Regrets? They've had a few
How does it feel to invent something you later wish you hadn't? Simon Hattenstone talks to the people who know.
November 25, 2010 — 3.00am
The labradoodle
If Wally Conron had known what was going to become of the labradoodle, he wouldn't have bred the dog in the first place. It was 22 years ago and Conron, now 81, was working as the breeding manager for the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia when his boss set him a tough task. A blind woman from Hawaii had written asking if they could provide a guide dog that would not shed hair, because her husband was allergic to it. ''I said, 'Oh yes, this will be a piece of cake. The standard poodle is a working dog, it doesn't shed hair, it'll be great.' I tried 33 in the course of three years and they all failed. They just didn't make a guide dog.''
Conron decided there was one possibility left: take his best labrador bitch and mate it with a standard poodle. They created three cross-breed puppies that needed to be boarded out to be trained and socialised but nobody would take them; everyone wanted a pure-bred. And that's when Conron came up with the name labradoodle. ''I went to our PR team and said, 'Go to the press and tell them we've invented a new dog, the labradoodle.' It was a gimmick and it went worldwide. No one wanted a cross-breed but the following day we had hundreds of calls from people wanting these master dogs.''
Grand designs that brought regret ... the labradoodle and the Kalashnikov AK47.
The labradoodle proved to be a brilliant dog for the blind and the woman in Hawaii was happy. So what was the problem?
It's how the dog has been used and abused and sold under false pretences, Conron says. ''When the pups were five months old, we sent clippings and saliva to Hawaii to be tested with this woman's husband. Of the three pups, he was not allergic to one of them. In the next litter I had, there were 10 pups but only three had non-allergenic coats. Now, people are breeding these dogs and selling them as non-allergenic and they're not even testing them.
''All these backyard breeders have jumped on the bandwagon and they're crossing any kind of dog with a poodle. They're selling them for more than a pure-bred is worth and they're not going into the backgrounds of the parents of the dogs. There are so many poodle crosses having fits, problems with their eyes, hips and elbows; a lot have epilepsy. There are a few ethical breeders but very, very few.''
Conron says that despite the fact the dogs have helped so many blind people, he regrets creating the first cross-breed. ''I released a Frankenstein. … People say 'aren't you proud of yourself?' and I say, 'not in the slightest. I've done so much harm to pure breeding.'''
The Kalashnikov
General Mikhail Kalashnikov, who was responsible for the AK-47 assault rifle, now the most widely used automatic rifle in the world, says he regrets that terrorists and gangsters use his weapon. ''It is painful for me to see when criminal elements of all kinds fire from my weapon. I created this weapon primarily to safeguard our fatherland,'' the Russian said on the eve of his 90th birthday last year.
C5 electric car
Sir Clive Sinclair remains best known for inventing what is widely regarded as a great British disaster: the C5, a one-seat electronic not-quite-car that has become an iconic image of technological failure. When it arrived on the market in 1985, it looked like nothing we'd seen before - and not necessarily in a good way. ''First of all, it was midwinter and there was snow on the ground,'' Sinclair says. ''And we threw it at the public without them being prepared for it … So it had a shock effect and that was bad news.''
That's not all that went wrong. The British Safety Council claimed it was unsafe. ''Absolute rubbish,'' Sinclair says. In fact, 25 years on, he believes the C5's time has come and he's developing a new prototype to be launched within a year. ''Technology has moved on quite a bit; there are new batteries available and I just rethought the thing. The C5 was OK but I think we can do a better job now.''
Electronic tag system
Professor Bob Gable is ashamed of what has become of the electronic tagging system he devised with his twin brother, Kirkland, in the mid-1960s. Both are professors in psychology, have law degrees and were motivated by hippie idealism. In 1964, tagging was invented as a system of positive reinforcement and the brothers are horrified that it is now used as a tool for punishment.
Bob says their work was influenced by American psychologist B. F. Skinner; Bob was taught by Skinner while Kirkland's adviser was Timothy Leary. ''We wanted to find a way of rewarding juvenile delinquents when they were doing what they were supposed to be doing; that is, going to school or to work or to a drug treatment centre. Just as Skinner rewarded pigeons.''
Over four years, they tagged 20 juvenile delinquents and compared their behaviour with a control group. They were then rewarded for being where they should be with, for example, tickets for a sports game or a free pizza. The results were impressive. ''We reduced the frequency of arrest and time in jail and when a crime did occur, they tended to be more creative and less violent.''
By the late '60s, the brothers had left Harvard and the experiment stopped. But 15 years later, electronic tagging came back - this time without the reward system. Bob says there are those who regard him and his brother as heroes because the tag has kept people out of prison but as far as the Gables are concerned, it's a gross misappropriation of the original concept. ''It's all using punishment.''
Are they disappointed because their tag was born of idealism? ''Yes - and it's not just idealism; it's also scientific fact that rewards and shaping behaviour works and that punishment in the long run is not very beneficial. When kids misbehave, we punish them; when countries misbehave, we bomb them. We just have this idea that we're going to suppress the bad behaviour and we don't take seriously how we ought to reward.''
Alexander Shulgin is known as the godfather of ecstasy. He lives with his wife, Ann, in Lafayette, California, and at 85 suffers severe short-term memory loss. Ann acts as a conduit between us - repeating my questions to him and his answers back to me.
Ecstasy was first synthesised in 1912 by the chemical company Merck but Shulgin resynthesised it in 1976 and was the first person to test it on a human: himself. Two years later, he wrote a paper with a colleague about the effect of MDMA, stating that it created ''an easily controlled altered state of consciousness with emotional and sensual overtones … it didn't have the other visual and auditory imaginative things that you often get from psychedelics. It opened up a person, both to other people and inner thoughts.'' He believed that with its unusual combination of effects (intoxication, clarity and loss of inhibition), it could be a useful drug in psychotherapy. And so it was, for a while. But then MDMA became ecstasy, the drug of choice for the rave generation, and in 1986 its use in the treatment of depression was banned by the US Drug Enforcement Agency. In 2000, US customs officials seized nearly 10 million pills.
Shulgin had his first psychedelic experience in 1960 and since then, he estimates, he has had another 4000. Some regard him as a holy man, some as a great scientist, others as a monster. The Daily Mail once ran a story headlined ''Has this man killed 100 British teenagers?''
Today, Shulgin has his doubts about the drug he championed - not because of its efficacy but because he believes people have abused it.
The problem started, he says, when clubbers began popping pills with reckless abandon. And once MDMA was made illegal, there was no way to monitor the quality of the drug. ''It made it impossible for people at raves to know whether they were getting MDMA. We never use the term ecstasy because it is meaningless; some ecstasy capsules have no MDMA in them whatsoever. So the so-called ecstasy has become a real menace.''
Dr Jay Chapman is sometimes referred to as the father of the lethal injection. ''It was not one of my purposes in life. It was something I was asked to do and I did it on the spur of the moment.''
It was 1977 and double murderer Gary Gilmore had just been executed in Utah. Faced with the option of firing squad or hanging, he had chosen the former but there had been an uproar among campaigners against the death penalty, denouncing the execution as inhumane.
A few days later, Chapman, who was Oklahoma's chief medical examiner, was asked if he had an opinion on how people should be put to death in a more humane fashion. He had strong opinions and suggested that a lethal injection would provide a much more palatable option. Chapman then created the formula - an ultra-short-acting barbiturate in combination with a paralytic agent and potassium chloride - to produce a quick death. Later, he set up a detailed protocol for the state of Oklahoma for the administration of the lethal injection. ''It's the standard protocol for anaesthesia carried to extremes,'' he says.
Why was he so keen on the lethal injection? Simple, he says. There were so many people on death row, living their lives as argument raged about the relative humanity of the means of execution. With a system that was quick, efficient and that involved minimal pain, he said natural justice would be restored and those on death row would die. And that, to Chapman, was what mattered.
Earlier this year, though, he announced that he regretted his role in creating the lethal injection. Has he had a change of heart on capital punishment? Yes, he says - in a way.
He says that as Oklahoma's chief medical examiner, he has witnessed many examples of man's inhumanity to man and he had believed that if the death penalty appeared to be carried out in a more humane fashion then more prisoners on death row would eventually be put to death. ''But there was a moratorium on executions .. They've been languishing there for 20-something years and that doesn't seem reasonable … If the death penalty is going to be assigned, it should be carried out. Justice delayed is justice denied.''
Life imprisonment is costly and pointless, Chapman says. ''There are some people who cannot live in society. And if that's the case, they should be eliminated.''
But the main reason he now has regrets, he says, is that over time, he has become convinced the lethal injection is too humane. ''I'm an eye-for-an-eye person. The lethal injection is too easy for some of them.''
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