I did my undergrad at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois (BA, 1976 Chemistry). I'm told that NU is a good place to get an education nowadays, but is very expensive. When I was there, however, many of the faculty members with whom I interacted had little or no interest in teaching undergraduates. I'll even name names. Faculty who had no interest teaching undergrads included Culver, Heithaus, Beattie, (Biological Sciences), Shriver, Nitzan, Klotz, Van Duyne, (Chemistry), Margoliash, Lorand, Dumas, (Biochemistry/Molecular Biology), Joravsky, (History) Roebuck, (Classics, by then, he was simply reading aloud from his venerable book), and several purveyors of English, Anthropology, and Political Science whose names I no longer recall. My favorite Chinese Restaurant, however, was called the Phoenix Inn, a pleasant memory.
It didn't matter. Useless pseudo-educators at NU provided reading lists, reserve lists, and specific literature. There was a big library. I simply attended lectures taught by real educators and labs where my absence could be noted. I only showed up at time-wasters to turn in bluebooks. I read every word "assigned" to me (and more!) at NU and avoided attending half of my classes. I learned how to educate myself. Grad school, intellectually, was no big deal (PhD 1981, Illinois-UC Chemistry). The skill of self education made my truncated professional career possible and successful.
Don't blame your teachers.
Today, we have broadband internet, and access to knowledge aggregators like EBSCO, MEDLINE, Google, and Thompson. For a motivated individual, this current state of affairs means essentially all of human knowledge is available for study. Who needs motor neurons? Why use this cyber-power to tweet and share pictures of boobs and beer pong?
Here, check this out. This is cold war history...this'll get ya started...
Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A.
By TIM WEINER
Published: March 10, 1999 New York Times
WASHINGTON, March 9 — Sidney Gottlieb, who presided over the Central Intelligence Agency's cold-war efforts to control the human mind and provided the agency poisons to kill Fidel Castro, died on Sunday in Washington, Va. He was 80 and had spent his later years caring for dying patients, trying to run a commune, folk dancing, consciousness-raising and fighting lawsuits from survivors of his secret tests.
Friends and enemies alike say Mr. Gottlieb was a kind of genius, striving to explore the frontiers of the human mind for his country, while searching for religious and spiritual meaning in his life. But he will always be remembered as the Government chemist who dosed Americans with psychedelics in the name of national security, the man who brought LSD to the C.I.A.
In the 1950's and early 1960's, the agency gave mind-altering drugs to hundreds of unsuspecting Americans in an effort to explore the possibilities of controlling human consciousness. Many of the human guinea pigs were mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes -- ''people who could not fight back,'' as one agency officer put it. In one case, a mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days.
Wikipaedia entry:
Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 – March 7, 1999) was an American chemist probably best-known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control program MKULTRA.
Gottlieb was born in the Bronx under the name Joseph Scheider. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. A stutterer from childhood, Gottlieb got a master's degree in speech therapy. He also had a club foot, but this did not stop him from practicing folk dancing, a lifelong passion.
In 1951, Gottlieb joined the Central Intelligence Agency. As a poison expert, he headed the chemical division of the Technical Services Staff (TSS). Gottlieb became known as the "Black Sorcerer" and the "Dirty Trickster." He supervised preparations of lethal poisons and experiments in mind control.
In April 1953 Sidney Gottlieb headed the secret Project MKULTRA which was activated on the order of CIA director Allen Dulles. Gottlieb was known for administration of LSD and other psycho-active drugs to unwitting subjects and for financing psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything." He sponsored physicians such as Ewen Cameron and Harris Isbell in controversial psychiatric research that used unwitting humans as guinea pigs. Many people suffered serious adverse affects consequent of research financed by Gottlieb and the Rockefeller Foundation.
In March 1960, under The Cuban Project, a CIA plan approved by President Eisenhower and under the direction of CIA Directorate for Plans, Richard M. Bissell, Gottlieb came up with ideas to spray Fidel Castro's television studio with LSD and to saturate Castro's shoes with thallium so that the hair of his beard would fall out. Gottlieb also hatched schemes to assassinate Castro, including the use of a poisoned cigar, a poisoned wetsuit, an exploding conch shell, and a poisonous fountain pen.
He also tried to have Iraq's General Abdul Karim Qassim's handkerchief contaminated with botulinum. Less known was an operation within the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam where a team of CIA psychologists performed mind control experiments on NLF suspects being detained at Bien Hoa Prison outside of Saigon.
Gottlieb is said to have played a role in funding investigation into paranormal phenomena, including remote viewing.
...as my Japanese colleague Tochiro used to say, "....ahhhhh....many interesting things....go to library, bye-bye...."
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