She returned with a paperback, The Lighted Road, some kind of religious tract. As she kissed me she whispered, “My story’s hidden in there. I’ve got another copy, so file that one in the library tomorrow. On some back shelf.” She kissed me again. “See you at breakfast.”
I walked slowly to my cell as the curfew chimed; more frustrated than excited.
III
My—your—name is Judith Grenfell, whatever they may call you now, and I am—was—a neurosurgeon (MD Hopkins ’20, Chief Neurosurgical Resident Bethesda ’24, Staff of Mercy Hospital and Research Associate NIH ’24— ’26). For more about our past life read my obituary in the Journal of the National Institutes of Health.
Officially I am dead. I was found guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Federal Penitentiary. I have now served one year and don’t expect to serve much longer, for they are planning to close the Pen and restructure the remaining prisoners. That will wipe me out and bring you into being. If you exist I do not. But I am hoping that our body retains some remnants of my beliefs and that, if you ever read this, you will see where your-— our—duty lies.
In ’24 I went to NIH Bethesda as a Research Associate and joined a team investigating neurotransmitters. It was headed by Doctor Eugene Drummond, and the others were James Cranston and Audrey Sullivan. They were both neuroscientists and both are now dead. I was convicted of murdering them.
I did not and I don’t know who did, but that is not important. What is important is a discovery we made and which has still not been published. Whoever you are, I beg you to make sure that it is.
Our project was the investigation of Aleptin, a synthetic neurotransmitter, and we used Paxin as the control drug in a double-blind cross-over study. We chose Paxin because it had been (we thought) well-researched, and was reputed to be so safe that it had recently been deregulated and could be bought “over the counter” without prescription. There had been some objections to its deregulation, and the American Medical Association had bitterly opposed the sale of an effective drug obtainable without first seeing a doctor. But when the Directors of Medicare showed that seeing a doctor was costing the taxpayer some ten billion dollars a year (five hundred million office visits at twenty dollars a visit to get prescriptions for a drug purported to be much safer than Aspirin), the opposition died and the American Medical Association retreated.
We were working with naive rats, that is pure-strain animals who had never been used in any previous experiment. I was doing the surgical implants and, as the junior member of the team and for another reason I explain below I was also supervising most of the pre- and post-drug tests. One of the tests was a standard maze-run to measure exploratory behavior (the orientation phase of the learning process). In group after group that exploratory behavior was reduced by Paxin, the effect to be expected from a minor tranquillizer.
One evening when I was alone in the lab watching the rats run the maze, I noticed that some showed a definite asymmetry; they consistently took right forks. This was sufficiently unusual for me to record which of the rats were right-turning. The next day a technician came from the animal colony to apologize for having inadvertently issued me a group which had been used in an operant conditioning experiment months before, and when I checked the protocol of that experiment I found that the operant response had been to turn right.
None of the rats had shown any right-turning tendency in their no-drug run but some had shown it strongly in their post-drug. I broke the double-blind code for that group, expecting to find those were the animals treated with Aleptin. They were not. All the right-turners had had Paxin.
That was an exciting observation, but it was also disquieting. I hope you can see why. Paxin was being used by half the populations in all the affluent nations of the world. And my observation suggested Paxin was a chemical reinforcer of conditioned behavior, at least in rats.
It might not have that effect in humans, but if it did the implications were so enormous that I repeated the experiment a number of times during the next few weeks. The statistical significance rose to probability levels which approached certainty.
Jim and Audrey knew that I was staying behind in the lab most evenings, and assumed that it was to sulk as well as to run rats. Team morale was bad because soon after my arrival at NIH I had become infatuated with Jim and we had shared a brief but hectic love affair. This had not endeared me to Audrey, his previous partner, and she had used her not inconsiderable charm to win him back from me. In fact I had not met either of my two colleagues outside the lab since I had heen dumped by Jim.
My discovery of the “Paxin effect” however was of such potential importance that it transcended personal feelings. I showed both of them my data and asked them to try and replicate my results while I carried out another survey of the human literature. Doctor Drummond was in Europe attending the World Conference on Impermease or I would have shown my data to him also.
When we met again two weeks later Jim and Audrey not only confirmed my results, their own findings suggested that Paxin in rats was an even more powerful reinforcer than I had suspected. And my search of the human literature had turned up a number of observations which, viewed in the light of our new knowledge, hinted that Paxin had the same reinforcing effect in man.
We were too excited by our discovery to let mutual hostility affect our decisions. We agreed that we must keep our results confidential until we had shown them to Doctor Drummond who was, after all, the leader of our team. His name would appear first on anything we published and the papers we planned would probably be referenced as “Drummond et al.” Jim and Audrey were already starting to resent that prospect. I myself would be proud to be among the “et al” in the authorship of a paper I was sure would be seminal, but I could not resist writing up what we had done. I included in my draft both our own findings and a catalog of those quotations from human experimentation which supported our hypothesis.
When Doctor Drummond returned from Europe we showed him our data. He was initially skeptical, then interested, and finally absorbed. We ran some groups to convince him and, once convinced, he went straight to the Federal Therapeutics Administration. He left us an enthusiastic scientist; he returned a troubled civil servant.
FTA had gone into spasm on seeing our results. Here was . a drug they had decontrolled under Administration pressure, and we were showing that it had an unexpected and socially significant side-effect. The Director of FTA pulled down a security screen over our study, and ordered Doctor Drummond to surrender all our data. He invoked the recently passed Social Stability Act and warned us we would be prosecuted if we mentioned our work to any unauthorized person. He certainly succeeded in frightening Doctor Drummond, who tried to calm our anger at the FTA’s gag by emphasizing the public uproar if people learned they had been gulping down a drug which encouraged them to act like conditioned rats!
Jim, in particular, was furious and said that he now understood why the Administration had pressured FTA into making Pax in easily available. Others must have already discovered the “Paxin Effect”; the Administration must have known about it for some time and were using it for their own ends. Everybody is conditioned to some extent by social pressures. We all stop automatically at a red light, and tend : to move back when a policeman tells us to. Paxin would make us jump back and would reinforce the average citizen’s I tendency to obey authority. The drug was a social stabilizer. With public agitation developing over the sudden decline in | the birth rate, the Administration was in need of all the social stability it could get, and the last thing it would welcome was news of an unexpected drawback to a widely touted drug.