Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [10]
The post was eventually revealed as an April Fool’s joke, but not before several scientists had contacted Eisen to express their concern about when the testing would start. Scientists, you see, do take drugs.
In the world of the arts, drug use is, if not encouraged, hardly a scandal. Artists, writers and musicians have long appreciated that certain drugs can open the mind to new sources of inspiration and creativity. Jacob Bronowski believed that science is creative too – perhaps even more so than the arts. ‘If any ideas have a claim to be called creative, because they have liberated that creative impulse, it is the ideas of science,’ he said. But to be creative, scientists need ideas. And they, like artists, will take inspiration wherever they can find it.
Eisen’s practical joke was stimulated by papers published in the journal Nature, which revealed that drug-taking is rife among scientists. In an article entitled ‘Professor’s Little Helper’, two Cambridge University researchers announced that ‘we know that a number of our scientific colleagues in the United States and the United Kingdom already use modafinil to counteract the effects of jetlag, to enhance productivity or mental energy, or to deal with demanding and important intellectual challenges’. The revelation provoked Nature to carry out its own informal survey of drug use among its readers. There were 1,437 respondents, largely drawn from the scientific community. A full 20 per cent of them admitted to using brain-enhancing drugs such as Ritalin (methylphenidate) or Provigil (modafinil).
Commentators looking to play down the findings pointed out that the effects of these drugs are mild, and that they were largely being used to get scientists through writing laborious grant proposals or long meetings. Most weren’t using the drugs to help with the process of actually doing science. If that’s true, it’s a shame; such anarchy would undoubtedly speed the process of discovery.
John Maynard Keynes once stated that what made Isaac Newton great was his ability to focus his mind on a problem, and hold that focus until he had thought his way through it. ‘I fancy his preeminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted,’ he said.
Imagine, then, what Newton could have achieved on methylphenidate or modafinil. Modafinil is a stimulant that can help stave off the need to sleep. Methylphenidate – better known by one of its brand names, Ritalin – is generally used as a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and helps the brain stay focused. Scientists less gifted than Newton certainly stand to gain something from their use. But perhaps it is the example of American psychologist and philosopher William James that they should really follow. Intoxication can be invaluable in releasing what lies beneath the conscious mind.
James carried out many of his investigations under the influence of drugs – in particular, nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. Intoxication opened his mind, he said: ‘Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.’
In 1921, the German pharmacologist Otto Loewi had a dream that brought the field of neuroscience into existence. It was more than a hundred years since Luigi Galvani had shown that electrical impulses could contract muscles in the legs of frogs. A few decades later, scientists discovered electricity within biological tissue, and tracked it down to the nerve tissue. By the end of the nineteenth century it was known that nerves carried electricity, and that there were gaps between nerve cells; it seemed