Erich Von Daniken - The Gold Of The Gods

6 - Rarities, Curiosities And Speculations
6 - Rarities, Curiosities And Speculations
In 1863 the American diplomat E.G. Squire found a human skull that was dated to about
2000 B.C. at Cuzco in the Andean plateau in Peru. A rectangular piece of bone had been
chiseled out of the skull. Squire gave his find to the French anthropologist Paul Broca
(1824-1880), who was the first man to localize the seat of speech in a convolution in the
front part of the brain (the convolution of Broca). Broca found six extremely fine wires
in the hollow skull and diagnosed a bone infection, which led him to conclude that an
operation had been performed on the skull during the patient's lifetime.
According to this, skull operations are by no means epoch-making surgical interventions
of our own time. The strange thing is that even modern men shudder when they read
reports about brain operations. Everyone should be pleased when medicine makes
progress which can liberate mankind from old afflictions. I should like to show that the
essential needs arising out of plans for future space travel are an important stimulus to
medical research.
Professor Robert Y. White, the neuro-surgeon, works in the Metropolitan General
Hospital, Cleveland, USA. The goal of this grand old man of brain surgery is to tackle
that scourge of mankind, the stroke, by operating on the brain. White builds on the
research of his colleagues at Keo University, Tokyo, who perform operations with the
brain chilled to a temperature of about 6ºC. With a body temperature of 36ºC. a surgeon
has three minutes at most in which to operate. For some years White experimented with
super cooled monkeys' brains. The news that during these experiments White had
succeeded in keeping the brain of a rhesus monkey alive for three days when separated
from its body hit the headlines in specialist medical journals. White kept the solo brain
supplied by attaching its blood-vessels to the carotid artery of a living member of the
same species. Herbert L. Schrader, who was present at one experiment, wrote:
"The isolated monkey's brain is alive. It emits electric currents ordering action like every
living brain. It can have sensations pain, fear ... Perhaps it sleeps as well, perhaps it
dreams. What is still left of the monkey's personality cannot see, cannot hear, cannot
smell, cannot feel. The brain can receive no information from the outside world, because
all the sensory nerves have been cut off short. Nor can it run away because it no longer
has a body to carry out its orders. But it can issue orders, for the nerve center is intact
and receives a good supply of blood-from the blood of another monkey. No one knows
what goes on in such a brain, for no one has managed to decipher the traces left by its
electric impulses. Consequently, even for the research worker it is only an organized
bundle of many millions of nerve cells which have a metabolism and send out currents."
Professor White's collaborators are of the opinion that the functions of a brain separated
from the body react more accurately and quicker than those of a brain "burdened" with
the whole organism. In its solo state it is still only a center of stored information that it