shaped solely by their environment." "Osgood:" "Over the years, Watson studies the behavior of babies-- hundreds of them." "To Watson, we arrive in the world a blank slate" "Tabula Rasa." "Nearly everything is learned even things we think are instinctual, like fear." "To prove that environment is more powerful tha" "Watson designs an experiment for an infant known as little Albert." "He's so confident, he films it for posterity." "At first, Albert shows little fear even when Watson places a burning newspaper in front of him." "Albert is also unafraid when he encounters a white rat for the first time in his life." "But then Watson shows Albert the rat accompanied by a loud clanging noise-- one of the few things that upsets little Albert." "(Cries)" "And he does it again... (Cries)" "N." "(Loud clanging)" "Eventually, Albert learns to fear not just the rat but all furry things, even without the loud noise." "In Watson's mind, the little Albert experiment is a success because it proves that fears are learned, not inherited." "Watson calls his theory "behaviorism"" "and begins to popularize it." "He urges parents to take active control of their children's upbringing by shaping their environment..." "To think of the home as a scientific laboratory." "Atson's to think of the home as interest in childhoodry.T w is purely professional." "Maher:" "He didn't like children much." "He referred to them, in one of his many statements as always squalling and shouting and dirty and wanting to be fed and sort of a nuisance." "It was clear he didn't particularly like them in his own environment but he felt that the good of society required shaping individuals right from day one you had to start with the babies." "Narrator:" "Ebullient and self-promoting" "Watson gathers a wide and appreciative audience which holds in high esteem any scientific thinking on the subject of child rearing." "Science was increasingly important in the popular mind-set." "If science said something, if scientists tested if scientists experimented, well, then, it must be so." "Osgood:" "But the appeal of behaviorism runs deeper." "Its egalitarian philosophy and outlook seems to reflect the very spirit of democracy." "Maher:" "Watson was the voice of the American dream the American dream was that this is the land of opportunity." "You can become what you would like to be even if you're not there yet." "And at least if you don't do it in youme this is in which your children can do it." "Osgood:" "The American dream of opportunity draws millions of immigrants." "They come by the shipload to fill the jobs of a rapidly expanding economy..." "To seek a better life." "But the arrival of new immigrants increases all kinds of fears." "Some are economic-- that the iorker will lower the wages of American workers or take their jobs altogether all the while crowding their cities and their schools." "And there are also biological fears." "Charles Davenport and others in the eugenics movement worry that the new immigrants from Southern and eastern Europe are bringing defective genes with them." "They have no faith that America will transform the immigrants." "If anything, they fear the immigrants will transform America." "For the eugenicists the immigrants' dream is their nightmare." "Kraut:" "If these newcomers who came off the ships-- who seemed so short, so misshapen compared to rugged American individuals-- intermarried and bred in this country, there was a fear that they would actually weaken "the race," as it was called." "Indeed, some spoke of "race suicide"" "that immigration could lead to Americans actually annihilating their own rugged, robust, pioneering breed." "Woman:" "And the idea was that many of them were defective and that the American population was quickly filling up with defectives." "The notion was that America had become the asylum of the world." "Osgood:" "There is a groundswell of national support to set strict immigration quotas." "From labor unions to the ku klux klan they join together to pressure president coolidge to protect the nation by signing the 1924 immigration restriction act." "It's a law that, in the words of one congressman" ""is a necessity for keeping pure the blood of America."" "For the eugenics movement the immigration act is a great victory." "A national campaign is under way to spread the eugenic vision to local communities." "State fairs are a favorite place to educate the public." "Than at a livestock competition?" "If you could control breeding you could control the evolution and the fate of a society." "You could breed for intelligence." "You could breed for justice." "You could breed for good moral sense." "You could breed for physical appearance." "Zenderland:" "It had a wide appeal to people across a broad political spectrum." "That man might control the process of birth that man might eliminate birth defects..." "That man might actually breed a better human being." "Osgood:" "Along with the usual competitions-- best livestock..." "Best crops..." "And best homemade goods..." "There's also the best human stock competition." "Babies were examined and weighed and measured to determine who was the most robust." "Osgood:" "There are even "fitter families" competitions." "Any healthy American family can enter." "All you need is to take a medical exam an intelligence test and supply a complete eugenic history." "But invariably the winners are white, of northern European stock." "This is the pinnacle of the eugenics movement in the United States." "There are new immigration laws." "There are new marriage laws forbidding mixed-race marriages." "There are even new sterilization laws preventing criminals, epileptics and the insane from reproducing." "Laws all designed to protect the gene pool..." "All widely acclaimed by eugenicists all widely acclaimed biological wisdom.Nsider" "the eugenics movement begins to lose its credibility at least as science, when a new generation of scientists begin to study genetics when they begin to discover, for instance that even understanding an organism as simple as a fruit fly is far more complex a process" "than we ever dreamed possible." "Osgood:" "In laboratories, like this one at the university of Texas scientists are studying the inheritance patterns of fruit flies." "Because fruit flies breed quickly it makes them ideal subjects for experiments to see how they change." "By the late 1920s, research makes clear that genetics will not be explained as simply as "one gene, one trait."" "The work shows that many traits are not the product of single genes but are polygenic, the product of several genes." "Something as simple as eye color, for example can be affected by as many as seven different genetic variables." "And if a fruit fly is this complex what, scientists wonder, does that imply for human genetics?" "But in the public's mind, the science of genetics the pseudoscience of eugenics to explain human behavior." "On a sheer practical level, behaviorism, for example has become far more pervasive than hardly anyone realizes." "Still leading the pack is John Watson himself who has left academia for the far more lucrative field of advertising." "It's the perfect home for his belief that behavior isn't fixed at all but is shaped by outside forces." "Buckley:" "Watson believed that the consumer is to the manufacturer what the gg is to the experimental physiologist." "What Watson believed is that he had the techniques at his disposal to shape consumer behavior." "Watson went into advertising armed with the information and the views he had shown in the case of little Albert namely, that if you pair two separate things together you can get the responses normally made to one attached to the other" "response to the loud noise became attached to the sight of the furry animal." "In advertising, he was the person who did things like get cigarettes shown in the context of handsome men beautiful women, big cars, mansions." "And what that said, so to speak, was, you smoke the cigarette that's the association that you will have." "Osgood:" "John Watson and the field of advertising is the perfect marriage of theory and practice." "It's behaviorism at work-- conditioning the minds of consumers that they truly need the products that American business wants to sell." "The conditioning that worked so well in the lab works equally well in the field." "Maher:" "The behaviorists' assertion that with appropriate control one could shape an individual to do anything, to be anything also, of course, meant that a person could be shaped to evil purposes as well as benevolent ones." "(Trumpet blaring, drums beating)" "Osgood:" "One person who truly understands the manipulation of human behavior and its terrifying potential is a rising politician in Germany." "Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party come to power in the early '30s by using every technique propaganda has to offer to influence the German people." "In films like this one he promotes the credo of the Nazi party:" "Beauty, strength, health-- the eugenic ideal." "It is in Hitler's campaign for power that the century's two opposing views of human behavior-- whether behavior is fixed or malleable-- come together with no apparent contradiction to the German people." "The irony is that Hitler himself believing in racial superiority used social manipulation constantly to convince people to do what he wanted in the service of racial superiority." "So his propaganda..." "He molded people in the direction that he saw them, that he wanted them to go he molded them through demonstrations, through rallies through propagandistic messages, through the film and art." "He molded people..." "That at the same time he was telling them:" ""You are biologically determined." "You are what you are, and you're not going to change."" "Osgood:" "Propaganda is just the beginning of the Nazi agenda." "First, they offer "fitter" families financial rewards for having lots of better babies." "Next, they start to rid Germany of people they feel will poison the race." "By mid-1extreme sterilization I aws partly modeled on American eugenic policies." "Eugenicists thought that sterilization would stop the proliferation of undesirable aspects of the population by preventing the birth-- in blunt terms-- of folks they find as undesirable would be the neatest solution." "And they would say that you do the society a favor by not reproducing." "Osgood:" "By the early 1940s" "Hitler's plan to purify germanic culture escalates." "No longer is it only a matter of sterilizing "tainted" individuals." "Now those groups considered a menace to the race-- like Jews, homosexuals and gypsies-- must be segregated, then sent to death camps to be killed." "By 1945, millions have died in the name of eugenics." "But in the end, the story of eugenics would prove the opposite of its core belief:" "That human behavior is biologically determined fixed and unchanging." "Instead it shows that people can be so malleable they can learn to do just about anything no matter how ous." "Harrington:" "The excesses of Hitler's Germany-- the fact that mass murder, that genocide had been committed in the name of racial purity in the name of a eugenically inspired racial cleansing-- was very frightening to people even to people that previously may have been attracted" "to a kind of idealism that was also part of the idea of eugenics." "And so you see in the years after world war ii a real pulling back from explanations of mental illness of intelligence, of all sorts of behaviors rooted in genetic understandings and a turn instead towards environmental understandings." "In the 1950s millions of Americans scanned the daily papers for the latest advice from "dear Abby" or Ann landers." "These twin sisters from sioux city, Iowa are the most popular advice columnists in the country." "Americans love advice." "They're hell-bent on self-improvement optimistic about their prospects and guided by a near-religious belief that they can always change for the better." "The opposite view-- that behavior is fixed at birth and can't be changed-- is still associated with Nazi Germany where eugenics was used to justify genocide." "So Americans embrace scientists who believe the opposite-- that when it comes to ironment t hat counts and virtually anything is possible." "These are optimistic times in 1945." "The soldiers who fought against totalitarianism overseas are returning home to the most powerful nation in the world." "Returning to lives interrupted..." "To girlfriends..." "To families left behind." "With the war finally over and victory won anything, and everything, seems possible." "Maher:" "People thought that after the stunning achievements of science and technology in the victory of world war ii that there was, in principle, no limit to what it could do now in the interest of the good life after the war." "The technology that had allowed us to win the war to defeat Hitler, to defeat the Nazis this technology could now be put into the service of liberating individuals of helping them develop themselves." "So it was a translation, I think of technology from an emphasis on weaponry to a technology on an emphasis on the human spirit and the development of human nature." "And we could translate that expertise from one domain to the other." "This setup makes any day wash day for me." "And I can do my drying in any kind of weather." "Osgood:" "By the 1950s many Americans develop a nearly insatiable appetite for all the new things that can be manufactured, bought, sold and consumed." "Singer:" "We see the idea that we could engineer the household." "We could engineer the family." "We could engineer allociety ." "Osgood:" "While some scientists engineer shiny new consumer goods for an eager public" "Harvard psychologist b.F. Skinner seeks nothing less than the engineering of human nature." "In experiments with subjects as simple as pigeons" "Skinner declares that with the right social engineering we can create a new breed of human being." "Skinner is firmly in the behaviorist tradition pioneered by John Watson in the 1920s." "Like Watson, Skinner contends that with the right tools we can predict and control behavior." "Skinner really inherited the mantle from Watson of behaviorism in this country but it's kind of interesting to think about how there's a subtle difference in the way they went about it." "Watson, as we know ended up becoming an advertising executive ended up embracing the American value system as it existed." "Skinner was different." "Skinner was a visionary." "Skinner felt that through behaviorism he could influence the world towards a greater humanity-- not meet humanity where it was, but take humanity to a new place through the principles of behaviorism." "Osgood:" "Picking up where Watson left off" "Skinner wants to do the rigorous science to prove that environment is everything." "Change the environment, he argues and you can change the individual..." "Or, in Skinner's case, the pigeon." "Maher:" "Skinner himself was a born gadgeteer." "He had in his own early years..." "As a boy, for example, he Dev ways" " as a boy, for example, I think it was Cranberries--e- from unripe Cranberries." "He invented a Cannon that would shoot things over his neighbor's fence." "This was the kind of man he was." "He was developing new ways to do everyday things in ways that were more comfortable, more efficient." "Osgood:" "During world war ii" "Skinner had developed a pigeon guidance device for the U.S. military." "While the Russians had dogs carrying bombs and the swedes had seals to blow up mines" "Skinner had a plan of his own:" "Teaching pigeons to guide missiles to an enemy target." "At the time, however the ad no missiles to guide." "But Skinner's pigeon research did not go to waste." "He develops a system called "operant conditioning"" "to prove that a behavior will be repeated by a subject when rewarded." "Repetition leads to reinforcement..." "Reinforcement to changes in behavior." "Announcer:" "This hungry pigeon is moving about more or less at random." "Sometimes it turns its head to the left." "When it does, we reinforce that movement by giving the pigeon access to a dish of grain." "Osgood:" "Skinner then waits for it to turn further." "Again, more food." "Ultimately the pigeon will turn in a complete circle having learned that only when he turns will he be rewarded." "Singer:" "What Skinner was able to do in very carefully controlled studies with animal models was to demonstrate that whole chains of behaviors could be built step-by-step so that literally you could teach a pigeon to do complicated behaviors that no one would have predicted possible." "Osgood:" "And Skinner believes that if it works for pigeons, why not people?" "In Skinner's mind, behavior is behavior up and down the evolutionary scale and it is all learned." "One of the great successes is in education." "People are taught to do more complicated tasks than anyone had thought possible by breaking down behavior into small steps" "the essence of Skinner's work was that we could manipulate the environment in ways that would permit us to produce any kind of behavior that we wished and we could develop individuals in ways that made every possible future open to them." "Osgood:" "The idea that anything is possible has enormous appeal in the '50s-- a time when the country is changing at a mind-boggling pace." "It's the baby-boom era." "Mothers who worked during the war are staying at home to raise kids." "With economic growth and unprecedented mobility young couples are moving around the country living far from their parents and extended families." "Mothers wanting child-rearing advice in this brave new world may not be able to turn to their own mothers." "And his popular book." "Dr. Benjamin Spock offers advice to millions of worried young parents about how to raise their kids in the proper environment." "He covers everything from diapers to discipline borrowing ideas more from Freud than from Skinner." "His parenting manual sells more copies than any book in history save one-- the Bible." "Woman:" "Dr. Spock appealed to the notion that parents and experts were kind of in the child-nurture business together that they were cooperating to produce healthy children, Democratic personalities and that child-rearing manuals likebaby and child care could be a useful aid to those kind of home-front scientists." "Osgood:" "Home-front scientists hungry for expert advice." "And popular television satisfies them by bringing the latest in lab science right into their living rooms." "Announcer:" "Conquest--the search for new knowledge about our universe, our world and ourselves." "This monkey is an orphan separated from his mother since the day of his birth." "Literally his life hangs by a thread-- a soft cheesecloth pad that is his only companion, his only comfort." "Once a day, the pad is removed for cleaning." "Osgood:" "This is the laboratory of psychologist Harry Harlow." "Announcer:" "...Is troubled, distressed." "Osgood:" "He is studying monkeys to better understand human relationships." "Announcer:" "He may die for want of love." "Osgood:" "Harlow believes he can use science to study love." "With a series of pioneering experiments he explores territory where few scientists have ventured." "Herman:" "Harlow said that there was such a thing as a science of love, for example-- that love, the kind of intimacy that characterized relationships between mothers and infants-- although in his case he studied monkeys-- that you literally could move love into a laboratory" "put it under a microscope." "Osgood:" "Harlow is studying love because he believes it makes an indelible impact on a young life." "The relationship between a mother and her child-- what Harlow calls our earliest social environment-- could hold the key to explaining behavior throughout life." "Harlow designs a set of ingenious experiments:" "He raises a baby monkey allowing it to choose between two surrogate mothers:" "And a cloth mother that doesn't-- a cloth mother that Harlow thinks might provide something else:" "Comfort and love." "Announcer:" "Here's baby 106 weaned on a wire mother." "He's going to the wire mother." "Osgood:" "But this infant quickly runs to the cloth mother where he will stay for the next 18 hours, cuddling..." "In Harlow's mind, choosing nurturing over sustenance." "In another experiment, Harlow creates a fearful situation." "Whom does the infant turn to now?" "Announcer:" "Let's find out what his reactions to his mother are when we frighten him." "He's scared, all right and he does what any child will do in a similar situation:" "He was runningtohis mother to touch her to drive away his fear." "(Screeching)" "Osgood:" "To Harlow, there is something about the experience of comfort and love-- even more than food-- that seems crucial to all these monkeys." "But what happens when the infant is raised alone without any mother at all, wire or cloth?" "In this situation, the orphan monkey stays alone." "He won't even go to the cloth mother when frightened but retreats into his own world." "Harlow believes he has shown how want of love can damage an infant for life and he worries the same is true for people." "In Harry Harlow's experiment was that early experience and the environment were crucial to the healthy development of the infant child and that in a sense, if you messed up if the right kind of maternal presence was not there" "during the critical years, then that infant might grow up to be an adult incapable of forming healthy relationships with other kinds of people." "Osgood:" "While Harlow feels that a bad environment can damage you there are others who believe that a therapeutic environment could provide the cure." "Chief among them are psychoanalysts." "By the 1950s, psychoanalysis has taken America by storm even though Freud himself had died over a decade earlier." "Woman:" "There's a fundamental optimism in American society that says that it's possible to fix almost any problem." "And the attitude of psychoanalysis that ultimately every difficulty could be understood seen as meaningful and potentially, at least, changed was something that was very appealing to Americans." "Osgood:" "Freud originally designed psychoanalysis to help neurotic individuals-- essentially normal people disabled by inner conflicts." "But his American disciples herwise." "One of the questions of the 1950s was how powerful would psychoanalysis be as an intervention, as a therapy?" "Was it only going to be a therapy for the worried-well for the mildly neurotic, for the anxious?" "Or could it really pack a sufficient therapeutic punch to help the most brutally mentally ill of our society the schizophrenics?" "Osgood:" "One of the psychoanalysts who believes it can is frieda fromm-reichmann." "Trained first in Germany as a neurologist she believes deeply that inside every patient no matter how seriously disturbed" "if the treatment is right." "Hornstein:" "She developed this attitude partly having worked with brain-injured patients in world war I where even those patients who had been hit by shells and gassed were people who could recover to a certain extent." "And her whole approach to them was based on their potential for recovery not for what was damaged." "She applied this same orientation and always searched for the part of the patient that was still intact." "Osgood:" "When fromm-reichmann emigrates to the United States" "built as a resort in the 1890s on the outskirts of Washington, D.C." "It is later converted into a mental hospital." "By the 1950s, Chestnut lodge is one of a handful of private psychls in the country which offers psychotherapy as its primary treatment." "Only the well-heeled can afford to come here and the waiting list is long." "Here psychotherapy ais used to treat psychotics." "W that the environmental camp will face its greatest challenge." "Man:" "Chestnut lodge was a strange place almost a mythical one because we had fairly good evidence that they really could make a therapeutic impact that was significant on schizophrenic patients simply by psychotherapy alone." "Osgood:" "Schizophrenia-- an illness marked by a loss of contact with reality by hallucinations, voices, paranoia." "It is not well understood in the 1950s when a young girl from Brooklyn arrives, seeking help." "Joanne Greenberg waited three years she finally enters two days after her 16th birthday." "She would later write about her illness and treatment in a best-selling book,I never promised you a rose garden." "Greenberg:" "I had no idea of what was going on on the outside but I was trying with everything I had and I had been since the age of six to try and make it right, to try and fix it." "I think the worst fear somehow is not to be all right and it's only later when you finally say a) You are never going to be all right it is never going to be all right that you say, "well, okay, let it, let it all go."" ""Tell them about the blood coming out of the faucets."" "I'd see people walking along who were just masses of maggots." "All right, you know, tell them about it." "Well, I did." "Osgood:" "Fromm-reichmann meets with joanne daily." "She treats her with a variation of the so-called "talking cure."" "Sitting with her patients-- listening, talking-- even while they were hallucinating withdrawn, recalcitrant." "Man:" "It was a very simple idea-- talk to patients." "Let them talk to you." "Take them seriously, treat them as human beings." "People were not just struggling with psychosis, with insanity." "They also had nonpsychotic aspects to their minds to their person and that if you could hold onto that aspect you could make a difference." "Greenberg:" "I had therapy four times a week." "But for those years that I was in the hospital that's all I did, and that took everything I had." "It's a very, very difficult process." "My Ally had a first-rate mind and would not allow me to get away with much." "She was trying to elicit from me things about my life that counted in the way I saw reality." "It doesn't sound like much-- you tell the doctor things and the doctor hears and listens but I think it reroutes your brain." "I think it reroutes your sense of reality." "I think it rewires you..." "(Laughs) Somehow uh... because when that change happens..." "It's a profound change." "Osgood:" "Joanne Greenberg leaves Chestnut lodge three years after she arrived." "Twice she returns for short stays." "But ultimately joanne goes to college, marries, raises her children and writes." "For joanne Greenberg fromm-reichmann's talking cure was enough." "But this turns out to be unusual." "Most psychotics treated solely by talking therapy eventually relapse." "So, even under the best of circumstances with the most committed clinicians ho believe with the most committed the environment can curers w only achieve occasional success." "And in the United States in the 1950s most of the severely mentally ill are not in the best hospitals under the best circumstances." "They end up in state mental institutions." "Here there is a different theoretical orientation one rooted in biology, but again with little success." "Mcglashan:" "They believed that severe mental illness were basically organic neurological disorders;" "essentially irreversible, like most neurologic disorders and that the victims, the patients to be taken care of and often taken care of for the rest of their lives." "Lehmann:" "The patients were doing their own thing." "Her lehmann:" "The patients were dsitting on the floor.E eit staring at the ceiling, listening to voices." "I remember in one big ward where about 150 people were sitting the attendant every 20 minutes or half an hour he would clap his hands and then everybody would get up around the ward, hewhich was quite big,s and then once or twiceld get up" "and then he clapped again and they would sit down." "That's to give them some exercise." "Not outside because all the wards were locked completely locked." "Osgood:" "Doctors offer what they can:" "They douche, spray, shock, operate." "Patients sit in carbon dioxide chambers;" "in refrigerated rooms;" "Their teeth are pulled;" "their blood is let;" "Their brains are sliced." "But the problem of treating the desperately ill does not abate." "Neither side in the ongoing battle-- at Chestnut lodge or in the state mental hospital-- seems to have the answer." "The great challenge in the history of psychiatry is that a given treatment has always worked for some patients and not for others." "Is that a given treatment has always worked for some patients every treatment that you can discuss however crazy it now sounds to us or however thoughtful worked for some people and not for others." "Doctors would try whatever seemed most successful to them." "I remember a student group went through the hospital on a sight-seeing tour-- medical students-- and they saw patients gesticulating to the ceiling and talking to their voices, and they turned to me, one and asked, "will there ever be kind of a pill" ""that we'd give these people that would stop this terrible torture they have?"" "And I patronizingly smiled, and I said" ""well, it won't be a pill, but somehow we'll probably learn how to do better than we do now."" "But, you know, it seemed to be ridiculous." "Osgood:" "But in 1952, in France the seemingly ridiculous is pursued anyway." "Here in Paris, at a general-practice hospital an accidental discovery leads to research on a radically new treatment a treatment that might not only give new hope to patients but also revolutionize the way psychiatry looks at mental illness." "It begins with a surgeon named Henri laborit in search of a medication that will calm his patients before surgery." "He adapts an existing compound by adding an antihistamine." "He finds that the new drug, called chlorpromazine or largactil, does quiet his patients." "And so he proposed to some psychiatrist friends of his that hey, maybe this drug might be useful for your terribly crazy patients because it seems to have this favorable effect." "And it was on that basis that this drug was first tried with people with." "Osgood:" "The first test is tried here as in the rest of Europe schizophrenia is considered a neurological disorder-- one that no amount of talking can cure." "Psychiatrists Jean delay and Pierre deniker head up the first trial." "Pierre pichot is part of their team." "Pichot:" "In psychiatry, we didn't know about the mechanism-- biological mechanism of the mental disorders." "So, uh, everything was tried just by, as you say, serendipity." "Maybe if something has a sedative effect it could sedate and maybe do something else." "Osgood:" "Delay and deniker realize quite rapidly that they are onto something momentous." "They report a transformation of their schizophrenic patients and the sudden disappearance of their hallucinations and voices." "Chlorpromazine and its pioneering doctors receive wide notice in franceop e and across the Atlantic in north America where psychiatrist heinz lehmann first hears about it." "Lehmann:" "I heard about it through an arrogant..." "What I thought then to be an arrogant and utterly unfounded statement from the detail man of a pharmaceutical company." "Usually I threw this literature away but those I took up the next time I had time for reading and that was on a Sunday morning in the bathtub." "On nurses at his hospital in Canada." "This is common practice in this pre-sputnik era of scientific research." "After that, his psychotic patients." "Lehmann:" "After two weeks two of the patients went into remission-- were completely free of symptoms." "Now, that I'd never seen." "It isn't in the textbooks either and it was what the French had described." "Um..." "I didn't believe it." "I thought it was a fluke." "But then, after three or four weeks quite a few more patients were symptom-free." "We had something that would turn it off like a water tap." "Symptoms would disappear whether you understood them or not no matter what the dynamics might have been." "It was like taking an aspirin for a toothache-- it just cut it off." "It didn't cure the toothache or the bad tooth but the symptoms disappeared completely." "Osgood:" "It is a new kind of treatment:" "A medication for the mind." "Before, they had only barbiturates which would knock patients out." "Now they have a drug that reduces psychosis without reducing the level of consciousness." "It is a whole new kind of pharmacy-- one that seems to target just the disease." "In a sense, the drug treatment of schizophrenia happened like all of the treatments of schizophrenia-- that you are working from desperation and if something looks like it might make an effect you try it because you haven't got anything to lose." "And so they tried it, and this time it... it worked." "Osgood:" "And chlorpromazine is just the beginning." "From pills for the severely mentally ill to tranquilizers for the mildly anxious." "From lithium and reserpine in the 1950s to miltown and valium by the 1960s." "Medications for the mind become a new part of American life." "How any of these drugs work, no one knows at first." "But there's no doubt that somehow the drugs change behavior by altering the brain." "The brain is the key." "The psychotropic drugs had effectively been discovered empirically." "No one knew why they worked, but they did work." "So the next question was:" "Why did they work?" "Osgood:" "In laboratories all over the world from Sweden to the United States scientists are trying to answer this question." "Solomon snyder is one of them." "In 1975, snyder and his colleagues embark on a series of animal experiments at Johns Hopkins university to see how chlorpromazine works." "He injects rats with the drug to see how it affects the brain." "What he discovers is a change in brain chemistry." "Chlorpromazine seems to affect one chemical in particular called dopamine." "The brain-- of a rat or a human-- is made up of these kinds of chemicals called neurotransmitters." "Neurotransmitters allow brain cells to communicate with each other, making up an intricate network." "Ultimately, what snyder's experiments and others like his show is that there is an intimate connection between neurotransmitters and behavior." "Betdopamine is linkedters with schizophrenia." "Other experiments link the neurotransmitter serotonin with depression..." "Acetylcholine with memory." "In fact, these neurotransmitters and the chemical reactions they produce in the brain are what cause behavior, normal and abnormal." "The realization that the brain works on the basis of chemical signals which are dynamic and which are changing all the time represented a major revolution in biology represented a major revolution in biologys analogous to the revolution that Galileo ushered in centuries ago." "No longer could we regard the brain as an unchanging, immutable switchboard with which we were blessed or cursed forever." "The chemical hypothesis of brain function and brain messages meant that we could understand behavior and that we might be able to change behavior." "The discovery that we are people with brains and that brains are regulated by various biological processes has certainly shaken the older view that we really are spiritual beings and that brains be damned." "They're just kind of the hardware-- like our muscles and our heart, etc.-- that we need to be spiritual beings." "The fact that we know that we have brains and that we can radically influence the way we think by ingestion of certain chemicals-- certain pure chemicals that we know the identity of-- has really changed our conception of ourselves" "and there's no going back." "Much as some might wish it, there is no going back at all." "The chemical revolution of the 1970s begets a whole new biology of behavior-- a biology of thought, a biology of emotion." "Some scientists begin to ask this:" "If the brain can be physically changed by pills like these can it also be changed just by experience?" "One answer comes from this unassuming creature, a sea slug." "Its anatomy is a world apart from ours but its biochemistry is similar enough to run a crucial experiment." "Beginning in the 1970s work with slugs demonstrates that it is possible to physically change the brain's biochemistry just through learning;" "that the brain does, in fact, respond to experience and is actually changed by it." "Of course, a slug is..." "Well, just a slug, not a person but it does prove that experience can never again be so easily divorced from biology." "It's the beginning of a new, revolutionary way of thinking about behavior-- a new synthesis, putting to rest the old dichotomy between nature and nurture-- a synthesis that would even include genetics." "(Choir singing handel's "Messiah")" "Osgood:" "Salt lake city, Utah." "Home to the mormon church which has attracted settlers for over a hundred years." "A tight-knit community the mormons provide a natural laboratory for geneticists looking to see how traits are passed from generation to generation." "In the 1970s, the church decided to open its doors to scientists sharing its vast genealogical records." "Mormon leaders did two things for which geneticists will forever be thankful." "Ncouraged their followers for which geneticists to be fruitful and multiplyy e and, as part of church practice they urged them to keep fastidious records of their family histories." "Some go back as far as 150 years." "This is how human genetics has been studied throughout the century-- making inferences about patterns of inheritance by studying the ancestry of large families." "This is how the inheritance of diseases like a fatal blood disorder found among mormons is tracked." "Or the inheritance of behavioral disorders like manic depression, seen among the amish in Pennsylvania." "All this would change by the 1980s." "Scientists no longer have to rely solely on family records to understand genetics." "They have discovered ways to work with the genes themselves." "They can work with DNA-- the material that makes up genes that carries the blueprint for how each of us develops that provides the genetic instructions directing our brain chemistry." "Scientists, like Walter Gilbert at Harvard and David botstein at m.I.T." "Developed methods to decipher the 100,000 genes in each one of us." "This enables geneticists to detect patterns-- the DNA sequences that make individuals different." "Scientists can now pick out an anomalous gene, a mutation." "They can search for genes that cause diseases like cystic fibrosis;" "or ones that contribute to behavioral disorders like depression or Alzheimer's disease." "Man:" "Having the technology led to a very high level of excitement among the people in the field who were collecting families and studying the patterns of inheritance because now they were able to take all the information that they had put it together with the modern genetic technology" "and actually find a ne." "Osgood:" "The power of this new DNA technology is felt in Utah, in Pennsylvania even as far away as the mountains of Colombia in south America where in 1984 a chance encounter between neurologist Francisco lopera and a confused young Colombian patient" "leads to a search for a gene for Alzheimer's disease." "Man:" "Si, en mil novecientos ochenta y cuatro..." "Translator:" "In 1984, a patient from velmira came here with symptoms of progressive mental disorder and dementia." "It caught our attention that he was so young it caught our attention and were able to piece togethere went to velmira nine other cases of sick people in that family." "Osgood:" "In town after town, Dr. lopera hears stories of others with Alzheimer's, including Leonardo piedrahita whhe market with his daughter and grandson." "Leonardo was diagnosed with Alzheimer's at age 42-- in the prime of life." "Getting Alzheimer's this young is rare." "95% of the time, the disease strikes much later sometimes as much as 20 to 30 years later." "This disease emerges sometimes as much as 2so early in lifeter.Why is a mystery to the townspeople." "Some very interesting ideas about this d why one person would get the disease and another would not." "And one of the ideas which actually was quite interesting was that some families believed that if they touched a certain tree in a village they would get the disease but they didn't know which tree." "No era una creencia de todas las personas pero si habia algunas personas que tenian esa idea." "Translator:" "Not everyone believed that, but some did." "But others thought it was a punishment from god and a few thought it was hereditary because they had observed that a good number of family members got sick." "They called it "the idiocy of our family."" "...de nuestra familia." "El tres con El cuatro." "Sigue." "Osgood:" "Alzheimer's is devastating regardless of who gets it or why." "Leonardo's disease is so advanced he cannot even perform the simplest of mental tasks." "Pero es que no veo... ojala." "No, no, no." "Lopera:" "Pegue El dos con El tres." "El dos con El tres." "Si, si." "Osgood:" "This disease of the brain robs people of their memories their minds and ultimately their personalities." "Con una linea." "Pero en angostura tambien tenemos una familia que les empieza a los 61 anos." "Osgood:" "Ken kosik is a neurobiologist who has come from Boston to collaborate with lopera because of the unique population in Columbia." "Their focus is an isolated region called antioquia where there's an extraordinary concentration of patients like Leonardo with early-onset Alzheimer's which makes it a natural laboratory to study the genetics of the disease." "Woman:" "Rocio." "Man:" "Rocio." "Osgood:" "Lopera's team meets with the piedrahitas to map their genealogy." "Eh... no." "Ah, pero, osea no, sin contar los que hay muertos ya?" "Osgood:" "Leonardo's children report that their grandfather also had Alzheimer's as did three of their uncles, all before the age of 50." "Theirs is only one of 12 extended families in this region" "4,000 people in all-- touched by the illness." "Lopera's team traces their lineage back six generations to Spain in the 1780s." "In the process, the team discovers something even the families themselves did not know:" "These families are all related." "They all share the same genetic inheritance which the scientists surmise must also include a genetic predisposition for this rare form of Alzheimer's." "When we began this search for a gene we knew there was a gene causing this problem and it was very, very clear." "It would have been clear 100 years ago because it was obvious that the gene was inherited generation after generation and it was equally prevalent in men and women and it was also the case that about 50% of the offspring would get the illness;" "are textbook features that about 50% of the offspring of a genetic illness.;" "Those so we knew there was a gene here." "There was no problem with that." "The problem was to find that gene." "¿De que?" "Duele un poquito." "Osgood:" "First, researcher Lucia madrigal gathers blood samples from Leonardo and all the other members of this great extended family." "Then, using modern DNA techniques they search for the culprit gene." "While lopera's team searches, so do other scientists studying family groups in other parts of the world." "In 1995, a group of Canadian scientists is the first to succeed." "They find and isolate the gene responsible for inherited Alzheimer's." "Kosik:" "This made our work much easier were able kosik:" "This madto hone in onch easier exactly where this mutation was and we were able to very rapidly now find which patients in medellin carried the mutation and which did not." "Osgood:" "For those patients with the defective gene the researchers can chart the course of Alzheimer's as it ravages the brain-- sometimes even before symptoms become apparent in a person's behavior." "En todos estan vemos El cerebro, ve?" "El cerebro, El cerebro..." "Si." "Esos Van de derecha a izquierda..." "Osgood:" "All this is possible because of advances over the past 20 years in brain-scanning technology another major breakthrough in the study of human behavior permitting scientists to peer inside the living brain and see the mind at work..." "The brain in action." "The gene for early-onset Alzheimer's has been found within Leonardo piedrahita's lifetime." "Esta bien bonita." "Osgood:" "There is even a test to see which of his children has inherited the gene." "There are medications available and in the works to treat this devastating illness." "This is a giant scientific leap in a short time." "Osgood:" "But having the gene is one thing the emergence of the disease itself, another." "Scientists are a long way off from understanding the cascade of events that lead from a mistake in the gene that you were born with se that emerges that lead from a mistake in the gene40 years later.Born with" "a disease that attacks the qualities in us that are most human." "Harrington:" "The power of looking at Alzheimer's as a case study here is that it really gives you an opportunity to see how you can study human behavior from soup to nuts-- from the genetic level through the brain level" "to the behaviol, to the experiential level and back down the other direction-- and to do it around a..." "An area of human experience tical to our understanding of what we're all about:" "Our capacity to remember to remember the story of our lives." "Osgood:" "Geneticists won a great victory when they discovered one gene for rare familial Alzheimer's but when it comes to the more common old-age variety it's a different story." "Scientists are identifying multiple genes-- genes that don't necessarily lead to the disease but put people at risk for developing it." "The same holds true for other mental or behavioral disorders such as schizophrenia-- as common today as it was in the 1950s." "Here, too, multiple risk genes may be responsible." "And life experience may also play a role." "For example, being severely malnourished during prenatal development may trigger schizophrenia years later." "Ideas about the causes of human behavior continue to be refined as in the case of shell shock, for example..." "Today called post-traumatic stress disorder." "Why do some soldiers break down while others can withstand the horrors around them?" "Scientists now speculate that some are more susceptible perhaps genetically predisposed to succumb to the traumas of war." "And yet these soldiers still need the trigger of combat to cause their breakdown-- biologyandexperience." "Most situations, however, are not as radical as war and most behaviors are not as extreme as shell shock or schizophrenia." "It is in the more routine encounters of everyday life that scientists of human behavior will find their greatest challenge." "The more we learn about our biology and the environment the more we realize how difficult it is to understand their interplay." "Kosik:" "Scientists have made enormous progress in the past century." "We know nearly all of our genes." "We know a lot about the molecules in the brain and how they work and how they build a brain." "We know a bit about how the environment interfaces with these genes and the molecules to actually affect their expression." "What the challenge is for scientists now is to understand how all of these molecules and genes and environment work together to build something as complex as human behavior which is clearly more than the sum of the parts." "That's really the challenge of the 21st century."