To some, it seems almost like a relic of the Cold War, when Harvard researchers conducted experiments with radiation on retarded children in Massachusetts.

But right now, a Harvard graduate is running a school for mentally retarded teenagers and adults that uses electric shocks to control their behavior.

Since 1971, the Behavior Research Institute (BRI) in Providence, Rhode Island, has served some of the most violent and self-abusive mentally retarded and autistic patients in the nation.

In recent months, BRI, which was created by Matthew L. Israel '54, has found itself under fire from the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation, advocates for the disabled and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It has also been the topic of a CBS special and the target of a bill in the state legislature designed to prevent aversive therapies.

Harvard is connected to BRI on several levels: its founder trained at

Harvard, its philosophy of treatment is basedon the ideas of Professor Emeritus B.F.Skinner and the son of a current professor is apatient.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, Israeltook a psychology course with Skinner. Hisexposure to Skinner's theories of behaviorism andto the idea that people can be made perfect wouldaffect him for the rest of his life.

Skinner, who taught at Harvard from 1947 to1974, believed people's behaviors fell into twotypes: voluntary, or "operant," and involuntary,or "reflexive." Through punishment and reward,Skinner believed people could learn to controltheir operant behaviors.

If one could devise a way to condition peopleto live harmoniously, Skinner believed a communalutopia could exist. Skinner, in fact, took this sofar as to raise his daughters in glass "Skinnerboxes."

After a brief stint at Harvard Law School,Israel earned his Ph.D. in Harvard's psychologydepartment. He later did his post-doctoral work atHarvard with Skinner.

When Israel founded the BRI in 1971, he appliedSkinner's ideas to the treatment of the mentallyhandicapped, creating an elaborate system ofrewards and punishments for patients there.

Those punishments, called "aversive therapy" or"aversives," have triggered one of the most heatedcontroversies ever about the care of the disabledand about what can be done in the name of medicaltreatment.

Opponents argue that aversives are equivalentto torture, that they do not work in the long termand that there are more effective, humanealternatives.

Proponents of BRI's program, including parentsof patients there, say BRI is saving people'slives.

The main aversive therapy BRI uses is electricshock, delivered by a device called the GraduatedElectronic Decelerator that 58 out of BRI's 62students wear on their bodies.

Students receive shocks to stop them frommutilating themselves or from hurting others,Israel says. The Boston branch of the FDA confirmsthat the electric shock is applied for thesepurposes. The FDA has been receiving informationfrom BRI on the use of electric shocks since 1991.