By Scott Nicholson
(Liquid Fear: A Mystery Thriller—Ten years after a tragic clinical trial testing a secret fear-response drug, the subjects realize the experiment never ended…available for 99 cents at Amazon, BN.com, and Smashwords)
Did you know the U.S. president has a special council that wonders how much your mind should be changed?
The council’s job is to advise on how emerging technologies and medical innovations should be used, as well as provide layers of oversight in how clinical trials are conducted. Of course, such a board can also have a hand in covering up any necessary ethical concerns that might make the government look bad.
For example, while the Germans were killing millions in concentration camps in the 1940s, the U.S. sponsored clinical trials in which Guatemalans were deliberately infected with sexually-transmitted diseases in order to test the efficacy of penicillin. True, the atrocities of genocide are exponentially more horrifying, but you could make the argument that both stem from the same moral failure—treating classes of people as less than human.
In my mystery thriller Liquid Fear, I drew on the work of the President’s Council on Bioethics (in the true spirit of ever-expanding government bureaucracy, the name has now been inflated to The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.) The board currently has 13 members, all doctors or professors.
In Liquid Fear, two of my characters serve on the council—neurobiologist Dr. Alexis Morgan and former U.S. Representative and fundamentalist Wallace Forsyth. One subplot involves their diverging views on the purpose of altering the brain to supposedly “help” people and what the moral limit might be for tinkering with the mind’s normal functions.
I’d been interested in fear response and the use of medicine to “help” people precisely because of the dangers of another person presuming to know what’s “good” for someone else. In fact, “good” and “helping” are purely subjective terms defined by the attitudes of the one doing the helping. Both scare me to death.
In my suspense thriller Liquid Fear, volunteers in a tragic clinical trial learn the experiment in fear response never ended, and 10 years later they must recreate it. I used a report published by the bioethics council called “Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness.” (You can order it yourself for free from bioethics.gov—after all, if you a U.S. taxpayer, you paid for it anyway.)
Part of the debate centers on the value of memory and whether it is merciful to chemically or even surgically wipe out “bad memories” in order to “help” someone suffering from, say, post-traumatic stress disorder. You may say, “Sure, sounds good to me,” but what happens if you erase the memory of someone whose hand was badly burned when they touched a hot stove eye? Then they haven’t learned that the stove eye can burn, and they may have to learn it all over again.
Bioethics. It’s a gray area, just like the brain. All I know is I don’t want the government making those decisions for me.
Liquid Fear. How much is enough?
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Scott Nicholson has written 20 other books, including the bestsellers Disintegration, The Red Church, and Speed Dating with the Dead. He’s also written six screenplays, three comics series, and the children’s books If I Were Your Monster, Duncan the Punkin, and Too Many Witches. Visit him at http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/ or follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
Hunger for nourishment. Hunger for touch. Hunger to belong.
Seth wants to be with Aislinn forever. Forever takes on new meaning, though, when your girlfriend is an immortal faery queen.
Unbeknownst to mortals, a power struggle is unfolding in a world of shadows and danger. After centuries of stability, the balance among the Faery Courts has altered, and Irial, ruler of the Dark Court, is battling to hold his rebellious and newly vulnerable fey together. If he fails, bloodshed and brutality will follow.
Rule #3: Don't stare at invisible faeries.
