The Atomic Human by Neil D. Lawrence

Author:Neil D. Lawrence [D., Neil Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2024-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

8.

System Zero

On 13 March 2006, eight young men arrived at an independent clinic in Harrow in north-west London. Each had received a payment of £2,000. Like the six test pilots based at NACA and the seven astronauts selected for the Mercury programme, these eight men were participating in a test. They were going to further the bounds of human knowledge; they were taking part in a phase-one clinical drug trial. The drug was called Theralizumab. To ensure that our medicines are safe and effective, they are tested. Full clinical trials require large numbers of patients to demonstrate the effectiveness of the drug, but, before undertaking those trials, drugs are tested for safety. The Mercury capsule was first tested on Ham, a chimpanzee who became the first hominid in space, then on Alan Shepard. His trip into space was on a low trajectory that didn’t take him into orbit. Similarly, Theralizumab was first tested on macaque monkeys; the clinic in Harrow was hosting the first human trial, and the drug would be given at a very low dose.

Each of the men rolled up his sleeve and had a cannula inserted into his arm. Two received a placebo, a dose that didn’t contain any active drug. When Stefan Cavallo flew through the cloud in his P-51, he had Robert Baker flying alongside him to act as a comparison. The placebo plays the same role in a drug trial. The other six men would be flying into the cloud: they received the drug directly into their bloodstream, one patient at a time, at ten-minute intervals.

Cavallo realized he was in trouble almost as soon as he entered the cloud. It took the Harrow men a little longer. Just over an hour after the first man had been dosed, he began to complain of a headache and fever. Then all six men who had been given the drug began vomiting. One’s head ballooned in size. Like Cavallo’s flight through the cumulonimbus cloud, something had gone seriously wrong. But unlike on Cavallo’s flight, there was no way for these young men to bail out of their predicament. All the patients were admitted to intensive care with multiple organ failure.

The reductionist approach to science that followed in the wake of Newton’s Principia didn’t bring uniform advance. The physics of flight in cloud formation is difficult to model, and the laws of motion do not readily transfer to the mechanisms of life. In medicine, the gremlin of uncertainty dominates.

But, despite the uncertainty, life prevails, and to do this it has evolved more than one form of intelligence. When Bauby’s brainstem was destroyed in his stroke, he lost control of his motor intelligence, his fast-reacting reflexive self. The brain evolved to be the supreme commander of our nervous system, but our bodies contain two principal forms of intelligence. Alongside our brain and nervous system is a decentralized intelligence we call our immune system.

In our nervous system the interaction between our reflexive and reflective intelligences is very tight, but the coupling between our immune system and our nervous system is much looser.

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