Game Changer (48 page)

The pace of technological advance
:
About
thirty years ago I was a grad student in a
PhD program in molecular
biology, although I finally decided to write a master’s thesis and leave, since
I didn’t have the patience for lab work.

As part of my research project,
I mutated viruses, looking for interesting mutant phenotypes (observable
manifestations), and then sequenced these viruses to learn what exact changes
had taken place at the DNA level.

Sequencing even two hundred
bases back then was quite an ordeal, took days, and required working with potentially
dangerous levels of radiation. I really didn’t enjoy it.

The fact that it is now possible
to sequence billions of bases in the time it took me to do two hundred
continues to blow my mind. How can this be? If you had asked me back then if
this would be possible in 2016, my answer would have been an emphatic NO!

I would have said it would
never
be possible. Not in 2016, not in
22,016.

We are truly living in an
amazing age. Every time I write one of these novels, I always come to a point
at which I hesitate to push the possibilities of a technology any further. No,
this is going too far, I think. My readers will revolt, thinking the technology
I present is too far-fetched, too impossible, even for five or ten years in the
future.

But then I always come back to
DNA sequencing. And cell phones. And computers. And I realize that I’m not being
too far-fetched—because a decade or two ago, I would never have had the
audacity to suggest we could perfect technological miracles that I now take for
granted every day.

The San Diego fire of 2007, cows, and suicide on the tracks
:

The San Diego wildfires of 2007
described by Azim Jafari happened, just as described, and the statistics cited
are accurate. It did cause the largest peacetime movement of civilians in
America since the civil war, with nearly a million residents forced from their
homes.

I was one of these residents.

While the fires headed in the
direction of my neighborhood, my family loaded up what we could into our car,
including photo albums, one dog, and one guinea pig, and I spent fifteen
minutes dousing my home with water before we headed downtown. It was exceedingly
stressful. Eventually we found lodging at a not-so-great motel, and smuggled in
our pets.

Our house was spared, but the
entire week was a horror show. Soot rained from the darkened skies and
breathing the unfiltered air was dangerous. From the cast of the sky, it did
seem like we were living in the aftermath of a nuclear war. It was eerie and
creepy and surreal, and deeply distressing.

And as mile after mile of
Southern California was consumed, and schools and businesses and the economy
ground to a halt, it did occur to me that the region had been brought to its
knees without need of a bombing, or a jet crashing into a skyscraper, and that a
terrorist could have brought it about with a lighter and few gallons of gas.

So while I was writing
Game Changer
and needing to come up with
a terrorist plot for the Mossad to foil—allowing me to introduce Mossad
characters and their counterparts in the US—I thought this would be a good,
dramatic choice.

Now let me switch gears. I was
Director of Biotechnology Licensing at Bristol-Myers Squibb in Princeton, New
Jersey, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Each day on my way to work I
passed farms and many cows, just like Carmilla Acosta. I once knew Princeton
well, so I enjoyed setting a few scenes here, even if I didn’t spend much time
describing the community.

When Carmilla remembers having been
on a train that made an unscheduled stop, followed by the conductor asking passengers
not to look out of the window on one side, followed by so many passengers rushing
to this side to look out it was a wonder the train didn’t tip over, this was an
event that I experienced personally, on a trip from Princeton to New York. Before
this time I had never associated trains with suicide, but after this event it
was impossible not to. (I just performed a quick search—and while I didn’t find
any up-to-date figures, I did find that in 2011, tragically, there were 173 train-related
suicides across America.)

Neuroscience
—
what makes
us tick?
All
of the neuroscience discussed by Rachel Howard and Kevin Quinn, predominantly
in chapters twenty-five and twenty-nine, is real, and as accurate as I could
make it, although highly summarized and not rigorously presented. Most of this
was gleaned from two books written by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at
Baylor College of Medicine, who is a gifted writer and who does a brilliant job
of explaining complex concepts in a highly entertaining manner. The books are
Incognito
and
The Brain: The Story of You
. If you had to read just one, I would
choose
Incognito
, as it contains more
material and is truly captivating (but only after reading all of
my
books, of course, and recommending
them to thousands of your friends :).

Some of the material on memory I found in the book
The Seven Sins of Memory
, by Daniel L.
Schacter, Chair of Harvard’s Department of Psychology, who has done
groundbreaking work on this subject.

The Danziger study is real. Apparently a full stomach can
influence who gets paroled and who doesn’t.

It is also true that damage to different regions of the
brain can cause dramatic and specific changes to personality and behavior. The
story about Charles Whitman, The University of Texas shooter, is real. He did
have a tumor and he did know something was going terribly wrong inside his
brain. The same for the man with a brain tumor who began to exhibit pedophilic tendencies.

The link between the physical brain and human behavior, and
the implications of this when it comes to the concept of the soul, is
fascinating to me, and I attempted to address different views on this subject,
although this is all highly speculative and subjective.

As discussed in the novel, human
beings are born largely unfinished, and our brains are wired-up as we go, and
unconscious subroutines burned into our brains tend to perform better and more
efficiently than tasks carried out by our conscious minds.
 

The unconscious does control our bodies, the random thoughts
we have, and far more of our lives than we’d ever imagine. This point is demonstrated
repeatedly in the book,
Incognito
,
and is truly astonishing to ponder. The unconscious really does run much of the
show, and we really have become expert at taking the credit.

The Hess experiment, in which men ranked women whose eyes
were slightly dilated as being more attractive, is true. And the unconscious
has been shown to be able to pick up on patterns faster than the conscious in a
number of experiments.

Emotions
are
important in driving decisions, and those with a certain type
of damage to their prefrontal cortex, whose emotions no longer influence their
behavior, can largely lose the ability to decide, paralyzed by even the
simplest of choices, like what to make for dinner or watch on TV.

With respect to split brain patients, researchers really can
get them to act without their consciousness knowing why, and they will
fabricate reasons for their actions from whole cloth.

Finally, our memories really can be readily manipulated. The
Loftus experiment, in which a memory of being lost in a mall was more or less implanted
in subjects, is real, as is our tendency to embellish memories, even those that
are false.

Addicted to Dmitri Kovonov?
Obviously,
the many manipulations Kovonov carried out on Carmilla’s brain to get her to
fall in love with him, and become addicted to him, are impossible. At least
right now.

Kovonov’s claim that specific people
are represented in the brains of others by specific neuronal addresses, as it
were, is accurate. These addresses can be as short as a single neuron, are
known as Jennifer Aniston cells, and might potentially be manipulated one day
for unsavory purposes, as suggested in this passage from the
New Scientist
article,
New memories implanted in mice while they
sleep:

Evidence suggests that single
neurons can represent specific people in the brain—such cells have been termed
Jennifer Aniston cells, after a test subject was found to have one brain cell
that only fired in response to images of the actress. If you could identify a
neuron that represents you in someone else’s brain and then stimulate areas of
the brain that create a rewarding feeling every time that neuron fires, you
might, in theory, be able to make that person like you more. “The fact that you
can do it during sleep is a bit worrying, in that it implies that you could
make somebody want something even if they didn’t really,” says Neil Burgess at
University College London. “There are a few ways of thinking about this—there’s
the medical application, and there’s the more Orwellian application, where the
government gets inside people’s heads and starts to control them,” he says.

Plum Island
:
This is a real island with a
checkered history, and the background on it given in the novel is accurate, all
except the following sentence: “
In
2020, with great fanfare, DHS had announced they had sold Plum Island to a
reclusive Internet billionaire.” This hasn’t happened yet, but check back in
2020 to see if this comes true.

Notably, in the movie
The
Silence of the Lambs
, FBI trainee Clarice Starling offers Hannibal Lecter
an annual vacation on Plum Island in exchange for helping her track down a serial
killer. In response, he scathingly refers to it as “Anthrax Island.”

To the best of my knowledge there is no Black neuroscience lab on
the island, and if there were, I suspect it wouldn’t be abbreviated as ANL. But
Plum Island would be a great place to put such a secret lab, in my opinion.

Finally, because the island is a major setting for the novel, I’ll
leave you with this excerpt from a CBS News story from June 10, 2012, entitled,
Plumbing the Mysteries of Plum
Island
(which can easily be found online):

Plum Island sits at the end of New York’s Long Island like a question mark.
For nearly 60 years, controversies and mysteries have engulfed it.

And no wonder. The island is controlled by the Department of Homeland
Security. Its labs are staffed by scientists from the United States Department
of Agriculture. They come and go by special government ferries, guarded by
armed officers.

We were asked not to film the docks on either side.

So what really goes on here? The USDA says scientists study diseases that
can affect livestock, primarily overseas, to develop vaccines.

And although the government says the germs stored on the island affect only
animals, that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous. And information about them is
strictly protected for security reasons.

Neurotheology
—
God on the
brain
:
I had thought that religion was in decline
around the world, certain pockets notwithstanding, but this is apparently not
true, as described by Kevin Quinn in chapter sixty-one. The Gallup poll data
and the data about the supernatural beliefs prevalent in Sweden and Iceland were
taken from the book
The Triumph of Faith
,
by Rodney Stark, which has as much data and statistics on the subject as you
would ever want to see. In preparation for these sections I also read Matthew
Alper’s
The God Part of the Brain
,
which I found both fascinating and useful.

The evidence presented in chapter sixty-one that a propensity
toward religiosity is prewired into the human brain is accurate, including the
identical twin studies mentioned, as well as the similarities across virtually
all cultures as noted by Carl Jung and others. Also, spiritual feelings can be
ramped up or down as a result of drugs, disease, or physical trauma.

Like the discussion about the existence of the soul earlier
in the novel, thinking about the philosophical implications of these findings was
intriguing to me. The argument about why these findings don’t necessarily
disprove religion is my own, as far as I know. I wouldn’t be surprised if this
argument had been made before, but it isn’t one that I’ve read.

I thought it made some sense that if there were a Creator,
he would give us this prewired religion function. Faith is defined as belief in
the absence of proof. If a Creator made us without the ability to have faith,
we could hardly be expected to come to it on our own. But if we were made
with
the ability to have faith, prewired
for it in fact, we could always choose to ignore it. (Again, this doesn’t mean
there is a Creator, just that these findings don’t necessarily rule it out.)

Those of you who have read other novels, and other notes,
I’ve written, may know that when I began writing novels I was leaning toward
atheism. But the more physics and cosmology I’ve learned, the more open-minded
I’ve become (which is the opposite of what I thought would happen). This has
occurred because, while I find the idea of a omnipotent Creator preposterous, the
answers proposed by physicists and cosmologists to explain the origin of the
universe are at least as preposterous. The universe is exquisitely fine-tuned
for life (Google “The fine-tuned universe” if you’re interested in learning
more). Scientific theories to explain the impossibly perfect balance of forces
that allow life to exist typically involve infinite universes, which sounds
cool, but which isn’t any easier to wrap one’s mind around than the concept of
God.