What if doctors could inject robots the size of microorganisms into our bloodstreams and send them to attack individual cancer cells, remove plaque deposits from the walls of our arteries, fix damaged kidneys, deliver drug treatments and perform various bodily repairs from the inside on a scale too tiny for regular-sized human surgeons to attempt?
One of the most wonderfully bizarre flicks that I’ve seen in recent years is 2005’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In the movie, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play former lovers who, after their painful breakup, each become clients of a company called Lacuna Inc., which offers a miraculous technology that can erase unpleasant memories. (The term “lacuna” means a gap or missing part; there’s a disorder called lacunar amnesia, in which a person develops a gap in his or her memory about a specific event.) Here’s the trailer, which gives you a feel for where the story goes.
Eternal Sunshine might seem like another improbable mind-bending fantasy from the keyboard of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (whose even more twisted Adaptation is another of my favorites). But maybe not. As the esteemed, deadly serious scientific journal Technology Review reports, researchers have made a breakthrough that may presage a real-life version of Lacuna’s memory-erasing process. But instead of the electronic brain-wave gizmo in the film, this process involves a chemical.
Before we get into a new drug’s seemingly miraculous ability to provide the same benefits as strenuous exertion, here’s why it is so potentially important. When I saw this headline in Google news, I had to do a double-take to make sure that it wasn’t from The Onion, the satirical Web site whose faux-journalistic parodies occasionally are plagiarized by reporters in other countries and run as actual news. But no, this story is from Reuters, and apparently it’s dead serious:
ALL U.S. ADULTS COULD BE OVERWEIGHT IN 40 YEARS
Ouch. The study in question, published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Obesity, uses data gathered over the past four decades to project the expansion of American waistlines into the future. And it’s not a pretty picture. By 2030, if present trends continue, 86.3 percent of American adults will be overweight, with a body mass index of 25 or greater, and 51.1 percent will be obese, with BMIs above 30. If the pattern persists through 2048, all American adults will be carrying a significant excess of pounds, something scientists would not have believed to be possible.
"Genetically and physiologically, it should be impossible" for all U.S. adults to become overweight, said Dr. Lan Liang of the federal government's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, one of the researchers on the study.
However, she told Reuters Health, the data suggest that if the trends of the past 30 years persist, "that is the direction we're going."
I’m avoiding the temptation to make a gratuitous Jabba the Hutt joke here, because the trend described by this study is a potential health catastrophe of staggering proportions. Indeed, the researchers predict that the cost of treating health problems associated with excess weight could double each decade, so that by 2030 we could be spending nearly a trillion dollars a year, or nearly a fifth of total U.S. healthcare expenditures, to cope with what essentially is a preventable condition.
So what’s an increasingly corpulent nation to do? Giving up cheese fries and venti lattes will help, but cutting caloric intake drastically only works up to a point, because our bodies kick into starvation-fighting mode and become super-efficient at preserving those stores of fat, often at the expense of consuming muscle. A less-drastic balanced diet, combined with plenty of exercise, is the conventional wisdom. The problem with that solution: A lot of people don’t particularly care for getting all breathless and sweaty.
But what if you could get the benefits of exercise simply from taking a pill?
During one of my usual late-night Googlethons fueled by potent Vietnamese coffee, I came across a fascinating 2006 article from New Scientist, “Get ready for 24-hour living,” which discusses the recent development of drugs that can allow a person to remain awake for hours or even days without ill effects. One such drug is modafinil, a medication whose maker, Cephalon, describes it as the “first in a new class of wake-promoting agents.” Approved by the FDA as a treatment for narcolepsy, excessive sleepiness caused by obstructive sleep apnea/hypopnea and shift work sleep disorder, modafinil also reportedly is popular off-label with overachievers such as “Yves,” a 30-something software developer from Seattle who has been using it on-and-off for several years, mostly to burn the candle at both ends.
"I find I can be very productive at work," he says. "I'm more organized and more motivated. And it means I can go out partying on a Friday night and still go skiing early on Saturday morning."
But the present generation of eugeroic drugs such as modafinil and CX717, another compound whose sleep depriviation-countering effects have drawn interest from the U.S. military, probably are just the start. New Scientist reports that several pharmaceutical giants are gearing up research on wakefulness drugs, and that the Pentagon is also looking at technologies such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, which might be used to switch on or off portions of the brain affected by sleep deprivation. The publication quotes Oxford University circadian biologist Russell Foster, who envisions that, in the next decade or two, it’ll be possible pharmacologically to turn off the need for sleep. As a result, according to Foster, people routinely will be awake and active for 22 hours a day.
The ability to function at a high level without sleeping much — or at all — for long periods would have some definite upsides. Medical residents wouldn’t have to worry about misdiagnosing emergency-room patients because their cognitive faculties have been reduced to goo by brutally long shifts. Truck drivers could pull coast-to-coast runs without slowing down, except for an occasional pie-and-coffee break. Particularly ambitious people could hold two full-time jobs at once or simultaneously earn multiple Ph.D.s. Earning a spot for the longest this-or-that in the Guinness Book of World Records would become a lot easier.
But what about the possible downsides? According to the National Sleep Foundation, less-than-normal amounts of good quality sleep have been linked to health problems such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension and depression. The precise role of sleep in memory processing is not completely understood, either. Would reducing or eliminating sleep cause an epidemic of related health problems? What sort of effects would it have on our personalities and social interactions? With all that additional time to read blogs and watch 24-hour cable news, would we all suffer from mega information overload — or worse yet, become so insufferably well-informed on every subject that we’d bore each other to death?
So should scientists develop wakefulness drugs and technology to their logical extreme? Or should we keep on snoozing? Express your opinion below.
According to the New York Times, the Bush administration is pressuring the Afghan government to allow
aerial spraying of synthetic herbicides in rural areas. The United States wants to eradicate Afghan farmers’ harvest of opium poppies, which supply
the raw material for 90 percent of the world’s heroin, and help fund the Taliban insurgency. But Afghan officials are resisting the idea, in part because of fears that the chemicals will contaminate the Afghan water supply. (The chemical that the U.S. wants to use is glyphosate,
which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warns can cause lung congestion, kidney
damage and reproductive problems with sufficient exposure.)
But the U.S. government ultimately may deploy a more technologically advanced — and potentially even riskier — solution to destroy the poppy fields in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has been working on using both natural and genetically engineered organisms to kill drug crops such as opium poppies and coca, the source of cocaine, according to The Sunshine Project, an international organization opposed to the use of genetic engineering in warfare. In the late 1990s, the Clinton administration tried to persuade Colombia to allow use of a U.S.-developed strain of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum against coca fields, but field tests of the organism were halted after international protests. In 2000, U.S. scientists published a study on two fungi with opium-killing properties. Asia Times reported in 2002 that the United Nations Drug Control Program, with research support and funding from the United States, had conducted tests of the effect of the fungus Pleospora papaveracea on opium poppies at the Institute of Genetics in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (a former site of Soviet biological-weapons research). In 2005, Indiana GOP Congress members Dan Burton and Mark Souder, the then-chairman of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, advocated a biological war on drugs, which potentially would include both naturally occurring and genetically manipulated organisms. "We spend millions of dollars every year on counter-narcotic efforts, including drug-crop eradication and interdiction, especially in our joint efforts in Colombia, Afghanistan and elsewhere, yet the flow of illegal and lethal narcotics continues to be a major problem in our country," stated congressman Burton. "The advent of mycoherbicides and other counter-narcotic alternatives offers us the possibility to cut off the source of these drugs literally at their roots."
The Sunshine Project’s scientists, however, warn that such tactics are "a recipe for environmental disaster." They point to the risk that drug-destroying organisms will harm other plants and insects as well, and estimate that the anti-opium fungus’s spores would persist in the soil for as long as 40 years, making the spread of the fungus difficult to control. In addition, they say that a biowar against drugs could lead to a rise in life-threatening fungal infections among humans with compromised immune systems — such as patients in Afghan hospitals. Worse yet, a scientific paper written by two Sunshine Project scientists warns that "these biological agents are lowering the political threshold for the use of biological weapons and are likely to have tremendous environmental and health impacts. The pursuit of crop-killing fungi as weapons would be a further slide down a slippery slope that, by following the same logic, could easily lead to the use of other plant pathogens, animal pathogens or even non-lethal biological weapons against humans."
There’s also the possibility that drug traffickers could strike back with biowarfare of their own. Wired News reported in 2004 that Colombian cocaine traffickers may have obtained genetically engineered herbicide-resistant coca plants to thwart the U.S. anti-drug effort.
So, should the U.S. wage a biowar against drugs in Afghanistan (or anywhere else)? Express your opinion here.
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