Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (22 page)

NOTE
: This offer is not open to family members or employees of Kary Mullis, who are doomed to have to listen to what I say.

D
O
I
MAKE
things happen? Or do my arms wave sometimes due to the rigid, absolute, causal connections between consecutive moments in my brain, and nerves and muscles? Are my sensations of being here as an active part of this thing just another part of that causal chain? Who cares?

At night I care. It gets spooky thinking that maybe I am a machine with no feelings that matter.

Am I a machine? Are my future states all plotted out for me by physical laws? If they aren’t, then at what point does something happen that is not determined by the laws of force and matter and quantum mechanics, and General Dynamics, and General Motors, and the surgeon general, and TRW? In other words, is there something that I can do called “exercising my will” that is outside of time and space, where everything otherwise has to behave according to equations? Do I do it constantly, or only once a week? Am I a machine or do I have sovereignty? Autonomy? Is freedom “just another word for nothing left to lose,” or does it mean that there is a ghostlike phenomenon associated with my body right now that can move things but cannot be moved? Sound unlikely?

There are some nice buildings in America and some even nicer ones in Europe where men, wearing fancy robes, surrounded by great art and nice music, will tell you that it’s not at all fanciful; in fact, that it is absolutely true.

Consider the following. I know—before anyone else could—when I am about to stand up in some place and scream, quoting e. e. cummings, “I will not kiss your fucking flag!” Everybody else would be surprised, but I would have known it before they did. I would have the impression that I caused it to happen. It’s my mouth. Or is it?

Imagine a deserted building in Texas. It was originally going to house the supercollider before the money dried up. It now houses a massive computer, and you are being wheeled up to it. Some serious guys in long white coats are plugging you in. The electrodes on your head are revealing to the computer everything that is going on in your brain.

The computer prints out, in lurid color, a complete and accurate description of what you are about to do. Now, only you and the computer would know just immediately prior to when you started to loudly quote cummings. Would you be worried?

What if the computer got way ahead of you and could have already written a few hundred pages about how you were going to respond to some simple movies it was going to show you? And the guys in the lab coats had already read it and were laughing and having coffee before you even did it? What if it was able to generate a videotape of exactly how you would react to something long before you did? Would you be nervous? Would you wonder who you were?

I would. Especially if it were dark. Is this machine responsible for you? Are you?

In a society where there are maybe too many people, it is reasonable to weed out the nasty ones. Killers, robbers, rapists, lawyers, editors, not necessarily because they are guilty for what they do but just because they do it and it hurts us. Guilt is sort of the theme of this chapter. What is guilt?

Not the feeling of it. We all know that. But guilt itself. Guilty enough to be administered a lethal injection by the state kind of thing? What is that? Am I a machine, just watching myself do things and feeling responsible, because I get a preview of what I am about to do, by being able to see into the future states of my brain? Or am I an eternal being, separated completely from time and space? Or am I something else?

If you live in a village under a steep mountain slope, and you have village meetings once a month, eventually someone will bring up the notion that a wall should be built to keep rocks from falling on roofs. No insult intended to the rocks. The rocks would understand, if they could think, that their downward motion should be impeded. After all, there are women and children in the village. And property. And men. The rocks hurt people and should be stopped.

What is the difference between you—hooked up to a computer that can predict your future before you can imagine it—and a rock falling down a mountain with a camera monitoring its descent, the same computer predicting its future course? What’s the difference between you and a little car tripping around on Mars with a bunch of grownup high school boys—like gods far away—controlling it? Now where do you fit in? Where do I? Who’s running the show? Is anyone watching the store? Who is to be punished? Restrained? Destroyed? The rocks falling on the village? Sure, the rocks. Who else?

These are not jokes from a B movie. These are issues that
our culture is presently dealing with, although not well, and usually at what sounds like a more dignified level. It comes across as something like this: “Was this defendant psychologically capable of knowing wrong from right when he smashed in our roof?” That kind of shit. And excuse me, but I can’t help thinking that that is pure shit. We can’t seem to frame these issues properly. Maybe the reason is that we are toy cars. Or maybe the reason we can’t deal with the realities of tumbling boulders is that we are not toy cars. Maybe we are evolutionary beings, grown up by random chance, out of nothing but clay, on a hostile planet. We have no idea where we came from, and a sad lack of imagination.

Maybe we are ourselves just helpless rocks.

I, on the other hand, have a memory and I have free will. I assume you do, too.

“Oh yes, you do,” comes a voice out of my dark bedroom closet while Nancy is out of town and I’m alone. A squeaky little voice followed by a light tapping sound like a keyboard.

It speaks. “Maybe your memory is just a feeling you get from the fact that your brain is floating through time and it can peer back into past states of itself. The seeing isn’t all that good, it gets worse with age, but it can see back into its past states. It can see what its eyes once saw, or hear what its ears once heard. It can’t see into
my
past states, though. Only into its own. It feels a private relationship to itself. Almost a feeling of ownership after a while. Know what I mean?”

“Yes. That sounds reasonable.” I pull the covers over me. Italian sheets—400 threads to the inch. Nancy buys them from David at the Golden Goose in Mendocino and I love them, but they aren’t a comfort to me tonight, hearing this voice in my closet.

“It is reasonable,” squeaks the voice, and the tapping stops. “And think about this. That feeling you get that you have control of yourself? That’s just caused by the time symmetrical reflection of what you call your memory. Know what I mean?”

“What?”

“That’s caused by the fact that your brain, which is only a wave phenomenon passing through time, can not only see into its past, but also peer into its future states. See what I mean?”

“What about that computer they can hook up on my brain and figure out what I’m going to do before I ever do it?”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know. I’m too tired. Go away.”

“Did you turn off the printer?”

“Go away!”

T
HE REASONS
I took up biochemistry as a profession were simple. With Mercury and Mars in conjunction in Sagittarius, I was not going to specialize in something well-defined and manageable. I didn’t think of myself as a worker, or a specialist. I thought of myself as a man of deep science with a Gemini moon in my face and the cold, red winds of Mars in my hair. I wanted to see reality, if possible, and my Capricorn sun felt a strong need to make a living.

The choice was going to be between the study of my body in great detail or the study of everything else. Either I would become a biochemist or an astrophysicist. I lingered over both, but my body won out.

The government was paying for graduate school in both disciplines at the time. It was 1966. I suspected that as soon as the Russians were no longer a threat, funding for the study of things in outer space that nobody will ever touch would drop off a congressman’s list of the essentials. The study of human bodies, and the things that go wrong with them, I surmised, would continue to be funded. I didn’t realize the Russians would eat it so soon, or that biotechnology would bring in so much private funding, but overall, I was right.

There was also the social excuse for choosing biochemistry. The universe sounds pretty universal, but try discussing it at a party with a twenty-two-year-old woman who never thought about neutral kaon decay rates as her trip. Then talk to the same woman about why ethylamino derivatives of safrole like MDA will make you want to take off your clothes and feel warm and cuddly for about eight hours. Even though she has never thought of catecholamines as her trip, she might be curious about this. A strong social impulse will lead you away from astrophysics and toward biochemistry. It did me.

Biochemistry was more fun. It still is. I don’t go to parties for the twenty-two-year-old girls anymore, but nothing is more fun or interesting to me than human bodies. I am one. I want my eyes to keep focusing, my heart to keep beating, and that thrilling sexual function my body engages in to keep working night after night.

I like to know about those things and all the diets and drugs we ingest to keep it all working. Furthermore, I like to fool around with it. I liked to make chemicals in the 1960s that had effects on my mind. I like to make chemicals in the 1990s that have serious effects on anything alive.

I like to make chemicals that could turn a sponge into a gold miner. A happy little creature that filtered water like a normal sponge might be endowed with a voracious appetite for filtering out the gold that washed down the Sacramento River out of them thar hills. I like to make chemicals that might help heal a spinal cord that had been crushed by its owner’s motorcycle. I’d like to cure diabetes. This is what biochemists do.

Down below the limits of our vision, there is a level of physical organization where the parts are like little machines and
conveyor belts and tables that hold the machines and partitions between them. There are things with shapes like Tinkertoys that go through machines and get turned into useful shapes like springs and sockets and drops of cement that hold things together or fill in the cracks. And none of this stuff is beyond our understanding.

Most of it can be figured out in terms of what things stick to each other, or twist or push one another. The things that become other things by being stuck together or cut in half, the things that are made in one place and then have to be moved to another place, and the things that will only function when fitted with other things. Stuff like that. Biochemistry is a lot like mechanical engineering or auto mechanics—only you can’t see the parts with your eyes and you don’t get your knuckles bloody or your fingernails greasy. Sometimes you get poisons on you, but you never lick your fingers.

The most important principle is that living systems are modular. They are collections of cells, and the cells are collections of parts, and we have a rapidly growing familiarity with the nature of the parts and the ability to make them. We have names for them and pictures of how they would look to our eyes if they weren’t so small.

Sometimes the shapes are complex and there are so many parts that the processes involved in disease and health seem endless. Spinal cord injury is a little like that. The human spinal cord contains millions of tiny tracts, and thinking about trying to repair it sometimes seems like trying to repair the ion drive on a crashed flying saucer. But there are those of us who seriously work on that. I work with a team jointly sponsored by Immune Response and Vyrex corporations. We’re looking
seriously at spinal cord injuries. We’re starting at the bottom, trying to catalogue all the genes that might be involved. It’s slow, but there’s a quarter million people in America alone who can’t feel or move their lower body.

I like to work on something where the defect is obvious and the solution is simple. Insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus is one of those diseases. I’m trying to organize an effort to cure that. If you have IDDM, then you have to take a chemical called insulin because the conveyor belts that move sugar into your cells when it’s needed don’t function without it and you can’t make it.

Insulin is normally made by a special little shop in the pancreas that goes by the charming name of the Isles of Langerhans. If insulin were all those cells made, then insulin would itself be a cure for diabetes, but that’s not the case. It helps, but you need those cells. In people with IDDM, something kills them. We now know what that is. It’s another set of cells, called T-cells, whose job is to kill other cells that are screwed up for some reason—like tumors, or cells infected with a virus. Like other hired killers, they have to be carefully controlled. In the case of IDDM, one set of T-cells has gone wild. In the summer of 1997, there was an article in a scientific magazine called
Cell
that described why this particular set of T-cells, called Vbeta7-T-cells, grows out of control in people with IDDM. The cells have accidentally started to make a chemical that not only allows them to reproduce themselves frequently, which they do, but also allows them to arm themselves. This particular set of T-cells would not normally be allowed to reproduce, or be armed, because they happen to have the noxious property of attaching themselves to the Isles
of Langerhans. When they do, and they are armed, they release acids, peroxides, and biological warfare agents that the quaint and unarmed cells of the Isles of Langerhans have no defenses against. They die. It takes a long time, which is why IDDM is a slowly progressive disease.

The chemical that the Vbeta7-T-cells have started to make that drives them to do this damage is a protein that unfortunately functions as an adapter between the T-cells and their nominal bosses, the antigen presenting cells. Don’t think this is any more complicated than the nose on your face, because it isn’t. This is an easy problem that can be solved as soon as a few biochemists are directed to work on it.