In June 1972, the Royal Society of Medicine in London hosted a symposium called “Man in His Place”. It featured an eclectic group of speakers, including Jacob Bronowski, whose acclaimed 13-part BBC television series, The Ascent of Man, would air the following year. But the first person to take the podium was John Bumpass Calhoun from the US National Institute of Mental 91É«ÇéƬ outside Washington DC.
Even audience members familiar with Calhoun’s work had no idea what was in store for them, and the title of his talk – “Death squared: The explosive growth and demise of a mouse population” – didn’t give much away. “I shall largely speak of mice,” he began, “but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life and its evolution.” He then went on to describe a long-term experiment he was running on population dynamics involving mice living in a “Utopian environment” that he dubbed Universe 25. Although his study subjects were rodents, Calhoun believed his metropolises had implications for humans: this was a cautionary tale of the chaos and social collapse in store for humanity in an overpopulated world.
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An ecologist-turned-psychologist-turned-futurist, Calhoun became a science rock star in the 1970s. His message struck a chord at a time when the human population was expanding rapidly and overcrowding was a hot political issue. As interest grew in his research, Calhoun was courted by the great and the good, from politicians and urban planners to prison reformists and writers. He even had an audience with the pope. Strange as it may seem, his rodent cities would influence many quarters of society for years to come.
Population growth and social meltdown
Calhoun first came to public attention in 1962, following the publication of an in which he described his study charting population growth and decay among rats living in an experimental barn not far from his labs. Both excited and alarmed by his findings, Calhoun subsequently established a series of rodent metropolises, including Universe 25, a mouse paradise consisting of 16 buildings, each split into 16 apartments, with their own feeding station and rooftop fountain to quench the residents’ thirst. On 9 July 1968, four male and four female mice were placed into Universe 25. Then, for hours each day, over nearly four years, Calhoun and his team looked down from above and recorded what was happening.
With plentiful food and water, no predators and no disease to speak of, the mice got off to a flying start, their numbers increasing quickly. After about 18 months, the population had skyrocketed to 2200, far above what Calhoun calculated to be the optimal size. This, brought about a collapse in normal behaviour, which he dubbed a “behavioural sink”. First, the inhabitants of Universe 25 exhibited “pathological togetherness” – a need to be near others, even if the consequences were negative. So, for example, they would cluster around a handful of feeders and leave others full. Then, as the population began to crash, life degenerated into a rodent hell, full of males that were either hyper-aggressive or listless and lacking sexual drive, alongside females that displayed almost no maternal care. As the crash progressed, growing numbers of mice spent most of their time grooming themselves and eating, while shunning all social interactions. Calhoun called these “the beautiful ones” and noted that they were capable of only the simplest behaviours compatible with physiological survival.
Calhoun was courted by the great and the good. He even had an audience with the pope
“Normal social organisation breaks down, it dies,” he told attendees at the 1972 symposium. By that time, there were only 121 mice left in Universe 25 and the population was headed rapidly to extinction. This was a warning for humanity, he believed: if we didn’t control our own population growth and reduce overcrowding, we too might destroy ourselves.
Calhoun’s work on Universe 25 propelled him to international fame. The day after he gave his lecture in London, The Daily Telegraph ran two stories about it: “Mice point way to doom…” and “Sad elderly mice”. CBS Morning News sent a camera crew to film Universe 25 and ran a long piece about population explosions and implosions on its morning and evening shows. Newsweek’s Stewart Alsop also visited. “It’s a lovely day – much too lovely to spend in an office,” his article began. “In fact, it seemed a perfect day to visit Dr. John Calhoun’s mousery.” When the last survivor in Universe 25 died, The Washington Post even ran a front-page story titled “Ten boxes of dead mice could be us: Is modern mankind becoming a giant colony of mice?”.
With Calhoun’s star on the rise, politicians started to take notice. US senator Robert Packwood was quick off the mark. In April 1971, he stood in the Capital building and told his fellow senators that a “critical aspect of the population problem is being studied by Dr John Calhoun” and then pleaded for his colleagues to take the . A few years later, Calhoun wrote to President Nixon, warning that this was the greatest crisis faced by humanity in 50,000 years. Nixon, however, didn’t respond – he was no doubt preoccupied with his own personal crisis, Watergate.
The dangers of overcrowding
However, Calhoun’s ideas were heeded elsewhere, with practical consequences. In 1971, he was consulted by the prison authorities in Washington DC and, in time, his work played a role in reforming dangerously overcrowded prisons. Likewise, city planners were considering the implications of his studies for urban development. In Philadelphia, for example, Calhoun’s findings persuaded a committee charged with revising the building code not to reduce the minimum space per person in city dwellings.
Meanwhile, member of congress Barry Goldwater Jr wrote to Calhoun to say that his findings “appear to coincide with certain theories now being evaluated by land-use planning consultants working with [my] staff” and requested an in-person meeting to discuss the “possible relationships between your findings and our investigations”. Alas, it is unclear whether this meeting occurred.
Calhoun’s ideas were soon making inroads into the popular psyche, too. They played a lead role in the 1969 documentary movie and in Tom Wolfe’s hard-hitting essay . Following a visit to Calhoun’s lab, Robert C. O’Brien was inspired – or so Calhoun believed – to write the wonderful children’s story . In September 1973, Calhoun even met Pope Paul VI at the Special World Conference on Futures Research in Rome.
Calhoun died in 1995. Today, the human population sits at twice what it was when he extrapolated from his rodent experiments to issue his dire warnings. The social breakdown that he feared might happen if humanity didn’t take action to curb overpopulation hasn’t (for the most part) materialised.
But Calhoun did live to see one of his predictions come to fruition: he forecast a “conceptual revolution” that would give birth to a global “electronic prosthesis”, a worldwide cybernetic brain. By the time he died, the internet had started to become a reality.
