Mind-enhancing drugs: Are they a no-brainer? Advocates say they are an irresistible way of improving students' performance. Critics argue they are a dangerous fad. Jeremy Laurance explores the debate   Friday, 19 June 2009  
Alamy Scientists are debating whether stimulants are an acceptable means for people to boost their brain's performance   In the middle of the exam season, the offer of a drug that could improve results might excite students but would be likely to terrify their parents. Now, a distinguished professor of bioethics says it is time to embrace the possibilities of "brain boosters" – chemical cognitive enhancement. The provocative suggestion comes from John Harris, director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics. Ritalin is a stimulant drug, best known as a treatment for hyperactive children. But it has also found a ready black market among students, especially in the US, who are desperate to succeed and are turning to it in preference to the traditional stimulants of coffee and cigarettes. Users say it helps them to focus and concentrate, and this has been confirmed in research studies on adults.David Green, a student at the University of Harvard, told The Washington Post: "In all honesty, I haven't written a paper without Ritalin since my junior year in high school."   Related articles Johann Hari: They were great at first – but then the creativity dries up
  Matt, a business finance student at the University of Florida, claimed a similar drug, Adderall, had helped him improve his grades. "It's a miracle drug," he told The Boston Globe. "It is unbelievable how my concentration boosts when I use it."Some experts have condemned the trend and accused students of gaining an "unfair advantage" by doping, without explaining why it is any more unfair than hiring a private tutor or paying for exam coaching.Professor Harris says that the arguments against the drugs "have not been persuasive" and that society ought to want enhancement."It is not rational to be against human enhancement," he writes. "Humans are creatures that result from an enhancement process called evolution and moreover are inveterate self improvers in every conceivable way." Although no drug can be guaranteed safe and free of all side-effects, Ritalin has been judged safe enough for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and has been widely used to treat them over many years, he says.The drug is a stimulant which was introduced in 1956 and appears to influence the way the brain filters and responds to stimuli. It increases energy as well as confidence and has been compared to cocaine. Possible side-effects are typical of stimulants and include insomnia, loss of appetite, dizziness and depression on withdrawal.Other drugs investigated for their mind-enhancing properties include donepezil, a treatment for dementia and modafinil, used in narcolepsy, the condition in which sufferers repeatedly fall asleep.Both drugs are thought to boost…

  Kennedy, Feeling Father’s Absence, Steps Aside  Representative Patrick J. Kennedy before the State of the Union address on Jan. 27. You can't easily replace his experinece "Mr. Kennedy said he intended to remain active in mental health issues, an area that has defined him, politically and personally. His mother, Joan Kennedy, has battled alcoholism for years, and his father was involved in a string of alcohol-related episodes earlier in his career. Mr. Kennedy himself was treated for cocaine addiction as a teenager, battled depression as a young adult, received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder after he came to Congress and then became addicted to painkillers."    

 What's In Store for Roger Clemens?Even in the best-case scenario, the former pitcher who's been indicted for perjury still has it badRead Article      

  From The Sunday Times of London

Spycraft: Inside the CIA’s Top Secret Spy Lab by Robert Wallace and H Keith Melton The Sunday Times review by Brian Schofield
During the second world war, American military technicians tried to improve their bombardment of the Japanese fleet by strapping cats to the underside of their bombs. In theory, as Tiddles plummeted towards the Pacific ocean from the belly of a B-52, the natural feline aversion to water would steer both puss and payload towards the warm, dry surface of the enemy’s warships. According to the co-authors of Spycraft, “Initial tests proved cats were ineffective and the concept died as quickly as the first test subjects.” Spycraft, the first complete history of the CIA’s department for clandestine military gadgetry, known as the Office of Technical Services (OTS), is packed with such nuggets of experimental enthusiasm. It’s a testimony to the comprehensiveness of this chronicle of bombs, bugs, poison pills and exploding cigars (and to Washington’s bureaucratic witlessness, which the authors capture in full) that this book took nearly two years to be cleared by security for publication. It emerges that America’s spyware history began sluggishly in the second world war — hampered by a belief that relying on technology and subterfuge was un-American, and best left to the more naturally sneaky British. There were some wartime successes, though, notably smuggling exploding coal to the French resistance, to blow up German trains. But as the cold war warmed up, America languished far behind the technocrats of Soviet Russia — the KGB had a bug inside the Great Seal of the United States, hanging on the wall behind the desk of the American ambassador to Moscow, and Russian dedication to fieldwork included cracking American diplomatic safes with an x-ray machine that slowly killed its operators with radiation. The “techs”, as America’s spying scientists were known, slowly regained lost ground throughout the 1960s, through such innovations as fake tree stumps, packed with listening equipment, planted outside Soviet airbases, postcards of Red Square with missile diagrams hidden in the surface gloss, and the famous T-100, the first real spy camera, small enough to fit inside a pen. While rightly awed at the ingenuity of the techs in this golden age (they resolved text messaging in 1973 and started work on the personal digital camera in 1974), Robert Wallace and H Keith Melton also give an airing to the moments when the OTS “disintegrated into Keystone Cops comedy”, notably when trying to kill Fidel Castro. We all know about fatal cigars, but poisoned boots, hallucinogenic air-conditioning and booby-trapped seashells? Related Internet Links Buy the book here The romantic, James Bond-ish heyday of spyware was brief, though, and from the 1970s onwards the drudgery of audio surveillance seems to have taken over. The techs could bug anything, from coffee cups to ballpoint pens — they even built robotic fish to drop into tanks in hotel rooms and (clearly dog people)…