The ever-thoughtful Frank Pasquale at Co-Op weighs in on the controversy surrounding the new pharmacopeia.  Now that there are drugs that can enhance cognitive abilities, what of the natural tendency of bioconservatives to question what evil unintended consequences will flow?

In a recent editorial in Nature entitled Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy, distinguished contributors have endorsed a “presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs.” Against various Luddites who worry about the rat races such drug use could spark, the editorialists argue that cognitive enhancement is here to stay: “From assembly line workers to surgeons, many different kinds of employee may benefit from enhancement and want access to it, yet they may also need protection from the pressure to enhance.” Instead of the regulation encouraged by Francis Fukuyama, they would have us rely on robust professional standards to guide “appropriate prescribing of cognitive enhancers.”

Or to put it in my less than scholarly way (as I’m no Frank), the genie is out of the bottle and she ain’t going back in.  The easy question is why not just give it to everybody, make them as smart as they can possibly be, and let the chips fall where they may?

The flip side has two problems.  First, not everybody wants to be altered, and there is the fear that employers, schools, court systems, might want to force cognitive enhancing drugs down the throats of those who prefer to be more picky about what reaches their insides.  Second, this could present some major productivity problems for those who gain sudden cognitive awareness that their jobs, tedious, repetitive and boring, suck.  And the fact remains that somebody has to do the boring work.

But then the flip side of cognitive enhancing drugs comes into play, conjuring up images of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.  Frank takes us down a different road traveled by Huxley to explain:

Bioconservatives may fear that cognition-dulling drugs presage a Brave New World–particularly Aldous Huxley’s futuristic vision of certain fetuses being routinely exposed to alcohol in order to ease their acceptance of low-caste membership. They tend to forget Huxley’s counter-image of a progressively technologized paradise, in Island, which “answers the authoritarian monoculture of Brave New World point by point”:

Biotechnology is present, but as a kind of ecologically wise agricultural system. . . . The nuclear family has been abolished . . . but only to increase human attachment among all its inhabitants . . . The novel . . . ends, exactly as it began, with the island’s mynah birds repeating the mantra they have been trained to mimic over and over again: “Attention.”

Like the happy inhabitants of Huxley’s Island, both cognition-enhancers and cognition-dullers can work together peaceably in a mutualism that discourages conflict.

That there are monumental bioethical issues involves in this pharmacological conundrum are clear, though the same is true of the medicinal use of opium.  Whether our society is capable of navigating the problems, and whether our government and business will cooperate, is another matter.

It’s unclear how this will be addressed going forward, but the fact that cognitive enhancing drugs are here to stay cannot be ignored.  I suspect that I would be happy to offer myself to science to test their efficacy, particularly given the fact that I can use whatever cognitive enhancements I can get my hands on.  As for the potential for harm, I feel better knowing that people like Frank Pasquale are watching carefully.