Hypopomus pinnicaudatus, an electric fish, has a marked sexual dimorphism in its tail filament. Sexually mature males have long, 'feathered' tails as compared with females. The sexual dimorphism emerges when a fish reaches about 110 mm total length. Mature males have larger electrocytes which are more widely spaced and more numerous than those in mature females: The biphasic electric organ discharge (EOD) is longer in males than in females. The peak-to-peak amplitude of the male's EOD is weaker than a female's of the same total length. The weaker discharge is unexpected given the increase in size and number of electrocytes. It is suggested that the reduction in EOD amplitude is a consequence of the increase in EOD duration among males. Further, female choice probably played a role in the evolution of long duration EODs among males, and males may have secondarily grown long tails to compensate for the loss in active space that would otherwise accompany a weaker EOD.

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In a military-sponsored research project begun during the Second World War, inmates of the Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois were infected with malaria and treated with experimental drugs that sometimes had vicious side effects. They were made into reservoirs for the disease and they provided a food supply for the mosquito cultures. They acted as secretaries and technicians, recording data on one another, administering malarious mosquito bites and experimental drugs to one another, and helping decide who was admitted to the project and who became eligible for early parole as a result of his participation. Thus, the prisoners were not simply research subjects; they were deeply constitutive of the research project. Because a prisoner’s time on the project was counted as part of his sentence, and because serving on the project could shorten one’s sentence, the project must be seen as simultaneously serving the functions of research and punishment. Michel Foucault wrote about such ‘mixed mechanisms’ in his Discipline and punish. His shining example of such a ‘transparent’ and subtle style of punishment was the panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s architectural invention of prison cellblocks arrayed around a central guard tower. Stateville prison was designed on Bentham’s model; Foucault featured it in his own discussion. This paper, then, explores the power relations in this highly idiosyncratic experimental system, in which the various roles of model organism, reagent, and technician are all occupied by sentient beings who move among them fluidly. This, I argue, created an environment in the Stateville hospital wing more panoptic than that in the cellblocks. Research and punishment were completely interpenetrating, and mutually reinforcing.

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