The Iron Ring

On a Monday night this fall I heard a fascinating talk by Penn researcher Martha Farah. As part of the Penn Science Cafe she spoke about how our society is manipulating the brain. Her talk was officially entitled, "The Human Brain v2.0: How Neuroscience Is Poised to Transform Humanity".

I was most interested in her discussion of a drug called modafinil, which is widely prescribed for narcolepsy. It seems that people without narcolepsy can take it the drug and go without sleep with little side effect. At least, I should say that no one has tried going without sleep for long stretches of time. Rather, it appears that for one or two nights, it is possible to take the drug and pull an all-nighter without crashing.

What is novel about modafinil, is that it doesn’t act as amphetamines do, that is, through the dopamine system. This drug acts directly to control sleeping through a group of hormones known as orexins, which govern wakefulness.

Dr Farah spoke about the ways in which people could abuse the drug. Students, pilots, soliders, etc. What would it be like to be a work environment where everyone took the drug and was more productive? How could you still abstain from it? It’s the everyday equivalent of the recent doping scandals in many sports.

But most interesting is that Dr Farah predicted some changes in how the drug is prescribed and used after it goes off patent, but after some preliminary searching online, I determined it already did go off patent last spring. And the nice cautionary article I found in the Times was from 1998, nine years ago.

And we’re still waiting for the sleep revolution.

# posted by Sarah : 3:08 PM  1 comments