Medicine: Schizoid Spiders

In Los Angeles’ Kerckhoff Mansion, which belongs to the University of Southern California, 70 small spiders (Zilla x-notata) are living in pampered luxury. Their room is air-conditioned, and every day delicious flies are handed to them alive. They have little paper cones to live in and water to drink from cups made of soda straws. Being creatures of inflexible habit, they spin beautifully regular webs in frames supplied for the purpose.

Master of the spiders is Neuropsychiatrist Nicholas Bercel, who had them collected under wharves in Monterey and is using them as sensitive instruments for measuring the effects of chemicals on behavior. When a drug upsets their nervous systems, its action is revealed by changes in their web-spinning patterns.

The payoff comes after a spider has settled down to a routine of high living and weaving perfect webs of traditional pattern. Dr. Bercel then gives it no food for a day. In the evening he offers it a doctored fly—one that he has killed without damaging its form and from which he has drained the blood. He replaces this with human blood serum taken from schizophrenic patients. Since the dead fly does not buzz or struggle, Dr. Bercel fools the spider into thinking that it is alive by twanging a tuning fork (middle C) near the web. The spider runs out, sinks its fangs into the fly and greedily sucks up its content of schizophrenic serum. Then Dr. Bercel destroys the spider’s web to force it to build a new one.

Early morning is web-building time, so when Dr. Bercel opens the air-conditioned room the next day, he can tell at a glance how the spiders reacted to their meals. Most striking results so far have been seen in spiders fed with serum taken from patients suffering from the catatonic form of schizophrenia. The spiders seem to become catatonic too. They move listlessly and spend much time in their houses; the webs they spin are like the last vestiges of ragged lace. The spiders’ reaction, like that of human volunteers injected with schizophrenic serum (TIME, May 14), shows that this disease is associated with a disorder in blood chemistry.

Other kinds of schizophrenic serum produce effects on the webs that are not so obvious. Dr. Bercel’s next step: to feed spiders on serum from former schizophrenic patients, now considered cured, to see whether the cure will extend to his spiders, leave them spinning perfect webs.