Down the memory lane

Accordingly, a human guinea pig is located, a twentysomething mentally retarded man. Charlie Gordon, on being administered brain therapy, is asked to keep a daily journal, a record of his mental progression as it were. As the entries become lessmisspelt and clumsy, as his jottings gradually delineate his emotional awakening, as his heightened intellectual grasp isolates him among his newfound friends, Charlie forms a special bond with Algernon.

A bond that is reaffirmed when Algernon8217;s excursions in laboratory mazes become more laborious and his health even more heartbreakingly tenuous. As Charlie keeps memories of Algernon alive by taking along beautiful flowers to his little grave, he must now contemplate his own inevitable regression, a decline duly recorded in the unknowingness that runs through the final pages of his diary. Was the experiment justified? Keyes offers no easy answers.

Contrast this with the current hullabaloo over three scientists8217; claim to have improved dramatically Doogie the mouse8217;s memory by injecting a single gene into its brain. Researchers may cite an ever gr-owing population afflicted with Alzheimer8217;s disease as the the first potential beneficiaries, but it is indicative of our fin de siecle fear of geneticdeterminism that the critical and the curious focus not on those suffering faded memories, but on the Fran-kensteinian monsters they believe will evidently people the coming biotech century.

Super-mice seizing control of the planet may be too big a leap for the human imagination, but purportedly serious discourse is not exactly averse to speculation about man8217;s closest relatives, the chimps, being rendered supersmart and threatening the new world order. Far-fetched maybe, but definitely less misleading than the pseudoscientific warnings of a genetic underclass on the anvil. It is argued that new leaps in genetic technology will engineer a new caste system: those who can afford ever superior offspring by shopping in a well-stocked supermarket of designer genes and those who can8217;t. And with the human genome on the verge of being fully mapped, this fresh twist to the tirade against consumerism is bound to become increasingly shrill.

It could be a spreading edginess about 8220;food integrity8221;, about the geneticmeltdown that could be triggered by insecticide producing corn, but the propensity to extrapolate worst-case scenarios from stray experiments and discount the merits of scientific enquiry is frightening. A taste of things to come: in some parts of the world, including one state in the US, children can no longer be forced to study Darwin8217;s theory of evolution or the big bang cosmological model.

So evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould may argue in Time that a method of rectifying a memory disorder need not necessarily confer supermemories and daunting IQs, that the nurture versus nature distinction is still valid, but the publication prefers to illustrate its cover story with photographs of what could be child prodigies.

As for Flowers for Algernon, if it were to be rewritten today, the focus would surely be less on Charlie8217;s journal than on patent deals, less on a man8217;s transient inclusion in the normal rhythms of daily life than on the supercelebrityhood path into a transhuman existence. Yes, sciencehas lost its innocence.