Whose bright idea was that?

How does it feel to invent something you later regret? Simon Hattenstone talks to the people who know
Dog Labradoodle
When the dream bites back. 'All these backyard breeders have jumped on the bandwagon, and they’re crossing any kind of dog with a poodle,' says Wally Conron. Photograph: Ragnar Schmuck/Getty Images


If Wally Conron had known what was going to become of the labradoodle, he wouldn't have bred the dog in the first place. It was 22 years ago and Conron, now 81, was working as the breeding and puppy-walking manager for the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia when his boss set him a tough task. A blind woman from Hawaii had written asking if it they could provide a guide dog that would not shed hair, because her husband was allergic to it. "I said, 'Oh yes, this will be a piece of cake. The standard poodle is a working dog, it doesn't shed hair, it'll be great.' I tried 33 in the course of three years and they all failed. They just didn't make a guide dog. Meanwhile, the woman in Hawaii was getting older and the boss was getting on my back."

Conron decided there was one possibility left – take his best labrador bitch and mate it with a standard poodle. They created three crossbreed puppies that needed to be boarded out to be trained and socialised, but nobody would take them – everyone wanted a purebred. And that's when Conron came up with the name labradoodle. "I went to our PR team and said, 'Go to the press and tell them we've invented a new dog, the labradoodle.' It was a gimmick, and it went worldwide. No one wanted a crossbreed, but the following day we had hundreds of calls from people wanting these master dogs."

The labradoodle proved to be a brilliant dog for the blind, and the woman in Hawaii was happy. Job done. So what was the problem? Ah, says Conron, it's how the dog has been used and abused, and sold under false pretences. "This is what gets up my nose, if you'll pardon the expression. When the pups were five months old, we sent clippings and saliva over to Hawaii to be tested with this woman's husband. Of the three pups, he was not allergic to one of them. In the next litter I had there were 10 pups, but only three had non-allergenic coats. Now, people are breeding these dogs and selling them as non-allergenic, and they're not even testing them."


Now, the designer dog has become a status symbol. "Jennifer Aniston's got one. Whatsisname, Obama, the American president, announced he was thinking of getting a labradoodle. He didn't get one in the end, but I wrote him a letter saying what the pitfalls were. I said, if you're going to buy a labradoodle, check both parents, make sure they have a certificate. A lot of them are untrainable."

Conron, who is writing a memoir about life with the labradoodle, says that despite the fact that the dogs have helped so many blind people, he regrets creating the first crossbreed. "I opened a Pandora's box, that's what I did. I released a Frankenstein. So many people are just breeding for the money." Today, people pay ridiculous prices for poodle crossbreeds, and unscrupulous breeders are crossing poodles with inappropriate dogs simply so they can say they were the first to do it. There are cavoodles (cavalier king charles spaniel/poodle), groodles (golden retriever/ poodle) schnoodles (shnauser/poodle), and even roodles (rottweiller/poodle). "A lot of them are just crazy," Conron says. "So many of them have problems. I believe that one-third of dogs bred today are the poodle crosses. People say aren't you proud of yourself, and I say, no. Not in the slightest. I've done so much harm to pure breeding and made these charlatans quite rich."

Conron has a pet labrador, Rocky, and has never kept a labradoodle as a pet. "No way!" he says, sounding shocked. He only ever bred 31, each of them "perfect". "I'm on a pension and live in a little shoebox flat. If I'd gone into breeding labradoodles for a living, I'd be on easy street. But there was no way I'd do it. My conscience wouldn't let me."

Sinclair C5

Sinclair C5
'We threw it at the public without them being prepared for it,' says Clive Sinclair. 'You need to prepare the ground with something radical.' Photograph: Steve Blogg / Rex Features

Earlier this year, Time magazine compiled a list of the 50 worst inventions. It ranged from the zany (Honegar, an unlikely combination of honey and vinegar; spray-on hair; the hula chair, part hula hoop, part chair) to the dangerous (Agent Orange, sub-prime mortgages, hydrogenated oils) and the plain dumb (New Coke – a sweeter version of the original – and crinoline). A few combined all three – the Mizar flying car crashed on a test flight in 1973, killing engineer and pilot.

But it is less common that inventors themselves express doubts about products they have laboured over, often for many years. General Mikhail Kalashnikov, who was responsible for the AK-47 assault rifle, now the most widely-used automatic rifle in the world, last year said he regrets that terrorists and gangsters use his weapon. "It is painful for me to see when criminal elements of all kinds fire from my weapon. I created this weapon primarily to safeguard our fatherland," the Russian said on the eve of his 90th birthday.

It must be tough to have such a tortured relationship with the thing that you are most famous for. Sir Clive Sinclair made his name by flogging the first £100 computer in Britain; before that, they'd sold for around £500. Make no mistake, he's proud of that. And yet the thing for which he remains best known is widely regarded as a great British disaster.

What he regrets most of all is the way he launched the C5 – a one-seat electronic not-quite-car that has become an iconic image of technological failure. When it arrived on the market in 1985, it looked like nothing we'd seen before – and not necessarily in a good way. "First of all it was midwinter, and there was snow on the ground," he says. "And we threw it at the public without them being prepared for it. You need to prepare the ground with something radical. So it had a shock effect and that was bad news."

That's not that all that went wrong. The British Safety Council claimed it was unsafe. "Asbolute rubbish," Sir Clive says. In fact, 25 years on, he believes the C5's time has come, and he's developing a new prototype that should be launched within the next year. "Technology has moved on quite a bit, there are new batteries available and I just rethought the thing. The C5 was OK, but I think we can do a better job now."

Will it have the same name? "No, I don't think the C5 was a very good name." So what's the new motor going to be called? He pauses dramatically. "At the moment the prototype is called the X1."

Electronic tagging

Professor Bob Gable is ashamed of what has become of the electronic tagging system he devised with his twin brother Kirkland in the mid-1960s. Both are professors in psychology, both have law degrees and both were motivated by hippy idealism. Back in 1964, tagging was invented as a system of positive reinforcement, and the brothers are horrified that it has been appropriated as a tool for punishment.

Bob tells me that their work was influenced by the American psychologist BF Skinner – Bob was taught by Skinner while Kirkland's adviser was Timothy Leary. "We wanted to find a way of rewarding juvenile delinquents when they were doing what they were supposed to be doing; that is, going to school or to work or to a drug treatment centre. Just as Skinner rewarded pigeons."

Over four years, they tagged around 20 juvenile delinquents and compared their behaviour with a control group. "We used missile tracking equipment, so it was very sophisticated. Transponders were put in various places around town and the kids carried a little transponder that would signal they had gone past that particular unit." They were then rewarded for being where they should be with tickets for, say, a sports game or a free pizza. The results were impressive. "We reduced the frequency of arrest and time in jail, and when a crime did occur, they tended to be more creative and less violent."

By the late 60s, the brothers had left Harvard and the experiment stopped. But around 15 years later, electronic tagging came back big time – this time without the reward system. Bob says there are those who regard him and his brother as heroes, because the tag has kept people out of prison, but as far as the Gables are concerned, it's a gross misappropriation of the original concept. "It's all using punishment." Are they disappointed because their tag was born of idealism? "Yes! Yes! And it's not just idealism, it's also scientific fact that rewards and shaping behaviour works, and that punishment in the long run is not very beneficial. When kids misbehave, we punish them; when countries misbehave, we bomb them. We just have this idea that we're going to suppress the bad behaviour and we don't really take seriously how we ought to reward."

What is it like to be known for something you hate, or that misrepresents everything you believe in? "Of course it's not pleasant," says Kirkland, "but I'm not in control of the universe. I have to realise there are some things out of my control."


Alexander Shulgin is known as the godfather of ecstasy. He lives with his wife Ann on a ranch in Lafayette, California, and at 85 suffers severe short-term memory loss. Ann acts as a conduit between us – repeating my questions to him and his answers back to me.

Ecstasy was first synthesised in 1912 by the chemical company Merck, but Shulgin resynthesised it in 1976 and was the first person to test it on a human being – himself. Two years later he wrote a paper with a colleague about the effect of MDMA, stating that it created "an easily controlled altered state of consciousness with emotional and sensual overtones… it didn't have the other visual and auditory imaginative things that you often get from psychedelics. It opened up a person, both to other people and inner thoughts, but didn't necessarily colour it with pretty colours and strange noises.'' He believed that with its unusual combination of effects (intoxication, disinhibition and clarity), it could be a useful drug in psychotherapy. And so it was – for a while. But then MDMA became ecstasy, the drug of choice for the rave generation, and in 1986 its use in the treatment of depression was banned by the US Drug Enforcement Agency. In 2000, US customs officials seized nearly 10 million pills.

Shulgin had his first psychedelic experience in 1960, and since then he estimates he has had another 4,000. (Ann says she has had only around 2,000 herself.) Some regard him as a holy man, some as a great scientist, others as a monster. The Daily Mail once ran a story headlined "Has this man killed 100 British teenagers?"

Today, Shulgin has his doubts about the drug he championed – not because of its efficacy, but because he believes people have abused it. "I have regrets about the way MDMA is used, because it has caused a great deal of negative publicity and been made illegal in a lot of countries. But it is still one of the great psychotherapeutic drugs."

In Britain and America, he says, people rarely talk of its therapeutic value. "You just hear about it causing young people to get into disastrous situations at raves. But MDMA is a very rich research tool and its use in the opening up the subconscious or the unconscious is very valuable."

The problem started, he says, when clubbers began popping pills with reckless abandon. And once MDMA was made illegal, there was no way to monitor the quality of the drug. "It made it impossible for people at raves to know whether they were getting MDMA. We never use the term ecstasy because it is meaningless – some ecstasy capsules have no MDMA in them whatsoever. So the so-called ecstasy has become a real menace." He is convinced that the outlawing of the drug has caused more problems than the drug itself.

The strange thing, Shulgin says, is that he has actually invented hundreds of psychoactive drugs, all with the same potential to open up the subconscious and unconscious, yet it is only MDMA, which he simply brought to public attention, for which he is known. "I still believe one day it will be a really important aid in psychotherapy, but MDMA has caused a lot of trouble for a lot of people in the way it was misused."

Lethal injection

Dr Jay Chapman says his invention is a strange thing to be defined by. "The media sometimes refer to me as the father of the lethal injection..." He stops. "It was not one of my purposes in life. It was something I was asked to do and I did it on the spur of the moment."

It was 1977 and double-murderer Gary Gilmore had just been executed in Utah. Faced with the option of firing squad or hanging, he had chosen the former, but there had been an uproar among campaigners against the death penalty, denouncing the execution as inhumane.

A few days later, Chapman, who was the chief medical examiner for the state of Oklahoma, was asked if he had an opinion on how people should be put to death in a more humane fashion. He had strong opinions, and suggested that a lethal injection would provide a much more palatable option. Chapman then went away to create the formula – an ultra-short-acting barbiturate in combination with a paralytic agent and potassium chloride, to produce a quick death. Later on, he set up a detailed protocol for the state of Oklahoma for the administration of the lethal injection. "It's the standard protocol for anesthesia carried to extremes," he says.

Why was he so keen on the lethal injection? Simple, he says. There were so many people sitting on death row, living out their natural lives as argument raged about the relative humanity of the means of execution. With a system that was quick, efficient and involved minimal pain, he believed that natural justice would be restored and those on Death Row would die. And that, to Chapman, was all that mattered.

Earlier this year, though, he announced that he regretted his role in creating the lethal injection. I assumed that he'd had a change of heart on capital punishment. Yes, he has, he says – in a way.

As Oklahoma's chief medical examiner, he witnessed many examples of man's inhumanity to man. "What we've seen is children abducted, sexually abused, tortured and killed. Some of these victims have even been buried alive. Can you imagine anything worse? I don't think the perpetrators of these crimes deserve any pity or sympathy. We hear all these arguments today about dysfunctional families; well, you know something, all of us came from dysfunctional families and we had choices to make. Those people had choices to make, too, and they made the wrong ones. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is."

Of course he's disappointed with the way things have turned out, he says. He blames bleeding-heart liberals, lawyers on the make and a dilatory court system. "There was a moratorium on executions. The lethal injection made the death penalty more humane, so it was more likely to be carried out – that was my thinking behind it. The problem is, it doesn't get carried out. We have people who have written books, gotten married, had conjugal visits, all sorts of stuff, on death row. They've been languishing there for 20-something years, and that doesn't seem reasonable to me. If the death penalty is going to be assigned, it should be carried out. Justice delayed is justice denied."

Life imprisonment is costly and pointless, as far as Chapman is concerned. "There are some people who cannot live in society. And if that's the case, they should be eliminated."

He speaks slowly and calmly as he explains that there is another reason he now has regrets. Over time, he has become convinced that the lethal injection is too humane. "I'm an eye for an eye person. The lethal injection is too easy for some of them."