Brain Enhancement is Wrong, Right?
Is it wrong to give yourself (and your children) every possible advantage in this “winner takes all” world?
SO far no one is demanding that asterisks be attached to Nobels, Pulitzers or Lasker awards. Government agents have not been raiding anthropology departments, riffling book bags, testing professors’ urine. And if there are illicit trainers on campuses, shady tutors with wraparound sunglasses and ties to basement labs in Italy, no one has exposed them.
Yet an era of doping may be looming in academia, and it has ignited a debate about policy and ethics that in some ways echoes the national controversy over performance enhancement accusations against elite athletes like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.
In a recent commentary in the journal Nature, two Cambridge University researchers reported that about a dozen of their colleagues had admitted to regular use of prescription drugs like Adderall, a stimulant, and Provigil, which promotes wakefulness, to improve their academic performance. The former is approved to treat attention deficit disorder, the latter narcolepsy, and both are considered more effective, and more widely available, than the drugs circulating in dorms a generation ago.
Letters flooded the journal, and an online debate immediately bubbled up. The journal has been conducting its own, more rigorous survey, and so far at least 20 respondents have said that they used the drugs for nonmedical purposes, according to Philip Campbell, the journal’s editor in chief. The debate has also caught fire on the Web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education, where academics and students are sniping at one another.
But is prescription tweaking to perform on exams, or prepare presentations and grants, really the same as injecting hormones to chase down a home run record, or win the Tour de France?
This is different because steroid are illegal. I see nothing wrong with giving yourself every legal edge possible to defeat your academic opponents.
Some argue that such use could be worse, given the potentially deep impact on society. And the behavior of academics in particular, as intellectual leaders, could serve as an example to others.
In his book “Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution,” Francis Fukuyama raises the broader issue of performance enhancement: “The original purpose of medicine is to heal the sick, not turn healthy people into gods.” He and others point out that increased use of such drugs could raise the standard of what is considered “normal” performance and widen the gap between those who have access to the medications and those who don’t — and even erode the relationship between struggle and the building of character.
The standards are ALREADY being raised. Children nowadays are required to learn things much earlier than before and school is much more competitive.
“Even though stimulants and other cognitive enhancers are intended for legitimate clinical use, history predicts that greater availability will lead to an increase in diversion, misuse and abuse,” wrote Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and James Swanson of the University of California at Irvine, in a letter to Nature. “Among high school students, abuse of prescription medications is second only to cannabis use.”
But others insist that the ethics are not so clear, and that academic performance is different in important ways from baseball, or cycling.
“I think the analogy with sports doping is really misleading, because in sports it’s all about competition, only about who’s the best runner or home run hitter,” said Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. “In academics, whether you’re a student or a researcher, there is an element of competition, but it’s secondary. The main purpose is to try to learn things, to get experience, to write papers, to do experiments. So in that case if you can do it better because you’ve got some drug on board, that would on the face of things seem like a plus.”
She and other midcareer scientists interviewed said that, as far as they knew, very few of their colleagues used brain-boosting drugs regularly. Many have used Provigil for jet lag, or even to stay vertical for late events. But most agreed that the next generation of scientists, now in graduate school and college, were more likely to use the drugs as study aids and bring along those habits as they moved up the ladder.
Surveys of college students have found that from 4 percent to 16 percent say they have used stimulants or other prescription drugs to improve their academic performance — usually getting the pills from other students.
“Suppose you’re preparing for the SAT, or going for a job interview — in those situations where you have to perform on that day, these drugs will be very attractive,” said Dr. Barbara Sahakian of Cambridge, a co-author with Sharon Morein-Zamir of the recent essay in Nature. “The desire for cognitive enhancement is very strong, maybe stronger than for beauty, or athletic ability.”
[...]Yet such objections — and philosophical concerns — can vaporize when students and junior faculty members face other questions: What happens if I don’t make the cut? What if I’m derailed by a bad test score, or a mangled chemistry course?
One person who posted anonymously on the Chronicle of Higher Education Web site said that a daily regimen of three 20-milligram doses of Adderall transformed his career: “I’m not talking about being able to work longer hours without sleep (although that helps),” the posting said. “I’m talking about being able to take on twice the responsibility, work twice as fast, write more effectively, manage better, be more attentive, devise better and more creative strategies.”
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Filed under: Changing World, Children's Issues
as-salaamu `alaykum brother Tariq.
You said
“I see nothing wrong with giving yourself every legal edge possible to defeat your academic opponents.”
Even if it comes at great personal and educational expense? Are people who take these drugs and engage in this type of competition healthy? Happy? Well-rounded? Are they really *learning* the stuff in their classes or are they just cramming for an exam in order to pass it and then forget everything they just did? How much stress does this put on a person physically? Emotionally? Psychologically?
You also said:
“The standards are ALREADY being raised. Children nowadays are required to learn things much earlier than before and school is much more competitive.”
SubHaan Allah. This is why I (and many others like me) homeschool. Not because I’m afraid of my children “mixing with kuffaar” but because I believe the education system in this country is an antidote to real life, to physical, emotional and spiritual health, and to human beings. Our children are not machines to be pumped full of facts, and “achievements”, they are humans with souls and feelings who need a human education, not to be put on an assembly line or a bootcamp called “school”.
My husband teaches at a university. He sees students who work full-time jobs and then try to take a full-time schedule on top of that. All most of them want to do is squeak by with a C. They don’t care if they learn the material or not, they just want to graduate and get out and get on with it. It is very disheartening to him. They cheat in ways you would never imagine. Just last week a student tried to turn in two copies of the same paper. Paper #1 was due in February. When Paper #2 was due, the student turned in the same paper he turned in for #1. When he got it back he tried to claim that he had “printed the wrong paper by mistake” and begged to be allowed to turn in his “real paper”. The problem was, he didn’t cover his butt– both papers were dated correctly. Paper #1 had a February date and the “mistakenly printed” paper had the date changed to March. He apparently thought that the professor or whoever else (TA, etc.) who was reading the paper would just see the correct date and not notice that it was the same exact paper he had submitted a month ago. SubHaan Allah, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
All this because “education” has become about racking up points, prizes, achievements, standardized test scores, and very little of it is about actual learning anymore.
laa hawla wa laa quwwata illaa bi l-laah.
Dear brother
Taking drugs in Olympics is wrong because that’s a competetion. To figure out who is best.
The wrong assumption here is that Scientists are competing for the Nobel. People don’t compete for the Nobel prize. They are recognized (voluntarily) by the Nobel Prize Committee. Science is not a competition. Persuing Science is a career to some and passion for fewer.
@TheLadyof the House
I don’t think that one has to be at the expense of the other. A child can grow up in a loving and compassionate home while still being a fierce competitor. That doesn’t mean to cheat to get to the top. That is why I mentioned legal means (which includes ethical) to get ahead.
Regardless of whether one home schools or sends their children to private or public schools, the world is extremely competitive and I feel that the children must be prepared to deal with it. There are many sharks out there
I know that you are not calling for a culture of failure, but far too many parents simply fail to send this message and they do not properly prepare their children. I believe that we need to hear a message of achievement and being the best we can be.
We’ll see how great it is when the side effects of those drugs start to hit them some years down the road.
so true foreverloyal. I’m in medschool right now and Adderol is quite popular amongst a lot of the students. They say it helps them concentrate, stay awake for longer periods of time, etc. OVertime I’m pretty sure they’ll develop some kind of a dependency issue on it and won’t be able to function, study, work without it. If you have to resort to taking drugs to get your work or studies done maybe you should fine a new profession.
I’ll be the first to tell anybody that I struggle with concentration and have struggled with it since I can remember.It seems that nobody has the patience to deal with life’s problems. No matter how poor my concentration skills are, I would never want that type of medication to be my best friend. It seems that the doctors are always coming out with some kind of foreign diagnosis for people to have. I wonder if they only do that in order for them and the bigwigs from the pharamaceutical companies to make billions off the people?
Another bad idea about these drugs is that it is sending the wrong message in being a good student.
We’re telling young people that they could be near geniuses if they take the concentration drugs. If students want to be good students, people have to teach them to do it the old fashioned way: Work hard, study, set high standards for themselves, and not wait for the educators to educate the students. All of this should start when they are kids, so those values can be absorbed in them as young college students.
In addition to giving out the wrong message, I’m also afraid that in the long run, these medications may do some kind of physical damage to them or has been implied in a couples of posts, become addicated to the drugs.