Some years earlier, New Jersey’s own Thomas Edison came up with another variation on the all-through-the-body concept of the soul. Edison believed that living beings were animated and controlled by “life units,” smaller-than-microscopic entities that inhabited each and every cell and, upon death, evacuated the premises, floated around awhile, and eventually reassembled to animate a new personality—possibly another man, possibly an ocelot or a sea cucumber. Like other scientifically trained but mildly loopy[32] soul speculators, Edison strove to prove his theory through experimentation. In his Diary and Sundry Observations, Edison makes references to a set of plans for a “scientific apparatus” designed to communicate with these soullike agglomerations of life units.
“Why should personalities in another existence or sphere waste their time working a little triangular piece of wood over a board with certain lettering on it?” he wrote, referring to the Ouija boards then in fashion among spirit mediums. Edison figured that the life-unit entities would put forth some sort of “etheric energy,” and one need only amplify that energy to facilitate communication.
According to an April 1963 article in a journal called Fate, sent to me by Edison’s tireless biographer Paul Israel, Edison died before his apparatus could be built, but rumors of a set of blueprints persisted for years. One fine day in 1941, the story goes, an inventor for General Electric named J. Gilbert Wright decided to use the closest approximation of Edison’s machine—a séance and a medium—to contact the great inventor and ask him who had the plans. “You might try Ralph Fascht of 165 Pinehurst Avenue, New York, Bill Gunther of Consolidated Edison; his office is in the Empire State Building, or perhaps, best of all, Edith Ellis, 152 W. 58th St.,” came the reply, confirming not only the persistence of personality after death but the persistence of the pocket address book.
Wright tracked down Edith Ellis, who sent him to a Commander Wynne, in Brooklyn, said to have a tracing of the blueprints. The mysterious Commander Wynne not only had the plans but claimed to have assembled and tried out the device. Alas, he could not make it work, and neither could Wright. You, too, can build one and take it for a spin, because the Fate article includes a carefully labeled (“aluminum trumpet,” “wood plug,” “aerial”) drawing of the contraption. Wright and an associate, Harry Gardner, went on to invent their own device, an “ectoplasmic larynx,” consisting of a microphone, a loudspeaker, a “sound box,” and a cooperative medium with great quantities of patience.
Wright used the “larynx” to contact Edison, who, apparently having nothing better to do with his afterlife than chat with the nutters, offered helpful tips on how to improve the machine.
While we’re on the topic of supposedly straight-ahead but secretly loopy entities who’ve gotten hung up in the cellular soul area, let me tell you about a project funded and carried out by the U.S. Army. From 1981 to 1984, the U.S. Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) was run by a Major General Albert N. Stubblebine III. At some point during his tenure, Stubblebine commissioned a senior aide to try to replicate an experiment done by Cleve Baxter, inventor of the lie detector, which purported to show that the cells of a human being, removed from that human being’s being, were in some way still connected to, and able to communicate with, the mother ship. In the study, cells were taken from the inside of a volunteer’s cheek, centrifuged, and put in a test tube.
A readout from electrodes in the test tube was run through a sensor hooked up to the readout on a lie detector, which measures emotional excitation via heart rate, blood pressure, sweating, etc. (How you measure the vital signs on a slurry of cheek cells is beyond me, but this is the military and they know all manner of top-secret things.) So the volunteer was escorted to a room down the hall from his cheek cells and shown a disturbing videotape of unspecified violent scenes. The cells, it is said, registered a state of extreme agitation while their owner was watching the tape. The experiment was repeated at different distances over the course of two days. Even as far away as fifty miles, the cells felt the man’s pain.
I wanted very badly to see the report of this experiment, so I called INSCOM. I was referred to a gentleman in the history section. First the historian said that INSCOM didn’t keep records back that far. I didn’t need any of the man’s cheek cells to know he was lying. This is the U.S. government. They keep records of everything, in triplicate and from the dawn of time.
The historian explained that what General Stubblebine had been primarily interested in was not whether cells contain some sort of life unit or soul or cellular memory, but the phenomenon of remote viewing, wherein you can sit at your desk and call up images remote from you in time and space, like your missing cufflink or Iraqi ammunition depots or General Manuel Noriega’s secret hideaway. (There was actually an Army Remote Viewing Team for a while; the CIA also contracted remote viewers.) When Stubblebine retired from the army he served as chairman of the board at a company called PsiTech, from which you can hire remote viewers to help you with all your remote-locating needs.
Forgive me. I have wandered far afield from my topic. But wherever it is that I am and however I feel about it, I know that all cheek cells belonging to me within fifty miles of here feel the same way.
The modern medical community is on the whole quite unequivocal about the brain being the seat of the soul, the chief commander of life and death. It is similarly unequivocal about the fact that people like H are, despite the hoochy-koochy going on behind their sternums, dead. We now know that the heart keeps beating on its own not because the soul is in there, but because it contains its own bioelectric power source, independent of the brain. As soon as H’s heart is installed in someone else’s chest and that person’s blood begins to run through it, it will start beating anew—with no signals from the recipient’s brain.
The legal community took a little longer than the physicians to come around to the concept of brain death. It was 1968 when the Journal of the American Medical Association published a paper by the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death advocating that irreversible coma be the new criterion for death, and clearing the ethical footpath for organ transplantation. It wasn’t until 1974 that the law began to catch up. What forced the issue was a bizarre murder trial in Oakland, California.
The killer, Andrew Lyons, shot a man in the head in September 1973 and left him brain-dead. When Lyons’s attorneys found out that the victim’s family had donated his heart for transplantation, they tried to use this in Lyons’s defense: If the heart was stil beating at the time of surgery, they maintained, then how could it be that Lyons had killed him the day before? They tried to convince the jury that, technically speaking, Andrew Lyons hadn’t murdered the man, the organ recovery surgeon had. According to Stanford University heart transplant pioneer Norman Shumway, who testified in the case, the judge would have none of it. He informed the jury that the accepted criteria for death were those set forth by the Harvard committee, and that that should inform their decision. (Photographs of the victim’s brains “oozing from his skull,” to quote the San Francisco Chronicle, probably didn’t help Lyons’s case.) In the end, Lyons was convicted of murder. Based on the outcome of the case, California passed legislation making brain death the legal definition of death. Other states quickly followed suit.
32
People have trouble believing Thomas Edison to be a loopy individual. I offer as evidence the following passage on human memory, taken from his diaries: “We do not remember. A certain group of our little people do this for us. They live in that part of the brain which has become known as the ‘fold of Broca.’ …There may be twelve or fifteen shifts that change about and are on duty at different times like men in a factory…. Therefore it seems likely that remembering a thing is all a matter of getting in touch with the shift that was on duty when the recording was done.”