Killing the Buddha

Burke says “the National Institute of Mental Health grant checks to UCLA for all of the research on the children in 1973, 1974 and 1975 were written with the understanding that he was the principal investigator. He often interrupted, raising his voice as if being attacked, in a bid to prevent this simple fact from being acknowledged: over and above the funds that Richard Green brought with him from SUNY?Stony Brook, $218,945 went to UCLA from the NIMH with Dr. Lovaas as Principal Investigator (PI) in this project.”

If that is true, then he was the official sponsor of the project. The Principal Investigator is the person who applies for a government grant, submits the plan of research (“protocol”) to justify the funding, then conducts or supervises the research after it is funded. The PI would also be the lead author on all, or at least the major, publications from the project. The PI is the head of a funded project – the author and initiator of the funding request, and the person responsible for seeing that the project is carried out. The PI is both legally responsible for the use of the funds, and is expected to produce good scientific results (if the project is not completed, that would jeopardize future requests for funding by that person). And to be accepted as a PI, a researcher must have a significant track record – not just anybody can get funding. It’s impossible for anyone to be the PI on a government-funded project without being, not merely intimately involved, but in fact in charge of, and the director of, that project – that’s what “Principal Investigator” means.

It will be officially documented what role Lovaas played in these projects, and whether he was PI or not. First, the grant request and funding records will still be on file, and may (I’m not sure) be open to Freedom of Information Act requests. Second, any publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals will identify the PI for the experiment, and probably the number of the funding grant under which it was conducted (that’s required today; I’m not sure about back then). So the places to look are in the NIMH archives for the years just before and during these projects, and the professional literature during and afterwards. It would help if it were known exactly when these projects were conducted (and bear in mind there may have been more than one official funding grant or project name), who else was involved, and if possible what the grant ID numbers were. I’d start with an index search of the general literature, under the names of Lovaas and his colleagues; more effort might be required if that doesn’t do it. But the answer is certainly findable.

@Kevin Keith. Thank you. Yes, O. Ivar Lovaas is listed as an author (with Rekers) of the study “Behavioral Treatment of Deviant Sex Role Behaviors in a Male Child” in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1974.

What’s more difficult to verify is whether Rekers’ story on the recording is true. That is, whether Lovaas ran into Rekers’ grad student office saying “I found it!” and giving Rekers “no choice” but to complete a dissertation attempting to manipulate gender identity.

PubMed – the online index of medical research – lists 45 papers with O.I. Lovaas as an author.

(Go to: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed – search on the term “Lovaas OI”.)

They range from 1958 to 1998. Most are on the treatment of autism (including, in 1966, “Modification of Autistic Behavior with LSD-25″ – yikes!); some of the early papers are on other subjects. Only two, both in 1974, are obviously about gender reassignment. Both of those have George Rekers as lead author.

The behavioral treatment of a “transsexual” preadolescent boy.
Rekers GA, Lovaas OI, Low B.
J Abnorm Child Psychol. 1974 Jun;2(2):99-116. No abstract available.
[This appears to be the second one described in the Burke link, involving an 8-year-old named "Carl".]

Behavioral treatment of deviant sex-role behaviors in a male child.
Rekers GA, Lovaas OI.
J Appl Behav Anal. 1974 Summer;7(2):173-90.
[This is the one mentioned by Rekers in his audio recording above - the basis of his doctoral research, and whose subject "Kraig" later attempted suicide.]

It is not recorded in these entries who was the PI on the grant that funded this work (the full papers might show it), but since they were both apparently part of Rekers’s doctoral research (i.e., done to complete his PhD, before he had received the degree), Rekers could not have been the PI. If these projects were funded by NIMH, there would have to be a PI and it would have to be Lovaas, since he is the only other person named as author. Also, since he was supervising his doctoral student on these projects, he would have to have had a fair degree of knowledge about them. (In the Burke piece linked above, Lovaas is quoted saying “he was simply on a committee that evaluated the research of a young assistant professor, George Rekers, who was working on gender deviation”. This would presumably have been Rekers’s dissertation committee, and Lovaas was not just “on” the committee, but Rekers’s dissertation supervisor; Rekers was probably a teaching assistant, not an “assistant professor”, at that time.)

Now, doctoral students are expected to do their research for themselves. These projects listed above are also very small – each one involves just one “patient”. So it’s possible that Rekers did the hands-on work, and Lovaas was just overseeing the project as his advisor. But either way, Rekers was officially just a grad student; Lovaas was clearly the supervisor on the project, and would have had official responsibility for approving the project design, ensuring subject safety, and overseeing proper scientific procedure (so-called!).

Whatever his practical day-to-day involvement may have been – and it could have been minor – Lovaas’s official role in the project cannot be minimized. He was both the PI on the project grant and a named author on the published reports from the project. He has professional responsibility for it in every sense: by putting his signature on the grant application, he endorsed the project as worthy and well-designed, and by putting his name on the published papers, he endorsed it once again, and also vouched for the results. It’s his baby.

One final note, however: these two citations appear to be the only ones in Lovaas’s career that involve gender-identity “therapy”. They were Rekers’s PhD project – his first published papers – but also the beginning of Rekers’s subsequent career. PubMed lists 23 papers with Rekers as a named author – usually the lead author. (Search PubMed for “Rekers GA”.) Virtually all of them are on gender identity or “gender disturbance”. After the 1974 project, Lovaas never published with Rekers again, and never published on “gender therapy” again. Rekers published on almost nothing else.

Lovaas cannot escape responsibility for officially sponsoring the Feminine Boy Project. But he appears to be telling the truth that it was not a major issue for him, and it may be true that his practical role in conducting the project (as opposed to his administrative role in sponsoring and supervising it) was minimal. Rekers clearly was obsessed with the subject. He has not only continued to tout his near-fatal “therapy” from his dissertation project, but continued to experiment with similar gender-bending “therapies” up to at least 1990, making that issue the focus of his entire career. Though he was only a grad student on the Feminine Boy Project, it was clearly his baby, too, and apparently much more significantly, in practical terms, than it was Lovaas’s.

Neither of these two comes off well from this history. But for Lovaas it appears to have been a side project he got into for a few years while supervising a student, then dropped and now repudiates; for Rekers the true believer, it was a life-long obsession.

NB: I said above that Lovaas was the only author besides Rekers on these papers. He was the only other author on the “Kraig” paper. There is a “B Low” on the second paper. I’m not sure what that person’s story is – PubMed seems to have papers from a number of different people named “B Low”, so it’s hard to tell who’s doing what – but no “B Low” co-authored with either Lovaas or Rekers aside from that one paper, and “B Low” does not appear to have done much else with gender therapy.

I suspect Lovaas was PI on both these projects; a look at primary sources (the papers and the funding applications) would clarify it all.