Special Episode: Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden & Rat City

I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast "Doubt," the case of Lucy Lepby, we unpack

the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? "Out of space, it's the moment you look at the whole picture of the case, Colach." What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe, oh my God, I think she might be innocent?

Listen to doubt, the case of Lucy Lepby, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckard, in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

“But here's the thing, Bachelor fans hated him.”

If I could press a button and rewind it all I would, that's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a courtroom. "The media is here. This case has gone viral." "The dating contract." "A great a date, me, but I'm also suing you."

This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young, listen to Love Trapped on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. "This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall." In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies, working for China's Ministry of State Security.

One of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. "The Sixth Bureau of Podcasts is a story of the inner workings of the MSS, and how one man's ambition, and mistakes opened its fault of secrets."

“Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get”

your podcasts. "The Sixth Bureau of Podcasts is a story of the inner workings of the MSS, and how one man's ambition, and mistakes opened its fault of secrets." "The Sixth Bureau of Podcasts is a story of the inner workings of the MSS, and how one man's ambition, and mistakes opened its fault of secrets."

"The Sixth Bureau of Podcasts is a story of the inner workings of the MSS, and how one man's ambition, and mistakes opened its fault." "The Sixth Bureau of Podcasts is a story of the inner workings of the MSS, and how one man's ambition, and mistakes opened its fault of secrets." Hi, I'm Erin Welch, and this is This Podcast Will Kill You.

Welcome to another episode of the T.P.W.K.Y Book Club. In this series, I bring on authors of popular science and medicine books, and ask them

a million and one questions about their books, about their process, and about themselves.

“I have loved putting these episodes together, and we have featured some fascinating”

books so far this season. If you'd like to check out the full list of books in the T.P.W.K.Y Book Club from this season, and seasons past, you know the drill. Head over to our website, this podcast will kill you.com, find the extras tab, and click on the link to our bookshop.org affiliate page.

On that page, you'll find a bunch of podcast-related booklists, including one for this book club. I'm constantly updating these lists, so make sure that you check in regularly to see what books might be featured in future episodes, or if there were any that you missed. Pro tip, these lists are great sources for gift ideas for the book lovers in your life.

If you have any books that you think would be a perfect fit for one of these episodes, please reach out through the contact us form on our website.

We always love hearing from you all.

A couple more pieces of business before moving on to the book of the week, and that is to first, please rate, review, and subscribe, it really does help us out. And second, you can now find full video versions of most of our newest episodes on YouTube. Follow exactly right media's YouTube channel, so you never miss a new episode drop. Imagine your standing in line at a cafe, waiting to place an order, and the person behind

you is just way too close. Your stuck in the middle seat on a long flight, battling with your seatmates over the two inches of armrest space. You're at a cocktail party, leaning further and further away from the Hall of Fame close talker who's been regaling you with an overly detailed account of their dream from last

night. How are you feeling? Uncomfortable? Encroached upon? Stress?

I feel like my heart rate went up just thinking about the close talker. All of these hypothetical situations and the discomfort they induce, center around concepts familiar to all of us, stress and personal space. When we feel like our personal space is being invaded, it doesn't feel good. It feels bad, but this idea of personal space and how we feel about crowds or our proximity

The term personal space was only coined in the mid 20th century.

“Around that time, headlines proclaimed that humans were at risk of exceeding Earth's carrying”

capacity as the global population grew exponentially and urban centers swelled in size. And a handful of researchers grew increasingly interested in the physiological effects of stress, crowding and population density. One of these researchers, John B. Calhoun, used rodents to forecast how human behavior might alter as available space shrank to non-existence.

What he observed did not bode well for the future of humanity. In rat city, overcrowding and urban arrangement in the rodent universes of John B. Calhoun offers John Adams and Ed Ramston chronicle the bizarre story of Calhoun's rodent utopias, in which food, water and bedding were unlimited, but space was not. The outcome, chaos, violence, complete social breakdown.

Calhoun's research captured the public's imagination and was employed to promote a suite of dangerous ideas about population control and crime. All on the faulty logic that rodent behavior is equivalent to human behavior. It's not. I loved this fascinating and strange tale and I'm really excited to share more of it with you

all, so let's take a quick break and get started. Ed and John, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Thank you. Thank you for taking an interest. Thank you.

I am just beyond thrilled to talk with you about John Calhoun, this mysterious and kind of bizarre John Calhoun, and his rat experiments. I mean, my mind was utterly blown when I learned about the connection between these experiments

“and the secret of name, which as a kid was one of my favorite movies and also is quite”

terrifying. I watched it recently, but we'll get into some of that later on. Just I would love it if you could give me a bird's eye view or rat's eye view of John Calhoun and his experiments and how you all came across them. I came across them really when I was doing my PhD and I was exploring the history of

demography, so population sciences and it relationship to eugenics and biological sciences in the 20th century U.S. and while sort of demography as a field became increasingly social scientific, it moved increasingly to sociology and began to sort of push away from quite deliberately the influence of biology, I noticed that there was this experiment that

just people kept referring to and even people who were really, really critical of the influence

of biological sciences in the social sciences and this was the experiment by John B. Calhoun. So even in the '60s and '70s, they were referring to these rat experiments of overpopulation. A lot of demographers were concerned with population control, population bomb and they drew from Calhoun's experiment when they were talking about the ill effects of population density. So I was really intrigued why this attention to these experiments with rats by sociologists

and social scientists that normally would not be drawn to these kinds of experiments. I wasn't in a story and I was working alongside net at the London School of Economics and he was talking to me about this work, he was doing on Calhoun and these weird rat studies. And I had, I'm sure I had heard of him, like when he was talking about the other population

“studies and the rats going berserk, that rung a bell, I think I'd heard of the experiment”

somewhere but I didn't have a name to it and I think that's a lot of people out there have that experience, they've heard of these experiments but they don't know where they come from and in a sense when we started putting the story together that was I was trying to sort of situate John Calhoun as a scientist rather than just this kind of nutty professor with the strange box of rats which he does at some point kind of emerge or slip into that

role of nutty professor but we'll get to that part of the story later I kind of first

want to go back to really the creature at the heart of this which is the rat and as you point out in your book, every city is a rat city. I mean that's they are everywhere globally distributed.

to this cosmopolitan lifestyle? The contemporary thinking is that rats split off from mice into

“a separate species about sort of 10 millionish years ago so they were there long before humans were”

there and the first kind of evidence of that being kind of rat skeletons mingled in amongst

human sites of habitation is in the sort of late place to see and so really it's soon as soon as you start getting communal railings and this is over in eastern Asia and modern-day China as soon as you had human habitation seeing where you had rats living alongside them so they become what's called a commensal species meaning that the two animals live side by side but don't necessarily harm one another and then as as human habitation spread out the rats spread with them

and when trade routes opened up between the the far east and into Europe the rats traveled along with ice roads and came into uh it came into western Europe and then once trade routes opened up across the Atlantic the rats came over almost certainly immediately will have been the black

rat first rat as rats us and then subsequently the brown rat which is uh it's it's larger it's

it's better at most stuff than the black rat and out competed the the black rat and so it's the brown rat the Norway rat um that that you will find in most most American cities now most

“Western European cities apart from some places actually though because I think it's in California”

that up in the palm trees because the rat is much better climber so it will still exist but it does tend to be um pushed aside by it's uh much stronger cousin I love rats and um and I find them so fascinating and the other thing I find truly fascinating about this is that for how ubiquitous these rats are in our cities we know kind of surprisingly little about their ecologies they're behaviors sort of just their everyday lives they're in and out what are they doing and much of what

we do know comes from this rat ecology project that John Calhoun ended up working on how did he find himself on this research team you know moving from I think turtle farms is where he got his starter one of the places he got to start to then these rat cities yeah so um John Calhoun was born in

“1917 so when the second world war came around it was a young researcher at the time and lots of”

kind of very smart people were cuffled around during the war years into jobs that they probably otherwise wouldn't have done some of them were pacifists perhaps conscientious objectives so they they'd be put on to non-military but war-related work that could be of some kind of civic value and the road ecology project emerged because Baltimore had a rat problem which existed before the war but but when Baltimore ramped up production for the war effort in the early 1940s the

rat problem became an issue that the city thought needed fixing and quick so they they hired a kind of crack team of scientists and Calhoun was amongst the the second wave of these and the

good the problem is when you hire scientists to do rat control they don't just put wilds

a poison down they get curious about the animals that they've been sent in to poison and one of the first things they figured out was if they were going to successfully keep these numbers down they had to understand the behavior of the rats so Calhoun was necologist by training joins this team and immediately becomes fascinated by the social lives of these animals you know and as you say they'd been almost no kind of investigative work studying the behavior particularly of city rats

and one of the things the road ecology project scientists set out to do was to treat the city as the rats natural habitat and therefore to come in with the ecologist question of okay if this is the habitat how do they live within it it also came out through really as a consequence of some of the problems they faced in the earlier phases of the project so the access to roadenta sites good ones that they tended to use as one called red squill and it came from the Mediterranean so they

didn't have their access to the normal redenta sites that they would normally get access to so they had to devise their own and to do this they turned locally to the Johns Hopkins University where they had another leading figure in the study of of rats which was Kurt Richter. Kurt Richter was a physiologist who was busy studying well rat physiology and he thought physiology determined so much of behavior and he was looking at what rats ate and why and he became employed

going out and killing hundreds thousands of rats the rat population wasn't being significantly

“dampened and this was because they're very very high rates of breeding of reproduction so the”

rat populations were really bouncing back so they needed to rethink how are we going to actually dampen control this population and they began to move from a kind of magic bullet approach through chemicals chemical warfare to an ecological approach the road control project became the rodent ecology project and ecologists began to take it over also based at Johns Hopkins and one of the first things they noticed once they were looking at it from as a habitat and

as ecologists was the population numbers were located and again the city was quite useful for this it's Baltimore's gridded into interblocks as many North American cities are and the rat population within each city block was more or less the same as they were able to count

“them they were about 150 rats per block and they didn't cross the roads even if there was a”

abundant garbage there for them to eat the numbers never really got above 150 and so for the

ecologists this is fascinating you know that the normal model would say the population expands until it runs out of resources and then it you know collapses through starvation and this wasn't happening they were never overusing the space they had they would limit their population numbers and so that that's the fascinating question the Calvin sets out to solve was how come the rats can practice birth control let's take a quick break and when we get back they're still so much to

discuss in 2023 a story gripped the UK of looking horror and disbelief a nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history

“everyone thought they knew how it ended a verdict a villain a nurse named Lucy let be Lucy let be”

has been found guilty but what if we didn't get the full story a moment you look at the whole picture of the case collapses I'm Amanda Knox and in the new podcast doubt the case of Lucy let be we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy let be was no voicing of any skepticism are doubt it'll call so much home at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong listen to doubt the

case of Lucy let be on the iHeart Radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Clayton Nackard and in 2022 I was the lead of ABC's the bachelor

unfortunately it didn't go according to plan he became the first bachelor to ever have his final

rose rejected the internet turned on him if I could press a button and rewind it all I would but what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines it began as a one night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal the media is here this case has gone viral the dating contract agreed to date me but I'm also suing you this is unlike anything I've ever seen before I'm Stephanie Young this is love trapped

this season an epic battle of he said she said and the search for accountability in a sea of lies listen to love trapped on the iHeart Radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful

spy agencies in the world but in 2017 the FBI got inside this is special agent regal special agent Bradley Hall this MSS officer has no idea the U.S government is on to him but the FBI has his chats texts emails even his personal diary here how they got it on the sixth bureau podcast I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer no doubt no question of his life and that's the unicorn no one had ever seen anything like that it was unbelievable this is a story of the inner workings of the MSS

and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets listen to the sixth bureau on the iHeart Radio app apple podcasts wherever you get your podcasts welcome back everyone I've been chatting with John Adams and Ed Ramson about their book rat city

you know it started out as this sort of field ecologist let's just observe and see what happens

“and then that gradually kind of morphs into more experimental let's manipulate some of these”

uh you know these block boundaries to then making this full on kind of rat terrarium which they did in the the towson enclosure what did these enclosures allow the team to do that they couldn't do with these purely observational studies in Baltimore yeah so they were rapidly approaching a kind of observational horizon within the city blocks because there's only so much you can observe people are obviously living in these houses right and whilst they could purchase any alleyways and

watch the rats and sort of trace their footprints through the snow at one point they put a die in the food so they could follow blue rat feces around and see how many have been taking which routes but they'd run out of observational room there and they wanted to know more about the behavior

“of the rats within their habitat so now Houn had this idea that he would build an artificial city block”

and so he asks his neighbor out in towson which is just outside of Baltimore he asked his neighbor can I kind of build a rat enclosure on this disused land and his neighbor said oh sure go ahead you know thinking he'd probably you know put up like a hut or a small pen how Houn built a quarter acre enclosure uh an area which he estimated covered about the available space that the rats would have within a city block so it was a one to one representation of a city block and he

cut alleyways to it high fences all around it he installed some wild rats builds an observation tower and then just lets them be there's a food hopper in the middle there's water available they've got nesting materials but effectively it's a wild population of rats that are in there and they've got abundant space um and then he could study them day by day and did so you know he was up every morning before work and every night sat in his observation tower there's binoculars with his

grasses for 27 months he observes them watching these life cycles go through watching them form into colonies and pretty much all that we know about the behavior of brown rats comes from Calhoun's very very meticulous detailed over two years study of their behavior within the Towson enclosure and he uses also the latest technology so they're the US Army is very interested in this because obviously they're trying to control rats not only at sort of bases within the US but but abroad as well

so they carry out some of the first films of the rats in their behavior through his experimental

spaces he borrows some snoopers scopes he calls them these night binoculars that allows him to watch them at night and he builds this tower an observational tower over the pen which allows him to watch all these rats whenever he can and it becomes a kind of place where lots of people other scientists come to view rats and it's through people coming to view these rats that he gets really his next chance in terms of developing his career and his next opportunities for studying these kinds of

semi artificial environments for understanding rap behavior I mean I'm truly a man dedicated to his

“craft just I just picturing him up there on the tower with his sneaker scopes and I think what's”

what's also so fascinating about these experiments are the questions that he's asking because of

course science doesn't happen in a vacuum the the questions that we are interested in are always

guided in part by the things that society is excited about or nervous about or just preoccupied within some way and this seems to be especially the case with Calhoun he seems like he gets increasingly interested in the effects of overcrowding on his rap populations not long after the concepts of personal space or like the stress of crowds become popularized which struck me I could not believe how recent those concepts are and so I'm curious why these concepts formed

when they did one of the most important ones that comes in is the concept of stress and stress as we know it today when we use this language all the time you know I'm stressed and we understand that it has both psychological and physiological effects and indeed long term stress we understand can contribute to heart disease diabetes and so on as well as mental health problems but our concept to stress is really really new it's a 20th century construction I mean we did have ideas of sort of

stressors is a 20th century construction and it really comes into vogue around World War II at the

“same time 1930s and 40s and one of Calhoun's colleagues on the project is”

an ecologist but is also working with endocrinology so he is looking at stress effects so what he's seeming to understand is maybe what is actually lowering this rap population isn't as we'd previously considered you know access to to water food and so on that is certainly part of it but actually it's stress because once you begin to close off access it's not simply that they don't have enough food to eat so they struggle and and get ill and die they get really

stressed competing for these resources and that has an effect on their bodies on their hearts

on their livers and they get diseases and they die what Calhoun does in this environment is he creates what he describes as a rat utopia because here they're going to get endless amounts of food

“endless amounts of water at heartbridge and he allows his population to grow and as this population”

grows he notices that the population is kind of restricted to the same number for about 150 rats so he's trying to understand why is it that even with all these resources this animal doesn't breed beyond this particular level and the answer he finds is stress they're getting very very

stressed because they're competing with one another for space there are territorial species

to access to females for example for the males are fighting a lot and so the result is that some of the dominance are able to control the space within the pens and live relatively normal lives but for the majority they're forced into these sort of open spaces where they're competing with one another continuously interacting with one another there's a lot of unwanted interaction

“rats can't ignore one another like humans can they continuously interact that's increasing”

their stress levels which is causing them to physically break down and so the death rate begins to spike at round about the same time a little bit later into the 1950s an entirely independent of Calhoun there's what was then a mental institution in Canada in Saskatchewan and it became a kind of laboratory the lead researcher there as an Englishman called Humphrey Osmond and he attracted kind of researchers who wanted to look at how he treated people within institutions people who were

already mentally unwell and Robert Sonno's an American researcher becomes fascinated by the way that the patients within the institutions would use space and it's summer in the 1950s that introduces this concept of personal space so obviously we had a notion of personal space before but it became a term of art only in the 1950s and and spreads almost immediately along with stress because it made sense to people they could immediately recognize this this sense of they're

being someone standing too close to you that's stressful someone making eye contact that's stressful and that that lack of privacy was causing the patients in the institutions to suffer far more than they needed to so summer along with Osmond and an architect they also bought on board they redesigned the spaces where the patients are housed so that they can have privacy so that they can retreat from company if they want to so they can mingle if they want to and the population

becomes less violent less hostile less frightened and then those concepts began to link up with the work that Calhum is doing I'm curious about the effect of stress on the rats so when we're talking about these enclosures and we're talking about increasing levels of stress as there's more crowding is there stress disparity among individuals or some rats simply much more or less stress than others so one of the things Calhum is able to observe in the towson enclosure this great big

core Drake a pen that he's got behind this house is that the rats form into distinct colonies so they they're not just spread out breeding you know randomly with one another the colonies form and about sort of 10 to 12 colonies would form within within this core Drake a space and amongst those colonies there would be two or three pretty dominant colonies which did nearly all the reproductive work and there you would have maybe just one or two male rats and a kind of horrorum

of you know 12 to 15 female rats and most of the breeding was done within those colonies the

have a greater male to female ratio and would perform almost no breeding work and they would be the

“more stressed of the colonies as well and at the very doldrums of that you would have an all male”

colony which did no reproductive work at all for obvious reasons but it was certainly the case that the stress levels within the rats would then be arranged along that gradient of dominance. One of the the nice things about stress is that it's measurable physiologically measurable it's one of the reasons it's so attractive and so he'd take samples of his rats and pass them on to physiologist based at National Institute of Health such as Julius Axel Rod who really is you know

big name and physiology who would do some all topsies for him and they would be able to identify this sort of damage done to eternal organs so they'd be sort of adrenal hypertrophy, atrophy of lymphatic structures, ulceration of stomach heart disease and so on among the more stressed animals that were lowered down really in the dominance hierarchy. Let's take a quick break here we'll be back before you know it. In 2023 a story gripped the UK of looking horror and disbelief.

A nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended, a verdict, a villain,

“a nurse named Lucy Leppi. Lucy Leppi has been found guilty but what if we didn't get the full story?”

The moment you look at the whole picture the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox and in the new podcast doubt the case of Lucy Leppi we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Leppi was. No voicing of any skepticism are doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to doubt the case of Lucy Leppi on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get

your podcasts. I'm Clayton Nackard and in 2022 I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

Unfortunately it didn't go according to plan. He became the first bachelor to ever have his final

rose rejected. The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would.

“But what happened to Clayton after the show? Made even bigger headlines.”

It began as a one night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. A great a date me but I'm also suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season an epic battle of He said she said and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful

spy agencies in the world. But in 2017 the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Riggle. Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the US government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Here how they got it on the 6th Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer no doubt no question of his life. And that's the unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable.

This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets. Listen to the 6th Bureau on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back everyone. I'm here chatting with John Adams and Ed Ramston about their book, Rat City. Let's get into some more questions. Calhoun moves from these

house and enclosures to he just kind of keeps doing this but more and more and bigger different variables and these rat utopias to rat universes. And all of this is also happening. It seems with this backdrop where headlines and books are shouting about the dangers of overpopulation and

And so, how much is that influencing his own experiments? Especially when he starts to do these in

“Casey's bar and for instance. So, when Calhoun's on the road ecology project, he's an employee of”

John's Hopkins. He's subsequently hired by the National Institute of Mental Health, which is a newly formed post-war institution at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda. And at the National Institute of Mental Health, he's looking at stress in these rodent populations but because of the nature of that institution, he's very much invited by his employers to make connections with human populations. So, it's unclear from reading his work when he starts thinking about his rats as

comparators to human populations. Certainly by this period in the late 1950s, when he's at the National Institute of Mental Health, and social stress is a topic of discussion in human societies and obviously are being stressed to the mental health of the American population. So, it's really at that point

“that he starts to make those connections that been an ecological concern about the here volume”

of humans on the planet that dates back to at least the 1940s. There was two books wrote to survival by William Voit and our plundered planet by Feb. Osbourne. And these two books really kind of kickstart the modern environmentalist movement and they're both predicated on this idea that the earth doesn't have an unlimited balance, right? And if we have billions and billions of humans upon it, eventually we're going to use up all the resources or we're going to damage the planet

and degrade the environment so much that it will become uninhabitable both for humans and for a large section of our other biomass. So, the other population concerned from that ecological perspective had been bubbling away for a while, post war that takes us like the different slant.

“Rapid population growth was seen as a real problem for some political stability in nations”

across the world, which had recently become free of colonial powers, but now there was a concern of course with socialism, with communism and there was a sense that in order to stabilize these countries to make them more aligned with the West, you needed to invest in their development. We needed to invest finances economically. We needed to support the development of their industries, their educational systems, but rapid population growth was going to completely destabilize all these

countries, it's going to restrict their development. And also within the United States itself, there was a sense that high population density led to a range of social problems that it was the cause, the driver of social unrest. So, the population control was the language that was very prominent during this period. So, Calhoun's work really chimes with this interest. This period overlaps with the experiments he's been doing with rats at Casey's barn as part of

his work at the National Institute of Mental Health. And those experiments are unlike Tauce, which is very much an observational experiment. At Casey's barn, he begins to really focus down on what happens to a population when the numbers get too high. It hadn't done within the Baltimore blocked because they self-regulated it hadn't done at Tauce because they had enough room. So, he shrinks the room down. This is where his attention shifts from general rodent behavior

to the specific problems of elevated population densities. One of the first things he discovers is,

as the rats become more and more densely populated. As the number of unwanted social interactions increases, beyond a certain threshold, all the behavioral norms break down. And so, at Casey's barn, he sees this first dramatic evidence of what happens to a population when it passes a certain threshold of density. And what happens is horrendous. You know, the males form gangs and attack the females, the mating rituals break down, the young and neglected. The family units which have been so stable

and kind of harmonious within Tauce and become chaotic, pops of barn and drops on a floor and left the die or cannibalised by other rats. The violence becomes so kind of intense that the rats

begin slashing and biting at one another in a way they never do in the wild. As soon as those

results are published, it looks exactly like all these concerns people have with San Francisco with New York or Detroit. They're looking at the American cities, they're looking at Calvin's work and immediately saying, "Well, look, there must be some biological connection with two density populated the cities are driving as mad." And that's really in the early 1960s when Calvin's work

utopias, which is not the most appropriate, I would say, word to describe what's happening with these

poor rats whose populations are crashing and are under a huge amount of stress. But what we're seeing are these crashes where in Baltimore and the Tauce and enclosures were seeing a population plateau. But here there are these extreme behavioral reactions pathological togetherness and then like behavioral sync. And these populations like in Casey's barn are starting to crash really dramatically.

“Can you describe some of what he is seeing when these populations are just crashing?”

Yes, I think the reason why these strange behaviors begin to emerge the violence, the pathological togetherness is because the design of the enclosure in Casey's barn is such that it allows the rats to congregate in the middle and it doesn't allow them to escape. So in the wild or in a larger

environment, they would never put up with those conditions. They'd have bought it off and formed a

new colony somewhere else and just got away from it. But instead these rats find themselves trapped in a place where they're not going to die of starvation and they're not going to run out of water. That's an entirely unnatural situation and it's sometimes said of Caldoons work. Well, these aren't natural environments. This isn't happening in nature. Caldoons well aware of this and that's kind of the point because he's looking at cities and thinking, well, those are artificial environments

“as well. They congregate far more people in one place and you would ever normally get and they”

effectively prevent those people from leaving. I mean, in theory, an individual can leave a city. But as everyone saw with Hurricane Katrina, for example, individuals very often can't leave a city even when there's an emergency. So people don't have the agency that it sometimes looks like they have. So what he'd done with that enclosure is create a space which would generate artificially high levels of population density. And that's when he begins to see the behavioral

breakdowns. So the pathological togetherness was a term he used for rats which would congregate all around the same feeding hopper. The rats would, as begin to associate feeding,

would having another rat next to them because there was always another rat next them when they fed.

So they became conditioned to only feed whenever other rats there. And this affects breads out, which means that all the rats will gather around a single hopper or they'll all gather around a single water bottle in great clusters, you know, 50, 60 rats all around the same food hopper while the other hoppers let completely untouched. They become almost addicted to the idea of proximity. And that then sends their bodies into this catastrophic process of stress related breakdown.

And the mortality rates just become enormous. And by the end of the experiment, the mortality rates are around 96% almost none of the young are surviving. And of course at that point, the populations crash into a local extinction. But it's all because of the design of the room that he set up. He didn't know that would happen. But he did expect that the rats would distribute themselves unevenly. He just didn't realize they would do it quite as catastrophically as they did.

“And that's what a behavioral sink is, really. It is, it is the collection of these rats pathological”

togetherness around in a particular spaces. And it's, you know, as he makes clear, the majority of sense around the language is not accidental, right? It's not a positive thing. Behavioral sink is very destructive. It exacerbates the other pathologies that are found in the group. So it's not pathological in itself. It's an anomaly rats eat drink alone, separate. There's a lot of violence in these spaces because they're continuously interacting with each other.

And then violence will break out. And they'll be a lot of fighting and so on and a lot of a lot of death. And what he thinks it happens among the rats is really a breakdown of their more complex behaviors. So, you know, they become much more withdrawn. So that's a later pathology that he begins to look at. And earlier we talked about stress. He talks about animals that actually become distressed. They're so withdrawn. They're not stressed at all. But they're not actually competing and living

as animals. They're not competing for, say, if they're male, for females, for access to food, for territory. They just have no social role in that mouse or rat society. They just sit on the floor. Eat, drink and clean themselves. And he describes this group as beautiful ones and dropouts. But he's beginning to think rats are limited in a sense by their evolutionary development, by their biological template. Humans have the possibility he's arguing

sort of compare humans and rats. That's his point. He's saying, look, human beings. We can actually

study this. We can say, you know, we need to actually change the way in which cities are built. The way we relate to one another in order to overcome these kinds of problems. One of the things that we did, well, it's part of the project. We are really interested in saying, you know, where did Calhoun's work go? Where was it really influential? Because he's making these big leap. So a lot of colleges who are doing work with crowding, looking at stress,

they're looking at this and they're saying, you are really, you know, making these massive jumps, these comparisons to human beings. So not a biologists think he's really sort of going too far away

“really, I think, from the field. So we were interested. Where does his research go? And some of the”

areas that it's really influential in are really psychologists who are looking at people in confined

environments where they really don't have a lot of access to space, a lot of freedom to move around. So prisons, hospitals, mental institutions in particular, but there was also a little spike around road rage incidents, for example, you know, whether or not that there is something going on here, that explains, you know, the spike in sort of violence and crowded traffic. So what's interesting, I think, for us as historians, to see where this kind of research goes and why. And again,

it's context. You're thinking of the American city, 1960s, 70s, concern over institutions. We have the Attica prison riot, for example. And it's kind of inevitable, I mean, thinking that a lot of people are looking around for experimental evidence for what they seem to see happening to the American city and American institutions at this time. The biologistic explanation for these behaviors all so means that people don't have to think too

much about the political rate, for a certain, for a certain section of the population, an account which blames all these problems that the American city seemed to be having in the 1960s on the biology of the, you know, human animal. It kind of lets them off the hook for having to address a lot of the social and political issues, which are almost certainly a more

“proximate cause. So that's the other appeal. I think of work like Calvin's,”

is this turn to biology to explain problems that actually probably have their feet in politics. It's such a great example, I think, of how you have limited control or no control really over how other people might use your research once it's out there. And so it seems like some politicians who used Calvin's, the results from his experiments to endorse, you know, violence or an increased policing state rather than increasing a social safety net. It's like, oh, look,

violence is inevitable. And so we can't do anything about that. We just need to increase police. And as you said, it's a way of being like, well, this is out of our control. We know what happens here. We have, we have a limited resources. And so we should do this instead of preventing what this might look like. And I think then that sort of is when the comparison between humans and rats begins to slip. And the biologist are like, let's pump the brakes on this. There's a limit.

“But then other people don't see the limit necessarily. Yeah, and I think Calvin had always,”

he'd always caught it press attention, you know, for really early on. So he's getting visits by the

Baltimore sun when he's on the road and ecology project in the 1940s before he's even done the thousand enclosure. So he liked the idea that people took an interest in his work, compiling the research for the book. You get the sense that he was playing a very dangerous game by allowing the reporters to run away with the ideas. And so he often wouldn't make the sensational comment himself. But if a reporter wanted to compare, you know, the dropout rats to the dropout

hit these are the 1960s, how who would put his hands up and say, oh, well, I'm not making the comparison. But I suppose you could. And that that's dangerous in as much as your influence runs away with you when you're no longer the author of the conclusions. And I think importing as much press attention as he did, certainly by the late 60s and then into the early 1970s, the dominant narrative is one, which he's increasingly feel is stepping out of his control. It's very much doom and gloom.

We're heading for societal collapse. There's too many of us. The problems with the cities are irresolvable. Now, who has this kind of positive message of, oh, well, actually, if we redesign the spaces, we could have a happier society. No one wants to hear that, right? Not when you've got the April sinks and, you know, gangs and families falling apart to talk about instead.

systems, very closely linked. One is shocking, I suppose, shocking people into the dangers and

“realities of uncontrolled population growth. So universe 25, for example, is a mouse experience.”

So it begins to move increasingly into mouse because they're easier to work with smaller, less complex for the kind of experiments that he's doing. And here you have the construction of an

environment, which looks like something. When I first saw this, I just thought, there's something

how blade runner. I mean, it's really sort of terrifying dystopia that he's created with these little apartment buildings up and down for mice. And he traces this experiment for over, it's think it's like four and a half years, isn't it, John? Yes, it is, yeah. So he allows this population to grow and he says, you know, this time, I'm not going to end the experiment early. So four and a half years, the population grows and then begins to crash and decline to the point that

“the last mouse dies. I think is reported in the New York Times with a death notice. I mean, it really”

does get a lot of attention. But this is a sort of really catastrophic view. I mean, at the end, the animals are so disturbed by their environment, so withdrawn that they don't know how to reproduce, they don't know how to wear a young. So the population, he says two years before it actually ends, it's is over because they're not reproducing. And then it's just the longevity of the remaining members. Even when he takes animals out of this environment and seeds them into a new environment.

So these are the most withdrawn, beautiful ones as he describes them. They look really healthy. He seeds them into a new environment. They don't reproduce. So on the one hand, he's producing experiments like this, which are really shocking. You know, that this could be the future of of humanity. Yet on the other hand, he's also doing experiments where he's trying to temper the effects of overcrowding. Better design of physical space could mean that perhaps

communities of rodents could live more normal lives among high density. He's trying to educate

his rodents. He'd first of them as super rats at one point in order to get a drink of water

or food they have to be next to another one. So the idea is that they develop a sense of cooperation and he describes this again leaping, you know, for comparisons with human beings in terms of altruism. And he believes that if he can culture his rats to sort of withstand some of the detrimental effects of density, human beings with all their capacity, intellectual capacities could actually design a future for humanity that was good, in fact, not just survivable,

but a positive one. Because he thinks that these stresses, these challenges that we face as human beings can actually drive our societies as they have in the past into increased innovation. He thinks now we're at a sort of crossroads he argues and we have the opportunity really to

redefine how we live and also reconstruct our spaces to make them more healthy. The problem is

is that people listen to the first message they are drawn as much to the second. Of course, it's always the shocking bit. The doom and gloom that captures people's attentions and makes

“that's the thing that people want to are drawn to, oddly. But that's not the only way that his”

work is capturing the public's imagination. Of course, at the very top, I mentioned the secret of Nim, which I mean, I was speechless when I learned that Nim and I am age refers to the National Institute of Mental Health. And in rewatching the movie recently, when they talk about the National Institute of Mental Health, I mean, I couldn't believe it. So can you tell me how Calhoun's work somehow finds its way into a children's book and movie? So in the, I think it's the

early 1970s, maybe late 60s, National Geographic send a reporter to Calhoun's lab at the National Institute of Mental Health Guide called Robert Conley. And we dug around that as far as we can tell, Conley didn't actually write any article about Calhoun's work, but he definitely visited the rat rooms. Conley clearly didn't forget the encounter either because a few years afterwards he published Mrs. Frisbee in the rats of Nim, which is this story about a female rat who is struggling

to save her family and encounters these superintelligent rats, which are the rats of Nim, which are rats which have escaped from a laboratory and have these kind of human levels of skill

published this under the name Robert O'Brien at the name sounds wrong. He used a pseudonym for his children's fiction, but the assumption is that those rats were inspired by the experiments he would have encountered Calhoun doing at the time on trying to create cultured and intelligent rats that were smarter than the average rodent. So that was an influence that Calhoun certainly didn't

seem coming, but was always very, very proud of. He was very, very glad that at least one person

had got the positive message out of his work or be it only through the medium of children's fiction. Calhoun's experiments go so far and they are invoked so often by politicians, by psychologists, by ecologists. I mean, they are as you describe hugely influential, but then he kind of slowly slips from relevance over time and he gets shoved aside at the National Institute of Mental Health. He resigns and then he just kind of fades away in a sense. What do you think his legacy is

today? Like, what mark do you think he left on science or society or the way that we think about space

“and crowds and populations? I think that as a group of thinkers and researchers in the”

kind of mid-20th century is really one of the first to get on top of this idea that our physical

environment can positively or negatively affect our health. And that's very much, you know, I think that's a really normalized idea now, but when Calhoun and anthropologist Khaled would haul and Robert Soma, who was the psychologist who introduced the concept of personal space, when they were writing and they were very much collaborating with one another, but they were turning people on to this idea that you could improve how a society functioned

also by improving the physical environment in which you house your citizens. So the idea that

that architecture should be sympathetic to the needs of the inhabitants are not simply acts like

a rack into which you stack a certain number of lab cages. That I think is one of the legacies of Calhoun's work taken as a part of that kind of revolution in design and architecture. I think, you know, for me, he represents this period in post-war United States, which was there was a period of optimism really that social scientists, biological scientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, could work together to solve a lot of these problems. And if you

look at this sort of the government money that goes into institutions like the National Institute of Mental Health, a huge proportion of it actually goes to social scientists, what we described as social psychiatrists, people who recognized say that the wider environment, as John said,

“the wider environment impacts our mental health. And that if you want to sort of address”

issues of mental health in cities, you need to look at problems such as housing, such as employment. These are the fundamental things you need to look at, right? You're not going to solve them simply by increasing the research into pharmaceuticals, which is what his lab was actually, you know, he lost his lab because he was replaced by someone who was actually looking at how to develop new forms of anti-depressants in their effectiveness. His concern with that was that all this

sort of social science research into how we improve our environments was being lost. And that was very much the kind of narrative arc that we followed in rat city was this sense of this work on social space and mental health just being really kind of collapses almost immediately when this new generation of psychopharmacological substances emerges, these drugs offer a much cheaper and quicker and in the short more effective fix for society's mental health

problems and for two or three decades from the mid 1970s onwards drugs was the main solution. In fact, in the last few years, you've begun to see institutions like the nation's whose mental health turning back more to look again at these non-pharmacological interventions,

“but it was very much the rise of the mood drugs that did for Calhoun's work. And I think along with”

that as well was it growing political unease about the rhetoric of our population. So it was no longer the done thing to talk about surging global population in terms of that being a problem that required fixing. And there was also I mean that was kind of just as a perfect storm of

really by the 70s and 80s. As John said, there's a pushback against ideas of population control.

There's also a backlash against sociobiology about this evolutionary psychology, the belief that humans are just like animals and that humans are inherently very aggressive territorial animals.

“So his work is associated with this. But also I think there is a sort of new we're entering”

into a new neoliberal world really by the late 70s, early 80s, whereby there isn't this interest in funding large-scale long-term social science ecological research projects. And a lot of the money is caught from these kinds of research programs. Again, kind of coming back to the work

that is done, the science that has done happens when it happens because of the broader world.

And I feel like Calhoun's work really does illustrate that science doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's a product of all of the other things that are happening around him who he is as a product of the environment that he grew up in and then is now participating in. And I just, I have to say this

“has been just a really fascinating conversation and I really appreciate you taking the time to”

chat today. Oh, it's been marvelous. Thank you. Thank you, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. [Music] A big thank you again to John Adams and Ed Ramston for taking the time to chat with me. I love talking about rats. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to learn more, check out our website this podcast will kill you.com where I'll post a link to where you can find rat city,

overcrowding and urban arrangement in the road universes of John B. Calhoun, as well as a link to John's and Ed's websites where you can find their other work. And don't forget, you can check out our website for all sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to transcripts, Quarantini and Plicyber Rita recipes, show notes and references for all of our episodes, links to merch, our bookshop.org affiliate account, a good read list, a fritanda count form,

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