virgin island dolphin experiment

Margaret Howe Lovatt And The Government Experiment That Led Her To Intimate Relations With A Dolphin

In the mid-1960s, margaret howe lovatt was tasked with training and observing dolphins on st. thomas. over the years, she developed an intimate relationship with a dolphin named peter..

When a young Carl Sagan visited St. Thomas’ Dolphin Point laboratory in 1964, he likely didn’t realize how controversial the setting would become.

Sagan belonged to a secretive group called “The Order of the Dolphin” — which, despite its name, focused on searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Also in the group was the eccentric neuroscientist Dr. John Lilly. His 1961 quasi-sci-fi book Man and Dolphin highlighted the theory that dolphins wanted to (and likely could) communicate with humans. Lilly’s writings sparked a scientific interest in interspecies communication that set in motion an experiment that went a bit awry with a young woman named Margaret Lovatt.

Trying To Connect Dolphins And Humans

Astronomer Frank Drake headed the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. He’d spearheaded Project Ozma, the search for extraterrestrial life through radio waves emitted from other planets.

Upon reading Lilly’s book, Drake excitedly drew parallels between his own work and Lilly’s. Drake helped the doctor secure funding from NASA and other government entities in order to realize his vision: a communicative bridge between human and dolphin.

John Lilly then built a laboratory housing a workspace on the upper level and a dolphin enclosure on the bottom. Tucked away on the picturesque shore of the Caribbean, he called the alabaster building Dolphin Point.

When 23-year-old Margaret Howe Lovatt realized that the lab existed, she drove there out of sheer curiosity. She fondly remembered stories from her youth where talking animals were some of her favorite characters. She’d hoped to somehow witness the breakthrough that could see those stories become reality.

Arriving at the lab, Lovatt encountered its director, Gregory Bateson, a famous anthropologist in his own right. When Bateson inquired as to Lovatt’s presence, she replied, “Well, I heard you had dolphins … and I thought I’d come and see if there was anything I could do.”

Bateson allowed Lovatt to watch the dolphins. Perhaps wanting to make her feel useful, he asked her to take notes while observing them. Both he and Lilly realized her intuitiveness, despite any lack of training and offered her an open invitation to the lab.

Margaret Howe Lovatt Becomes A Diligent Researcher

Soon Margaret Howe Lovatt’s dedication to Dr. Lilly’s project intensified. She worked diligently with the dolphins, named Pamela, Sissy, and Peter. Through daily lessons, she encouraged them to create human-esque sounds.

But the process was becoming tedious with little indication of progress.

Margaret Howe Lovatt hated leaving in the evenings and still feeling that there was much work left to do. So she convinced Lilly to let her live in the lab, waterproofing the upper rooms and flooding them with a couple feet of water. This way, human and dolphin could occupy the same space.

Lovatt chose Peter for the revamped, immersive language experiment. They co-existed in the lab six days of the week, and on the seventh day, Peter spent time in the enclosure with Pamela and Sissy.

Through all Peter’s speech lessons and voice training, Lovatt learned that:

“when we had nothing to do was when we did the most … he was very, very interested in my anatomy. If I was sitting here and my legs were in the water, he would come up and look at the back of my knee for a long time. He wanted to know how that thing worked and I was so charmed by it.”

Charmed might not be the word to describe how Lovatt felt when Peter, an adolescent dolphin with certain urges, became a bit more… excited. She later told interviewers that he “would rub himself on my knee, my foot or my hand.” Moving Peter back down to the enclosure each time this happened became a logistical nightmare.

So, reluctantly, Margaret Lovatt decided to satisfy the sexual urges of the dolphin manually. “It was just easier to incorporate that and let it happen … it would just become part of what was going on, like an itch, just get rid of that scratch and we would be done and move on.”

Lovatt insists:

“It wasn’t sexual on my part … sensuous perhaps. It seemed to me that it made the bond closer. Not because of the sexual activity, but because of the lack of having to keep breaking. And that’s really all it was. I was there to get to know Peter. That was part of Peter.”

Meanwhile, Drake’s curiosity about Lilly’s progress grew. He sent one of his colleagues, the 30-year-old Sagan, to check the goings-on at Dolphin Point.

Drake was disappointed to learn that the nature of the experiment was not as he’d hoped; he’d expected progress in deciphering the dolphin language. This was likely the beginning of the end for Lilly and his crew’s funding. Nevertheless, Lovatt’s attachment to Peter grew, even as the project waned.

But by 1966, John Lilly was more enthralled with the mind-altering power of LSD than he was with dolphins. Lilly was introduced to the drug at a Hollywood party by the wife of Ivan Tors, the producer of the movie Flipper . “I saw John go from a scientist with a white coat to a full blown hippy,” Lillie’s friend Ric O’Barry recalled.

Lilly belonged to an exclusive group of scientists licensed by the government to research the effects of LSD. He dosed both himself and the dolphins at the lab. (Though not Peter, at Lovatt’s insistence.) Luckily the drug seemed to have little to no effect on the dolphins. However, Lilly’s new cavalier attitude towards the animal’s safety alienated Bateson and put a stop to the lab’s funding.

Thus Margaret Howe Lovatt’s live-in experience with a dolphin ended. “That relationship of having to be together sort of turned into really enjoying being together, and wanting to be together, and missing him when he wasn’t there,” she reflects. Lovatt balked at Peter’s departure to Lilly’s cramped Miami lab with little sunlight.

A few weeks later, some terrible news: “John called me himself to tell me” Lovatt notes. “He said Peter had committed suicide.”

Ric O’Barry of the Dolphin Project and Lilly’s friend validates the use of the term suicide. “Dolphins are not automatic air-breathers like we are … Every breath is a conscious effort. If life becomes too unbearable, the dolphins just take a breath and they sink to the bottom.”

A heartbroken Peter didn’t understand the separation. The sorrow of losing the relationship was too much. Margaret Howe Lovatt was saddened but ultimately relieved that Peter the dolphin didn’t need to endure life at the confined Miami lab. “He wasn’t going to be unhappy, he was just gone. And that was OK.”

Lovatt remained in St. Thomas after the failed experiment. She married the original photographer that worked on the project. Together, they had three daughters and converted the abandoned Dolphin Point laboratory into a home for their family.

Margaret Howe Lovatt didn’t speak publicly of the experiment for nearly 50 years. Recently, however she granted interviews to Christopher Riley for his documentary on the project, the aptly named The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins .

After this look at Margaret Howe Lovatt and the strange experiments that she participated in with dolphins, learn more about how dolphins communicate . Then, read up on the fascinating development of military dolphins .

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In 1965, a young woman lived in isolation with a male dolphin in the name of science. It got weird

Week 5 of Margaret Howe’s diary is concerned with a new issue: Peter's 'sexual needs' are frustrating research. She decides to take matters into her own hands

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From outside it looked like another spacious Virgin Islands villa with a spiral staircase twisting up to a sunny balcony overlooking the Caribbean Sea. But Dolphin Point Laboratory on the island of St Thomas was part of a unique Washington-funded research institute run by Dr John C Lilly, the wackiest and most polarizing figure in marine science history. A medic and neurologist by training, a mystic by inclination, he was intent on furthering his investigations into the communication skills of dolphins, who he believed could help us talk to extraterrestrials.

For 10 weeks, from June to August 1965, the St Thomas research centre became the site of Lilly’s most notorious and highly criticized experiment, when his young assistant, Margaret Howe, volunteered to live in confinement with Peter, a bottlenose dolphin. The dolphin house was flooded with water and redesigned for a specific purpose: to allow the 23-year-old Howe and the dolphin to live, sleep, eat, wash and play intimately together. The objective of the experiment was to see whether a dolphin could be taught human speech – a hypothesis that Lilly, in 1960, predicted could be a reality “within a decade or two.”

In 1965, a young woman lived in isolation with a male dolphin in the name of science. It got weird Back to video

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Even dolphin experts who today hold some of Lilly’s other work in high regard believe it was deeply misguided. Media coverage at the time focused on two things: Howe’s almost total failure to teach Peter to speak; and the reluctant sexual relationship she began with the animal in an effort to put him at his ease. She has not spoken about her experiences for nearly 50 years (to “let [the story] fade”), but earlier this year accepted an interview request by the BBC producer Mark Hedgecoe, who thought it was “the most remarkable story of animal science I had ever heard.”

The result, a documentary called The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins, is set to premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest and then on BBC Four later in June. Various films and documentaries have dissected some of the baffling, entertaining and ultimately tragic animal-human language experiments offered up by the Sixties and Seventies, most recently James Marsh’s 2011 feature Project Nim, about a chimp raised in a New York family. But what makes the dolphin house story unique is the intensity of the period of interspecies cohabitation. Howe and Peter lived in complete isolation.

Prof Thomas White, a philosopher and international leader in the field of dolphin ethics, believes the experiment was “cruel” and flawed from the outset. “Lilly was a pioneer,” he says. “Not just in the study of the dolphin brain; he was an open-minded scientist who speculated very early on that dolphins are self-aware creatures with emotional vulnerabilities that need an array of relationships to flourish. That should have made him think: ’I really shouldn’t be doing this kind of thing’?”

Lilly, who had gained the scientific establishment’s respect with his work on the human brain, became interested in dolphins in the Fifties, after performing a series of “inner-consciousness” investigations on himself in which he floated around for hours in salt water in an effort to block outside stimuli and increase his sensitivity.

His 1961 book Man and Dolphin was an international bestseller. It was the first book to claim that dolphins displayed complex emotions – that they were capable of controlling anger, for example, and that they, like humans, often trembled in response to being hurt. Some dolphin species, he said, had brains up to 40% larger than humans’. As well as being our “cognitive equal,” Lilly speculated they were capable of a form of telepathy that was the key to understanding extraterrestrial communication. He also believed they could “teach us to live in outer space without gravity”. He also proposed that they could be trained to serve the Navy as a “glorified seeing-eye” (a theory that became the basis of the 1973 sci-fi thriller Day of the Dolphin, despite Lilly’s best attempts to halt production).

If you want to do your experiments on solitude and LSD, please keep them in the isolation room. I am not curious or interested

But Lilly did little to burnish his credentials in the early Sixties when he started exploring the psychological research possibilities offered by lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). He took it himself, often while floating in his isolation tank. Lilly later pinpointed 1965, the year of the dolphin cohabitation experiment, as the year he came to “no longer regard the scientific viewpoint of total objectivity as the be-all and end-all.” It wouldn’t be wildly speculative to suggest that Lilly was – by today’s standards at least – not in quite the right frame of mind to be leading the dolphin project.

Looking back at his memories of the mid-Sixties in his autobiography, an impressionistic account in which he writes of himself in the third person (“He felt that he was merely a small microbe on a mudball, rotating around a G-star, two thirds of the way from Galactic centre…”), it is also apparent how removed he was from Howe’s work.

He writes: “In the midst of his enthusiasm he [Lilly] attempted to speak to [Howe] of his experiences.” Howe, in her early 20s, was not sympathetic. “If you want to do your experiments on solitude and LSD, please keep them in the isolation room. I am not curious or interested.”

Howe was among many keen young staff members he employed from the island. Only the bravest stayed with him any significant length of time; as Lilly noted in The Mind of the Dolphin (1967), the Tursiops (bottlenose) – chosen for study because its brain size was comparable to man’s – was larger and more powerful than most humans. They grew irritable and angry when mismanaged. Howe’s talent for communicating with the dolphins was exceptional and, as Lilly noted, her dedication was unmatched by anyone else in the faculty. “I will not interfere with that,” he wrote.

Still, he prepared the experiment. Following a week-long trial period, Lilly decided 10 weeks was the maximum time frame that both human and dolphin could survive comfortably in confinement. Objectives, regulations and a daily timetable were clear and precise. Howe’s aims were threefold: to make notes on interspecies isolation, to attempt to teach Peter to “speak,” and to gather information so that the living conditions might be improved for longer-term cohabitation.

Cooking is fine. Cleaning is interesting… Each morning most of the dirt is neatly deposited at the foot of the elevator shaft. All I have to do is suck it up

On June 15 Howe moved in, her hair cut to a quarter-inch boy crop. All she needed was a swimming costume and a leotard for the cooler nights. The entire upstairs of the lab building and the balcony had been flooded with salt water 18in deep, which Peter could swim around in and Howe could wade through. A desk hung from the ceiling, and her bed was a suspended foam mattress that she later fitted with a shower curtain so that Peter’s splashes did not soak her through the night. She would live off canned food to minimise contact with outsiders.

“It was perfect,” she remembers today of her domestic dolphinarium. Early entries in her diary at the time reveal that, like a nervous new housewife, she made the best of things: “Cooking is fine. Cleaning is interesting… Each morning most of the dirt is neatly deposited at the foot of the elevator shaft. All I have to do is suck it up.” As for her companion, he spent “a good deal of his time in front of the mirror,” she noted. She was amused to find that during rare moments of contact with the outside world (mostly on the telephone) Peter talked “very loudly and in a competitive way” over the top of her.

Although he could be rambunctious, the archive footage of his lessons featured in the new BBC documentary reveal Peter to have been a curious, dedicated student. Lilly’s team had already established that dolphins could adjust the frequency of their squeaks and whistles to mimic human sounds, and claimed that during his time with Howe, Peter learnt to pronounce words such as “ball” and “diamond”, and to tell the difference between certain objects.

Howe was a creative, commendably patient teacher; when Peter struggled with certain sounds, particularly the “M” in her name, she came up with the inventive method of painting her face in thick white make-up and black lipstick so that he could clearly see the shape of her lips moving. “His eye was in [the] air looking at my mouth. There was no question… He really wanted to know: where is that noise coming from? What is the sound?” she remembers. “Eventually he kind of rolled over so that he would bubble [the ’M’ sound] into the water.”

To those who lived and worked with Peter, his progress was perhaps clearer than it was to the outsider. The average viewer, on watching the BBC documentary, might conclude that the experiment was a failure. Kenneth Norris, an influential marine biologist, said of Lilly: “He started out as a capable scientist, but nothing he did was subject to measurement or truth, and that’s what scientists live by.” Experiments since 1965 have proved that dolphins have high levels of self-awareness and can understand human sign communication – but there is still little evidence that a dolphin language exists.

Peter begins having erections and has them frequently when I play with him

However, Peter’s linguistic progress was seemingly what kept Howe going when their relationship grew strained. Fed up and clearly exhausted by week three, she wrote at length about Peter whining and making loud noises night and day for no apparent reason: “I will do anything to break this… I lost my temper and nearly yelled at Peter… I am physically so pooped I can hardly stand… depression… wanting to get away… my mind is not all on the job.”

Lilly, responding to Howe’s feedback, recorded his concerns. “This is a dull and small area… Isolation effects showing,” he wrote. Howe’s diary of week five is predominantly concerned with a new issue: “Peter begins having erections and has them frequently when I play with him.” Her frustrated efforts to deal with his “sexual needs” and advances – which had become so aggressive that her legs were covered in minor injuries from his jamming and nibbling – had left her scared. “Peter could bite me in two,” she wrote. But she was reluctant to hamper progress, and, in a spirit of pragmatism, decided to take matters into her own hands. As the narrator in the documentary tactfully puts it: “Margaret felt that the best way of focusing his mind back on his lessons was to relieve his desires herself manually.”

Sex among dolphins is a “normal way to establish a bond”, White says. “Dolphins are mostly bisexual, sometimes heterosexual, sometimes homosexual, and quite frequent – eight to 10 times a day I’ve been told – so it’s a very different culture that we’re looking at.” Peter’s sexual advances wouldn’t surprise any marine biologist. But what astonished Lilly was the complexity of the way Peter and Howe’s relationship developed from thereon in.

“New totally unexpected sequence of events took place,” Lilly noted excitedly. “I feel that we are in the midst of a new becoming; moving into a previous unknown…” As Peter became increasingly gentle, tactile and sensitive to Howe’s feelings he began to “woo” her by softly stroking his teeth up and down her legs. “I stand very still, legs slightly apart, and Peter slides his mouth gently over my shin,” she wrote in her diary. “Peter is courting me… he has been most persistent and patient… Obviously a sexy business… The mood is very gentle, still and hushed… all movements are slow.” Today she talks about the whole experience philosophically: “It was very precious. It was very gentle… It was sexual on his part. It was not sexual on mine. Sensual, perhaps.”

Howe’s writing also reflects her increasingly protective feelings towards Peter, and at the end of her diary she admits that Peter’s attentiveness helped her overcome her “depression” and “fits of self-pity.”

It was great [Howe] wasn’t going to be damaged… but as a veterinarian, I wondered about poor Peter. This dolphin was madly in love with her

In a neat romantic twist, it all ended happily for Howe. She left the lab to marry the project’s photographer, John Lovatt. Though dismayed to lose her, even Lilly was pleased: “Her intraspecies needs are finally being taken care of.” She never returned to work for him. Soon after the experiment, Lilly’s funding began to dry up, and with his second marriage in tatters he left to explore mystical interests in South America.

As for Peter, the lab’s vet Andy Williamson remembers his concerns as the experiment came to a close: “It was great [Howe] wasn’t going to be damaged… but as a veterinarian, I wondered about poor Peter. This dolphin was madly in love with her.”

The unexpected consequences of the experiment highlight one of the persisting problems with the “short-sighted” scientific approach to animal intelligence, says White. “We focus on language as the primary indicator of intelligence. Dolphins, like humans, are very sophisticated emotionally as well as intellectually. From an ethical standpoint, that’s what we should be looking at.”

The Sunday Telegraph

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Environment

Talking dolphins and the love story that wasn't.

By Lewis Dartnell

18 June 2014

Margaret Howe had some success in teaching language to Peter the dolphin (Image: The John Lilly Estate)

The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins explores a 1960s project to teach a dolphin English, but its true significance has been buried in sexual innuendo

On the rocky coastline of St Thomas, a small island in the American Virgin Islands, squat the dilapidated ruins of a villa. Built in the 1960s by the eccentric neuroscientist John Lilly, this research station was once the site of one of the most ambitious experimental programmes in animal behaviour. Lilly hoped to teach dolphins to speak English.

Christopher Riley’s documentary The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins does a good job of explaining, in sober terms, why this idea isn’t as hopelessly crazy as it sounds. Researchers had been trying to teach chimpanzees sign language, and even spoken English, with limited success. Bottlenose dolphins are deeply social animals and seem to demonstrate a high level of intelligence in their behaviour. Indeed, we now suspect that in the wild, dolphins use signature whistles to identify each other; in other words, they have names .

When Lilly’s wife told him she had noticed lab dolphins imitating the tones of conversation between researchers, he reasoned that perhaps dolphins could be taught to not only understand human speech, but recreate words themselves through their blowholes.

Some of the funding for Lilly’s research came from NASA. Through the 1950s and 60s the agency, and radio astronomers in general, took increasingly seriously the possibility that there were other technological civilisations in our galaxy. If Lilly could establish communication with another animal species on Earth, lessons from his work might help humanity understand radio messages from extraterrestrial intelligent life.

With the arrival in St Thomas of a young and enthusiastic college dropout, Margaret Howe, the entire second floor of the villa was waterproofed and flooded so that human and dolphin could work together closely. Howe lived full time with a dolphin named Peter, and attempted to teach him English: hence the girl who talked to dolphins.

Howe had some early success, and was able to train Peter to make a recognisable attempt at approximating the sound and intonation of English words, repeating them back to her for fish treats. But for the funders, anxious to see progress from this expensive programme, few signs emerged that the dolphin actually comprehended what words signified or represented. Peter never constructed novel sequences of sounds to communicate his own intentionality.

Things didn’t improve. Lilly began taking LSD as a way of exploring his own mind, and even injected the hallucinogen into female captive dolphins to see how they responded. (They didn’t.) But the revelation that cast the greatest shadow over the credibility of the work was the nature of the relationship that developed between Howe and her experimental subject – a story revealed years later in Hustler magazine.

During the study period, as Peter matured, his sexual urges increasingly became a distraction. At first, the researchers arranged temporary visits to the enclosure with the two females, but as these visits became more frequent and disruptive to the language work, Howe began to relieve his desires manually herself.

By the summer of 1966, funding for the dolphin speech experiments had dried up. St Thomas dolphin house was shut down, and the three dolphins were relocated to a research lab in Florida. We are asked to imagine that Peter’s subsequent trials and miseries were the result of a broken heart. Howe stayed on and got married.

Underneath this tosh (and not to give too much away) there is a much tougher, more uncomfortable story not getting told at this point: about laboratory life, animal welfare and whether non-human animals should be accorded rights. The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins is not a love story, much as it might want to be one.

Riley’s documentary is undeniably fascinating, however. It is compellingly assembled from archive footage and, in places, cleverly and subtly reconstructed. Humans are not perfectly objective, investigative robots: you choose to study an area you are passionate about, you tend to favour one theory over another, and you care what the outcome is. Particularly in animal research, it can be difficult to avoid becoming attached to your subjects. The skill in successful science is to make sure these impulses don’t taint your methods and the results you get from them.

Lilly spent his last years arguing, with some success, for the release of captive dolphins. In the end, he felt he had had no right to experiment upon them.

Howe, now Howe Lovatt, feels differently. Her language experiments with Peter lasted only a few months before the plug was pulled. She wonders what we may yet discover about intelligence and language, if only we would learn a little patience.

The Girl Who talked to Dolphins was broadcast in the UK on BBC Four on 17 June 2014

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News and commentary on caribbean culture, literature, and the arts, the dolphin who loved me.

In the 1960s, Margaret Lovatt was part of a Nasa-funded project to communicate with dolphins. Soon she was living with ‘Peter’ 24 hours a day in a converted house. Christopher Riley reports for London’s Guardian   on an experiment that went tragically wrong. Here is an excerpt. For the full report and a gallery of photos follow the link below.

Like most children, Margaret Howe Lovatt grew up with stories of talking animals. “There was this book that my mother gave to me called Miss Kelly,” she remembers with a twinkle in her eye. “It was a story about a cat who could talk and understand humans and it just stuck with me that maybe there is this possibility.”

Unlike most children, Lovatt didn’t leave these tales of talking animals behind her as she grew up. In her early 20s, living on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, they took on a new significance. During Christmas 1963, her brother-in-law mentioned a secret laboratory at the eastern end of the island where they were working with dolphins. She decided to pay the lab a visit early the following year. “I was curious,” Lovatt recalls. “I drove out there, down a muddy hill, and at the bottom was a cliff with a big white building.”

Lovatt was met by a tall man with tousled hair, wearing an open shirt and smoking a cigarette. His name was Gregory Bateson, a great intellectual of the 20th century and the director of the lab. “Why did you come here?” he asked Lovatt.

“Well, I heard you had dolphins,” she replied, “and I thought I’d come and see if there was anything I could do or any way I could help…” Unused to unannounced visitors and impressed by her bravado, Bateson invited her to meet the animals and asked her to watch them for a while and write down what she saw. Despite her lack of scientific training, Lovatt turned out to be an intuitive observer of animal behaviour and Bateson told her she could come back whenever she wanted.

“There were three dolphins,” remembers Lovatt. “Peter, Pamela and Sissy. Sissy was the biggest. Pushy, loud, she sort of ran the show. Pamela was very shy and fearful. And Peter was a young guy. He was sexually coming of age and a bit naughty.”

The lab’s upper floors overhung a sea pool that housed the animals. It was cleaned by the tide through openings at each end. The facility had been designed to bring humans and dolphins into closer proximity and was the brainchild of an American neuroscientist, Dr John Lilly. Here, Lilly hoped to commune with the creatures, nurturing their ability to make human-like sounds through their blow holes.

Lilly had been interested in connecting with cetaceans since coming face to face with a beached pilot whale on the coast near his home in Massachusetts in 1949. The young medic couldn’t quite believe the size of the animal’s brain – and began to imagine just how intelligent the creature must have been, explains Graham Burnett, professor of the history of science at Princeton and author of The Sounding of the Whale. “You are talking about a time in science when everybody’s thinking about a correlation between brain size and what the brain can do. And in this period, researchers were like: ‘Whoa… big brain huh… cool!'”

At every opportunity in the years that followed, John Lilly and his first wife, Mary, would charter sailboats and cruise the Caribbean, looking for other big-brained marine mammals to observe. It was on just such a trip in the late 1950s that the Lillys came across Marine Studios in Miami – the first place to keep the bottlenose dolphin in captivity.

Up until this time, fishermen on America’s east coast, who were in direct competition with dolphins for fish, had considered the animals vermin. “They were know as ‘herring hogs’ in most of the seafaring towns in the US,” says Burnett. But here, in the tanks of Marine Studios, the dolphins’ playful nature was endearingly on show and their ability to learn tricks quickly made it hard to dislike them.

Here, for the first time, Lilly had the chance to study the brains of live dolphins, mapping their cerebral cortex using fine probes, which he’d first developed for his work on the brains of rhesus monkeys. Unable to sedate dolphins, as they stop breathing under anaesthetic, the brain-mapping work wasn’t easy for either animals or scientists, and the research didn’t always end well for the marine mammals. But on one occasion in 1957, the research would take a different course which would change his and Mary’s lives for ever.

To continue reading go to  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me

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