IS ANY OF THIS A GOOD IDEA?

摘要

The point of medicine is to make sick people "well," which is really just another way of saying "afflicted with roughly the same diseases as everyone else." But as we've seen in this special issue, we are belly-flopping our way into a world in which more and more medical interventions hold the promise of making us better than well, to borrow a memorable coinage from Peter Kramer's 1993 book Listening to Prozac. We're working on an entire suite of biological enhancements: smart drugs to improve memory beyond normal, doping methods that promote muscle growth by inhibiting certain proteins, gene therapy to stimulate the birth of neurons in the brain to above-normal levels. If you can imagine it, some scientist is mucking around in it. I know this firsthand. In my lab at Stanford University, we're developing gene-therapy approaches to, among other things, transfer genes into the hippocampus—an area of the brain involved in learning and memory—with the goal of making a rat learn better under stress, a state that typically impairs cognition.