by Lewis Thomas
As a personal footnote, I must confess to another motive in pressing for more work on the slow virus of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. Scientifically, it ought to be irresistible. The only reason it is being resisted is that too few people have had adequate long-term support to set out on such new and shifting ground. But think of the intellectual reward. To be able to catch hold of, and inspect from all sides, a living, self-replicating form of life that nobody has so far been able to see or detect by chemical methods, and one that may turn out to have its own private mechanisms for producing progeny, novel to the earth’s life, should be the chance of a lifetime for any investigator. To have such a biological riddle, sitting there unsolved and neglected, is an embarrassment for biological science.
THE LIE DETECTOR
Every once in a while the reasons for discouragement about the human prospect pile up so high that it becomes difficult to see the way ahead, and it is then a great blessing to have one conspicuous and irrefutable good thing to think about ourselves, something solid enough to step onto and look beyond the pile.
Language is often useful for this, and music. A particular painting, if you have the right receptors, can lift the spirits and hold them high enough to see a whole future for the race. The sound of laughter in the distance in the dark can be a marvelous encouragement. But these are chancy stimuli, ready to work only if you happen to be ready to receive them, which takes a bit of luck.
I have been reading magazine stories about the technology of lie detection lately, and it occurs to me that this may be the thing I’ve been looking for, an encouragement propped up by genuine, hard scientific data. It is promising enough that I’ve decided to take as given what the articles say, uncritically, and to look no further. For a while, anyway.
As I understand it, a human being cannot tell a lie, even a small one, without setting off a kind of smoke alarm somewhere deep in a dark lobule of the brain, resulting in the sudden discharge of nerve impulses, or the sudden outpouring of neurohormones of some sort, or both. The outcome, recorded by the lie-detector gadgetry, is a highly reproducible cascade of changes in the electrical conductivity of the skin, the heart rate, and the manner of breathing, similar to the responses to various kinds of stress.
Lying, then, is stressful, even when we do it for protection, or relief, or escape, or profit, or just for the pure pleasure of lying and getting away with it. It is a strain, distressing enough to cause the emission of signals to and from the central nervous system warning that something has gone wrong. It is, in a pure physiological sense, an unnatural act.
Now I regard this as a piece of extraordinarily good news, meaning, unless I have it all balled up, that we are a moral species by compulsion, at least in the limited sense that we are biologically designed to be truthful to each other. Lying doesn’t hurt, mind you, and perhaps you could tell lies all day and night for years on end without being damaged, but maybe not—maybe the lie detector informs us that repeated, inveterate untruthfulness will gradually undermine the peripheral vascular system, the sweat glands, the adrenals, and who knows what else. Perhaps we should be looking into the possibility of lying as an etiologic agent for some of the common human ailments still beyond explaining, recurrent head colds, for instance, or that most human of all unaccountable disorders, a sudden pain in the lower mid-back.
It makes a sort of shrewd biological sense, and might therefore represent a biological trait built into our genes, a feature of humanity as characteristic for us as feathers for birds or scales for fish, enabling us to live, at our best, the kinds of lives we are designed to live. This is, I suppose, the “sociobiological” view to take, with the obvious alternative being that we are brought up this way as children in response to the rules of our culture. But if the latter is the case, you would expect to encounter, every once in a while, societies in which the rule does not hold, and I have never heard of a culture in which lying was done by everyone as a matter of course, all life through, nor can I imagine such a group functioning successfully. Biologically speaking, there is good reason for us to restrain ourselves from lying outright to each other whenever possible. We are indeed a social species, more interdependent than the celebrated social insects; we can no more live a solitary life than can a bee; we are obliged, as a species, to rely on each other. Trust is a fundamental requirement for our kind of existence, and without it all our linkages would begin to snap loose.
The restraint is a mild one, so gentle as to be almost imperceptible. But it is there; we know about it from what we call guilt, and now we have a neat machine to record it as well.
It seems a trivial thing to have this information, but perhaps it tells us to look again, and look deeper. If we had better instruments, designed for profounder probes, we might see needles flipping, lines on charts recording quantitative degrees of meanness of spirit, or a lack of love. I do not wish for such instruments, I hope they will never be constructed; they would somehow belittle the issues involved. It is enough, quite enough, to know that we cannot even tell a plain untruth, betray a trust, without scaring some part of our own brains. I’d rather guess at the rest.
There is, of course, one problem that will have to be straightened out sooner or later by medicine, duty-bound. It concerns placebos. The sugar pill is sometimes indispensable in therapy, powerfully reassuring, but it is essentially a little white lie. If you wired up the average good internist in the act of writing a prescription, would the needles go flying?
Let others go to work on the scientific side issues, of which there are probably many. Is there a skin secretion, a pheromone, secreted in the process? Can a trained tracking hound smell the altered skin of a liar? Is the total absence of this secretion the odor of sanctity? I can think of any number of satisfying experiments that someone ought to be doing, but I confess to a serious misgiving about the possible misuses of the sort of knowledge I have in mind. Supposing it were found that there is indeed a special pentapeptide released into the blood on the telling of a lie, or some queer glycolipid in the sweat of one’s palms, or, worst of all, something chemically detectable in balloons of exhaled breath. The next thing to happen would surely be new industries in Texas and Japan for the manufacture of electronic sensing devices to be carried in one’s pocket, or perhaps worn conspicuously on one’s sleeve depending on the consumer’s particular need. Governments would become involved, sooner or later, and the lawyers and ethicists would have one field day after another. Before long we would stop speaking to each other, television would be abolished as a habitual felon, politicians would be confined by house arrest, and civilization would come to a standstill.
Come to think of it, you might not have to do any of the research on human beings after all, which I find a relaxing thought. Animals, even plants, lie to each other all the time, and we could restrict the research to them, putting off the real truth about ourselves for the several centuries we need to catch our breath. What is it that enables certain flowers to resemble nubile insects, or opossums to play dead, or female fireflies to change the code of their flashes in order to attract, and then eat, males of a different species? What about those animals that make their livings by deception—the biological mimics, the pretenders, the fish dangling bits of their flesh as bait in front of their jaws, the malingering birds limping along to lie about the location of their nests, the peacock, who is surely not conceivably all that he claims to be? It is a rich field indeed, open to generations of graduate students in the years ahead, risk-free. All we need is to keep telling ourselves that this is not a human problem, to understand that we have evolved beyond mendacity except under extraordinary conditions, and to stay clear of the instruments.
It would be safe enough for the scientists themselves, of course, because good science depends on truth-telling, and we should be willing to wear detectors on the lapels of our white coats all day long. I have only one small reservation about this. Scientists do have a tendency to vanity—some of the bes
t ones are vanity-prone—and there is probably a mechanism at work here with a fundamental connection to lying. Perhaps this is one kind of human experimentation that ought to be done early on, if it can pass review by the local ethics review board: catch hold of an eminent researcher at the moment when he is involved in a press conference, looking and sounding for all the world like the greatest thing since the invention of the nucleated cell, and hook him up to the machine, or stick a sensor on his necktie. Then we could learn how to control the work for background noise, and move on to the insects.
I don’t want to go over this again. I didn’t write any of the above.
SOME SCIENTIFIC ADVICE
It was good news when a Science Adviser was appointed and installed in the White House, put there with the explicit understanding that his job is not to represent the scientific community as an advocate but to provide the President with the best-informed and most objective counsel available for the formulation of a national science policy. We have had Science Advisers in the White House before, but never a recognizable science policy. It is an ambitious undertaking, and the Adviser will need all the advice he can get. No single scientist, or any full-time staff assigned to his office, can possibly appraise and evaluate the progress and problems all along the immense frontier of today’s science in this country, let alone in the rest of the world. He will need the services of expert committees and panels representing the various broad fields of science, industry, and education. He will need as well good advice from thoughtful, sagacious citizens who have no connection at all with science or scientists. Something like the structure of the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee (PSAC), in useful existence until evicted in the late Nixon years, will be indispensable for the Science Adviser’s work, and it is probable that sooner or later such a body will be created politically neutral, one hopes, made up of people who can agree not to act as special pleaders for the constituencies of science and technology, but to provide unbiased advice for the country’s research effort in the years ahead.
Having served as a member of PSAC for four years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I am aware of the difficulties involved in objectivity. The biologists will want more biomedical science, the physicists will want more physics and more big instruments, the social scientists will hope at least to ensure the survival of their disciplines in hard times, the industrialists will demand more applied research, and the citizens-at-large will want to make sure that the health, safety, and well-being of ordinary people are enhanced by science and not, as some apprehend, placed more in jeopardy. Somewhere offstage, the military and intelligence communities will be wanting things to go their way in research.
But it begins already to look like an entirely new set of puzzles for which the administration will be seeking advice. In the old days, the early 1970s, the main task for the Science Adviser and his advisers was to identify the most important national problems for which a better kind of scientific study might be useful, and then to press for expansion of that sort of research, whatever. There were opportunities all over the place, and the PSAC panels fired off one report after another, always recommending more research. Now things are different. Nobody in the upper reaches of government is likely to be looking around for new ways to spend money. It is much more probable that the Science Adviser will look over the country’s scientific endeavor with an eye out for expenditures that can be reduced or eliminated.
The word is out that the United States cannot do all the science that needs doing. Instead of trying to explore all aspects of biology or physics or chemistry or behavioral science, we are told that a more limited agenda must be arranged. The problem will be to identify a finite number of surefire areas of science, and concentrate our efforts on these in hopes of achieving prompt and profitable payoffs. Energy is an obvious candidate, agriculture another, biological engineering another.
If this is the way things are to go, the Adviser and his committees are likely to have a dreary time of it. Trying to make guesses at the future in research is an easy enough job if you are talking about matters of some certainty—the likelihood of getting certain proteins more cheaply from bacteria by the recombinant-DNA technique, for example—but trying to guess which lines of fundamental science are unlikely to yield profitable knowledge is quite another matter. I cannot imagine a more depressing undertaking for a committee, no matter how bright and stimulating its members.
What branches of science should we now give up on, or turn over to the rising generations of increasingly adept investigators in Europe or the United Kingdom or Japan or the Soviet Union? Or, within those branches, which particular lines of investigation should we set aside on grounds that their prospects for a short-term payoff are too marginal for an investment? I can see ways of answering questions like these in applied research: obviously solar energy versus nuclear fusion versus conservation versus fossil fuels versus hydrogen are items that can be argued over in terms of the dollars and years needed for research, and reasonably intelligent appraisals can be arrived at.
But what can be said about the future yields from basic research, in any field of science? No Science Adviser, nor any committee, has ever succeeded in forecasting the future outcome of this kind of scientific endeavor. It is in the nature of basic research that the future is unknowable until it happens. No committee could have sat around a table in the early 1950s and predicted that the pursuit of work in solid-state physics would produce the microchip. All the world’s molecular biologists of the 1960s, assembled in any conference hall, could not have imagined that the strings of genes of one species could soon be inserted into the DNA of a totally different species for manufacturing salable products. Nor can any group of our best cell biologists, hot on the trail of mechanisms responsible for cancer, predict with any confidence which particular line of research carries a higher probability of success than another line.
What are we talking about, anyway? Is this an argument over costs, and is the country so near to being broke that the President must be advised to reduce the national effort in science? I cannot imagine it. This is a special intellectual knack, a sort of national, natural gift, in which the United States excels. It is one of the things that Americans and their institutions—mainly their talented universities—are really good at. And, if I may say so at a time when every federal penny is to be watched and pinched, good basic science comes relatively cheap. As a percentage of the gross national product, the amount being spent now on basic science is so small that it would go undiscovered if incorporated into the budget of the Department of Defense. We can afford to spend more than we spend today.
My unsolicited and perhaps unwelcome advice to the Adviser would be to plunge, to splurge, to cut back nowhere, to encourage the doing of basic research wherever the questions seem engrossing and fascinating, and not to think of excluding any field, never mind the cost. It is the best investment, short-term or long-term, that the country can make.
THE ATTIC OF THE BRAIN
My parents’ house had an attic, the darkest and strangest part of the building, reachable only by placing a stepladder beneath the trapdoor and filled with unidentifiable articles too important to be thrown out with the trash but no longer suitable to have at hand. This mysterious space was the memory of the place. After many years all the things deposited in it became, one by one, lost to consciousness. But they were still there, we knew, safely and comfortably stored in the tissues of the house.
These days most of us live in smaller, more modern houses or in apartments, and attics have vanished. Even the deep closets in which we used to pile things up for temporary forgetting are rarely designed into new homes.
Everything now is out in the open, openly acknowledged and displayed, and whenever we grow tired of a memory, an old chair, a trunkful of old letters, they are carted off to the dump for burning.
This has seemed a healthier way to live, except maybe for the smoke—everything out to be looked at,
nothing strange hidden under the roof, nothing forgotten because of no place left in impenetrable darkness to forget. Openness is the new life-style, no undisclosed belongings, no private secrets. Candor is the rule in architecture. The house is a machine for living, and what kind of a machine would hide away its worn-out, obsolescent parts?
But it is in our nature as human beings to clutter, and we hanker for places set aside, reserved for storage. We tend to accumulate and outgrow possessions at the same time, and it is an endlessly discomforting mental task to keep sorting out the ones to get rid of. We might, we think, remember them later and find a use for them, and if they are gone for good, off to the dump, this is a source of nervousness. I think it may be one of the reasons we drum our fingers so much these days.
We might take a lesson here from what has been learned about our brains in this century. We thought we discovered, first off, the attic, although its existence has been mentioned from time to time by all the people we used to call great writers. What we really found was the trapdoor and a stepladder, and off we clambered, shining flashlights into the corners, vacuuming the dust out of bureau drawers, puzzling over the names of objects, tossing them down to the floor below, and finally paying around fifty dollars an hour to have them carted off for burning.
After several generations of this new way of doing things we took up openness and candor with the febrile intensity of a new religion, everything laid out in full view, and as in the design of our new houses it seemed a healthier way to live, except maybe again for smoke.
And now, I think, we have a new kind of worry. There is no place for functionless, untidy, inexplicable notions, no dark comfortable parts of the mind to hide away the things we’d like to keep but at the same time forget. The attic is still there, but with the trapdoor always open and the stepladder in place we are always in and out of it, flashing lights around, naming everything, unmystified.
