Return to: Home | Life & Society | Society

Time for a clever pill

Published 12 March 2007

Shake off that hangover drowsiness with the help of an experimental drug

Last weekend was exhausting. I stayed out late on Friday and Saturday nights. I drank too much. On Sunday, I got up early and drove a long way to see a football match. My team lost. By Monday, what I really wanted was some CX717.

I can't have it right now, as CX717 is an experimental drug. Its developer - Cortex Pharmaceuticals of California - is keeping a tight hold on it. Clinical trials are being run to test its safety - thousands of them at any one time - yet there is a buzz about CX717 already. It'll be years before it hits the market, but people, including me, want it already.

We want CX717 because it appears to wipe out that slow-thinking drowsiness that a lack of sleep brings on. It's early days, but initial experiments show that sleep-deprived monkeys given CX717 perform as well on cognitive tests as those who had slept soundly. The results are exciting enough to have landed Cortex research papers in top-ranked scientific journals. Humans seem to benefit as well, and none of the experiments has revealed any serious side-effects.

Results like this are enough to have investors throwing millions at Cortex. But there is another side to the drug that could turn it into an even bigger earner. CX717 doesn't just make you think better when you're tired. It makes you think better when you're not. In other words, it makes you cleverer.

Just how much cleverer is something that will become clear as the drug is tested. It may be little more than the sharper thinking and better recall we get from coffee. It may be noticeably more than that. In a sense it doesn't matter, because CX717 is only one of several drugs being developed to do the same thing. It's likely that at least one will clear safety testing and hit the market in the next five years or so.

So why aren't we talking about all this? There are big questions to be answered. Will employees be pressured into taking drugs in order to work longer hours? What if students want to take them but only the rich ones can afford to? Should less affluent students be given them, for example? Or should we just relax: if a drug can make us more alert without harming us, isn't that a good thing?

One reason why we're not talking about this is that CX717 is not marketed as a clever pill; it's being tested as a treatment for brain disorders, including Alzheimer's. Yet, if it gets approval, something interesting is likely to happen. Doctors, particularly in the US, could prescribe the drug for people who simply want a pick-me-up. Internet pharmacies could make it available to anyone. The same has happened with Viagra; originally licensed as a treatment for erectile dysfunction, it is now used by couples who just want more of a good thing.

But drugs such as CX717 shouldn't enter the market under the radar. As the think-tank Demos has pointed out, technologies should be discussed at an early stage of development, not moments before they are deployed. Cortex, and other drugs companies, need to come clean about their products and sponsor such a debate. CX717 sounds a good product. I'd just like to hear all sides of the story before it hits the pharmacy shelves.

Post this article to

3 comments from readers

Peter O'Loughlin
19 March 2007 at 10:23: Ah! The eternal search for the 'magic bullet'. That magical potion that will allow us to abuse our mental, and physical capacity, without penalty. The altered state of consciousness without any effort on our part. The quest for eternal youth. Dream on. Meanwhile stop abusing yourself.
bob thornley
19 March 2007 at 16:44: There are already drugs on the market which do the same and are currently used for Alzheimer's. There are also several nutritional supplements which boost memory and cognitive functioning such as DCP Choline and DMAE. The smart drugs are getting better and it raises interesting arguments about access to these enhancers. It's not a magic bullet as you need to take a range of supplements for them to work effectively, nothing in isolation will have a measurable benifit. You'd be stupid not to take a drug that makes you smarter. Increased intelligence is generally good for society, in my opinion.
juso
09 May 2007 at 23:21: Considering how much influence differences in cognitive functioning between people have on the professional outcomes of an individual and his access to higher education, i believe that cognitive enhancement has the possibility to even out much of todays social inequality. I don't think it will narrow personal freedom, because there are limits to the human brain which cannot exceeded without very basic changes. So pills like cx717 will enhance performance only up to a level which today is already present in smart people with high iqs. If cognitive enhancement works everyone will be on to the same high level of intelligence where you can acchieve most . There is no tradeoff in terms of having to give up a part of yourself. Getting smarter does not change your personality. It just enhances your problem solving abilities and your chance for succes.