Are You a Machine of Many Parts?
1. What will future historians remember about the impact of science during the Last decade of the 20th century? They will not be much concerned with many of the marvels that currently preoccupy us such as the miraculous increase in the power of home computers and the unexpected growth of the Internet Nor win they dwell much on global warming, the loss of biodiversity and other examples of our penchant for destruction. Instead, the end of the 20th century will be recognized as the time when, for better or worse, science began to bring about a fundamental shift in our perception of ourselves.
2. It will be the third time that science has forced us to re-evaluate who we are. The first time, of course, was the revolution that began with Copernicus in 1543 and continued with Kepler, Galileo and Newton. Despite the Church's opposition, we came to realize that the Earth does not lie at the centre of the universe. Instead, we gradually found we live on a small planet on the edge of a minor galaxy, circling one star in a universe that contains billions of others. Our unique position in the universe was gone forever.
3. A few centuries later, we were moved even further from stage centre. The Darwinian revolution removed us from our position as a unique creation of God. Instead, we discovered we were just another part of the animal kingdom proud to have “a miserable ape for a grand-father", as Thomas Huxley put it in 1860. We know now just how dose to the apes we arc — over 90% of our genes are the same as those of the chimpanzee.
4. Increasing knowledge of our own genetics is one of the driving forces in the third great conceptual shift that will soon take place. Others are the growing knowledge of the way our minds work, our new ability to use knowledge of the nervous system to design drugs that affect specific states of mind and the creation of sophisticated scanners which enable us to see what is happening inside our brains. In the third revolution, we are taking our own selves to pieces and finding the parts which make up the machine that is us.
5. Much of the new knowledge from genetics, molecular biology and the neuro-sciences is esoteric. But its cultural impact is already running ahead of science. People begin to see themselves not as wholes with a moral centre but the result of the combined action of parts for which they have little responsibility.
6. It’s Nobody’s Fault is the title of a popular American book on “difficult” children. Many different children, the book explains, are not actually difficult but are suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). There is nothing wrong with them or the way they have been brought up. Rather, the part of the brain which controls attention is short of a particular neurotransmitter. *'
7. ADD is currently the world’s fastest growing psychological problem. In the United States, a survey showed that 1.5m children between the ages of five and eighteen were being treated with a drug, Ritalin, for the disorder. Since then the number taking the drug is believed to have doubled.
8. You might, as many people do, question the way in which the disorder has been diagnosed on such a staggering scale. But that is not the point. The cultural shift is that people are not responsible for their disorders, only for obtaining treatment for the parts of them that have gone wrong.
9. The more we know about the parts of ourselves, the more cures for our defects will appear. Prozac is one example. The best-selling Listening to Prozac claimed the drug "can transform pessimists into optimists, turn loners into extroverts". And Prozac, the book explained, “was not so much discovered as planfully created, through the efforts of a large pharmaceutical firm ... the likely result of this form of research is not medicines that correct particular illnesses but medicines that affect clusters of functions in the human brain."
10. Even when a treatment is not to hand, the notion that we are made of “clusters of functions" remains strong. Genetic analysis supports this view. A gene linked to alcoholism has been located and a Gallup poll has revealed that the great majority of Americans consider alcoholism to be a disease. There are claims of genes too for obesity, homosexuality and even for laziness.