Electrical Breeding

Pre-natal influence was in the news last week. At Los Angeles City College, Psychologists Johnette Dispense and Richard T. Hornbeck injected small doses of electrical current in the uterus of female rats, then tested the maze-running intelligence of their offspring against that of undosed rats with the same fathers. Result: when a mother rat got a dose of one milliampere from the cathode (negative pole), the odds were 383-to-1 that her litter would be superior in intelligence; a dose of two milliamperes had the opposite effect--the litter was inferior (61-to-1). Doses from the anode (positive pole) seemed to have less effect--two milliamperes produced somewhat inferior litters, one milliampere made no visible difference.

Psychologists Dispense and Hornbeck could not explain their results but thought that most probably the current had produced chemical changes in the mother rats' hormones. They based this theory on evidence that 1) an electrical current in body fluids produces acid at the anode and alkali at the cathode, 2) douching female rats with acid and alkaline solutions seems to affect their offsprings' intelligence in much the same way as electricity.

Reporting their own and others' experiments in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Dispense and Hornbeck noted some other startling recent results in baby-influencing:

> Baby rats born and raised in cold rooms were smarter than those in hot rooms.

> Male and female rats which were given small doses of pituitary extract produced smart offspring.

>Rats were very fertile when they lived in a cage enclosed by a yellow light filter. Behind a blue filter, they had no young at all.

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