Becoming Human, page 24
On Sunday at a very early hour, just after five o’clock as I remember, everyone but D’Arcy was back in the lab, and even he, a notoriously slow riser, was there by six. My first question was, “Would there be any point in repeating the pain experiment?”
The consensus was “no.”
My second question was, “Does anyone have any ideas?” The only one that arose was the one we had all been thinking: take him apart again and try to find what was wrong with him, where he was wired incorrectly. There were a number of sighs, but we rolled up our sleeves and started to work.
It took us another week to dismantle him again, compare each step with Susumu’s drawings and the photographer’s pictures, and slowly, slowly, put him back together once more.
The result was exactly the same as before.
I was forced to report our failure to the NIMH. The upshot was that we would have until the end of the current grant period to figure out our mistake, or to start over and create another Oscar within the year remaining to us. Since we had already done everything we could to determine what had gone wrong, we opted to start over, even beginning with a new façade (not such an ugly one this time).
We’ve all—David, D’Arcy and I—talked this over many times. Of course, we had wondered all along what might go wrong with transporting Oscar to a new place. Every one of us had imagined that, when Oscar was reassembled, there was a tiny chance that he might not be exactly the same as he was before. That is, we all thought he might be defective in some way, not quite as smart, perhaps, or with a somewhat different personality, much as if one were to take a human brain apart and put it back together again. It couldn’t possibly be exactly as it was before. But none of us expected Oscar to disappear altogether. Which is a tragedy in many, many ways. But the one that keeps coming back to me is this: he would have loved the view of the ocean.
So how do we account for our abject “failure”? Here is what I think, and for the most part, we all agreed that it was the most likely explanation: we had forgotten one thing when we decided we had to move him. We forgot that a human brain is not merely a collection of neurons, axons, dendrites, and all the rest, but an entity that has a mind and, yes, perhaps a soul, something that’s built up over the years, one experience at a time, until it becomes what it is at any given moment in a person’s life. In other words, perhaps the brain is far more than the sum of its parts. When you dismantle it, you are left with only the parts. I don’t want to sound like a religious nut, but Oscar’s death may, in fact, provide evidence for a soul, or a human spirit, or whatever you wish to call it. Once it’s all taken apart, that entity, whatever it may be, is lost, literally forever. It’s not that we failed to put Humpty Dumpty back together again; it’s that it would have been impossible to do so. The only way to build a human brain is one cell, one neuron, at a time. A human being accumulates.
Although we didn’t fully achieve our original goal of creating a fully functional human brain, the fact that we obtained evidence for a soul may be far more significant. But even if Oscar’s demise doesn’t constitute scientific evidence for one, it certainly suggests that every individual personality is unique, and depends on the sum total of all of his experiences, that even a single damaged neuron can change that uniqueness and result in an entirely different person. It is that uniqueness we choose to call a soul. Of course we could be wrong—that is the nature of science. Whichever side one comes down on, however, Oscar’s life was certainly not in vain. He had a profound impact on everyone who knew him, and for the better in most cases. How many of us can say the same?
One final note: our results indicate that thinking, at least in human beings, requires far fewer neurons than had previously been suspected. (As Oscar might have said: I think I have made a joke). In that respect alone, the grant money consumed by our little project definitely wasn’t wasted.
That leaves only the question of what happened to Oscar’s “soul.” If anyone cares about our opinion on this matter, we all feel that he is now in paradise sipping latte and guzzling the occasional Prosecco. At least that’s where we all hope he is. And we hope, further, that we will all join him one day. It is noteworthy that his last recorded words expressed much the same wish. We’re all just human beings, after all.
Afterword
More than a year has passed since we lost Oscar. In that time we have worked feverishly to “replace” him with another synthetic brain and get a new grant application written to fund further research on him (or her). The good news is: we do have another “Oscar.” The bad news is that he is not like Oscar in any way. Although we used exactly the same protocols for both, the new brain is nowhere near as smart as Oscar was. I would even go so far as to say that he is severely retarded. He (or she) can’t read above a first-grade level, isn’t interested in much of anything except watching children’s shows and sitcoms, has no sense of humor whatsoever, and shows little sign of improvement no matter how many neurons we add.
The upshot is that our renewal application, while deemed “worthy” of funding, did not make the cut. Sixty Minutes, of course, canceled its interview. We are all very disappointed with the way things turned out (as was the dean), but, as Oscar himself pointed out, every great scientific achievement is built on a succession of failures. Oscar is our Louis Washkansky, the first human heart transplant recipient, who only lived a few days. Now such transplants are performed almost routinely. As for Oscar #2, unfortunately, he went the same way as Mr. Washkansky. It was a difficult decision to end his life, but we had little choice.
For those who might be interested, incidentally, Susumu Ishakawa has built a successful group of his own, and is already doing extremely well in the grants department. Omar Khartoum is his laboratory chief. David married his girlfriend (Rhonda, whom Oscar never met) as did D’Arcy (Gladys)—I think Oscar would have been pleased to hear that. Both have gone off to professorships elsewhere. Robyn and Ed O’Reilly, while not married, are living together while she completes her graduate studies and, from all reports, are very happy.
One final irony: Shortly after we moved to Harvard, Frank Wilkes suffered a stroke and was forced to relinquish both his laboratory and the chairmanship. Had that happened a few weeks earlier, we might still be in Oscar’s birthplace, and he would still be with us. By now we might have provided him with arms and legs, a face, and, yes, even a penis. Who knows what he would have been like—another Schweitzer, perhaps? Or maybe an insufferable boor. You never know how a person will turn out.
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Gene Brewer, Becoming Human
