Imagine if the obesity epidemic came to a halt.
Visualize nurseries full of newborns, none of whom will ever grow up to be smokers.
Picture this: Our country’s cruelest afflictions obliterated not with a cure, but a vaccine.
No, this is not a John Lennon impersonation – this is actual news.
Dr. Kim D. Janda, a professor at the Scripps Research Institute, has developed a vaccine that blocks the addictive effects of heroin on rat’s brains. He’s given himself the next ten years to get a similar, FDA-approved vaccine for humans in order to prevent various drug addictions.
The vaccine would be administered to addicts. Afterward, they could smoke all the cigarettes, drink all the booze and snort all the drugs they desire, but the brain would stop the body from feeling any high. Janda has also developed a vaccine to combat obesity among rodents (and, someday, people) that would cause the brain to ignore to the stomach hormone, peptin, that signals hunger.
The only difference between Janda’s vaccines and the scores of others that have eradicated illnesses like the mumps and measles is that Janda’s rewires the brain, not the body.
It’s a little futuristic, and Janda has quite a few kinks to work out yet, but I can’t help but think of what the world would look like if he does.
Could we see the end of diabetes and date rape drugs? Could we knock out every disease and disorder, one by one, until we’re all perfect human models of health?
Or what if we could remedy our conditions that look so subsidiary next to alcoholism and obesity: our inabilities to focus, our short-term memories or our disorganization?
Maybe I’m getting carried away, but I’m amazed something as physiologically complex as addiction – something humans have battled for centuries to no avail – can be prevented with a simple injection.
If properly engineered, this vaccine would be a momentous gain for the entire human population. But I think we might also lose something important.
We can do nothing but think highly of the people who have overcome life-threatening addictions and lived to tell the tale. Similarly, there is something to be said about the people who beat the obesity epidemic with hard work and strict dieting.
With this vaccine and others like it, could we see the end of self-control?
Janda said he’s been turning away parents left and right who show up to his office, begging them to inject their drug-addicted children with his vaccine.
“I guess it’s been so devastating in their families that they’re looking for anything, and there’s just nothing out there,” Janda said.
Come again? “Nothing out there?”
For people who have developed substance dependencies in their first two decades of life, there is plenty out there. Their organs are prime, their brains are still maturing, and their futures are malleable. These kids are hardly lost causes.
That being said, part of the cure is self-discipline. Addiction is a science, but it’s also a habit. A vaccine only helps the former.
As excited as I am for this vaccine to come through, a little skepticism remains. A shot that alters brain chemistry can’t heal the mind of all its afflictions. There is no cure-all for our bodies and our heads; it’s a balance of medicine and self-discipline, and we can’t just forget about the latter.