Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang Read Free Book Online

listening to. “I'd be willing to do that."
    "You understand that this is purely for investigational purposes, not therapeutic. You may benefit from it with further gains in your intelligence, but this is not medically necessary for your health."
    "I understand. I suppose I have to sign a consent form."
    "Yes. We can also offer you some compensation for participating in this study.” He names a figure, but I'm barely listening.
    "That'll be fine.” I'm imagining where this might lead, what it might mean for me, and a thrill runs through me.
    "We'd also like you to sign a confidentiality agreement. Clearly this drug is enormously exciting, but we don't want any announcements to be made prematurely."
    "Certainly, Dr. Shea. Has anyone been given additional injections before?"
    "Of course; you're not going to be a guinea pig. I can assure you, there haven't been any harmful side effects."
    "What sort of effects did they experience?"
    "It's better if we don't plant suggestions in your mind: you might imagine you were experiencing the symptoms I mention."
    Shea's very comfortable with the doctor-knows-best routine. I keep pushing. “Can you at least tell me how much their intelligence increased?"
    "Every individual is different. You shouldn't base your expectations on what's happened to others."
    I conceal my frustration. “Very well, Doctor."
    * * * *
    If Shea doesn't want to tell me about hormone K, I can find out about it on my own. From my terminal at home I log on to the datanet. I access the FDA's public database, and start perusing their current INDs, the Investigational New Drug applications that must be approved before human trials can begin.
    The application for hormone K was submitted by Sorensen Pharmaceutical, a company researching synthetic hormones that encourage neuron regeneration in the central nervous system. I skim the results of the drug tests on oxygen-deprived dogs, and then baboons: all the animals recovered completely. Toxicity was low, and long-term observation didn't reveal any adverse effects.
    The results of cortical samples are provocative. The brain-damaged animals grew replacement neurons with many more dendrites, but the healthy recipients of the drug remained unchanged. The conclusion of the researchers: hormone K replaces only damaged neurons, not healthy ones. In the brain-damaged animals, the new dendrites seemed harmless: PET scans didn't reveal any change in brain metabolism, and the animals’ performance on intelligence tests didn't change.
    In their application for human clinical trials, the Sorensen researchers outlined protocols for testing the drug first on healthy subjects, and then on several types of patients: stroke victims, sufferers of Alzheimer's, and persons—like me—in a persistent vegetative state. I can't access the progress reports for those trials: even with patient anonymity, only participating doctors have clearance to examine those records.
    The animal studies don't shed any light on the increased intelligence in humans. It's reasonable to assume that the effect on intelligence is proportional to the number of neurons replaced by the hormone, which in turn depends on the amount of initial damage. That means that the deep-coma patients would undergo the greatest improvements. Of course, I'd need to see the progress of the other patients to confirm this theory; that'll have to wait.
    The next question: is there a plateau, or will additional dosages of the hormone cause further increases? I'll know the answer to that sooner than the doctors.
    * * * *
    I'm not nervous; in fact, I feel quite relaxed. I'm just lying on my stomach, breathing very slowly. My back is numb; they gave me a local anesthetic, and then injected the hormone K intraspinally. An intravenous wouldn't work, since the hormone can't get past the blood-brain barrier. This is the first such injection I can recall having, though I'm told that I've received two before: the first while still in the coma,