What is the experimental man?
What is the experimental man?
It started as a book due out next spring, but it’s more than that. It’s you and me (some of you are Experimental Women) as we engage in a curious moment in history - when a species (Homo sapiens) is creating the tools to delve deep inside itself to find out who we are. It’s an exploration and assessment of cutting-edge technology and information that is revealing secrets about our genes, how the environment impacts us, our brains and our bodies.
The plan is for one person - me - to take the ultimate high-tech exam: tests that reveal everything from my genetic markers for, say, diabetes and novelty seeking behavior to levels of pollutants in my blood to brain scans that attempt to tell me how greedy or altruistic I am, or if I am in love or believe in God.
I’ll use all of this poking, prodding, and scanning as a means to describe the latest science and technology, while assessing what is useful for a healthy individual, and what is not - and how I feel finding out so much information about my inner workings. Is there anything I don’t want to know?
Perhaps most important, the project will explore what it means to be human - and why we are obsessed with experimenting on ourselves.
I invite you to read the synopsis of the Experimental Man book project - a link is on the main website, http://www.experimentalman.com. I also invite you to take a peek at the powerpoint presentation I have given at meetings describing the project — the link is on the main website.
On this blog, I’ll be posting diary-like entries of my tests and results, and how it feels to be a human guinea pig. I’ll do my best to describe what it’s like to experience this new world of personal knowledge.
Check my website to find out more about me, if you wish: http://www.davidewingduncan.com.
Here is a brief excerpt from the introduction to the book introducing the experimental man:
“Your host – the guinea-pig telling this story – is a father of three children ages 13, 19, and 21; he is an older brother to his only sibling; and the son of a mother and father in their late seventies who are both extraordinarily healthy. This book is in part their story, too, the connection to a continuum of generations that stretch far back in history and will project forward into the future through my daughter and two sons. To make this link for Experimental Man, I have had genetic profiles run of my parents, my 48 year-old brother, Donald, and my 19 year-old daughter, Danielle.
“But this physiological and hereditary “me” – the bundle of tissue, organs, sensors of environmental cues, cells and genes – isn’t the full story I plan to tell. This is the functional part, the mechanistic me. There is also an experiment about what happens to my mind (as opposed to my physical brain) and my emotions, and to my conception of self as I learn the results of my tests. If, in fact, I have a reaction at all. This is the mental “me” that gets up each morning with an innate sense of who I am, and how I feel about myself, and my place in the world: that package of hopes, fears, stress, euphoria, needs and resolutions that shift and change and underlie my days and nights as I interact with the world. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in Notes from the Underground: “There are… things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.””
Let me know what you think - I look forward to a great conversation!