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Scientists Produce Fearless Mice
Dotnaught writes "According to New Scientist, a Rutgers University geneticist has found that turning off a specific gene for the protein stathmin makes mice fearless. The story speculates that this research might improve treatment for phobias. It does not mention obvious military applications for the discovery. As noted in this Naval Officer's guide for managing fatigue, the use of amphetamines to stay alert, followed by sedatives to sleep, has a long tradition. Genetic treatments may offer an alternative to pharmaceuticals."
Whatever happened to the good old days of pumping soldiers full of angel dust to rid them of fear?
The non-military uses for such a treatment are pretty far-reaching. Would it be able to cure people that suffer anxiety attacks? Could children with night terrors be cured?
If the rats don't feel fear, do they also lose understanding of danger? That would be a pretty bad mutation.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Giving Methamphetamines to soldies to "stay alert" and to "strengthen confidence" has -sadly enough- a long tradition. As Wikipedia tells us even the Nazis spreaded the drug among their Wehrmacht. What's the point of a government saying "Stay away from drugs!" on the one hand and willingly giving it to soldiers on the other?
Seems alright, I quit military service a long time ago...
Regards
Stirz
IMHO, there are much better ways of curing phobias than resorting to potential treatments based on genetics. It's much easier to imagine military and other subversive applications to motivate this kind of research. Imagine it billed as a "cure" to shell shock and other combat-related situations. While its definitely interesting that we now understand fear a little better, removing fear, or even tinkering with its inner workings, seems nothing short of asking for disaster. We have fear for a reason, and methink moderating it arbitrarily to within parameters that we specify will be more challenging than it is worth.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
...or just plain stupid?
Lemon curry???
I don't think that an army of fearless soldiers would be that effektive.
Imagine hordes of these running fearless into machinegun fire... Very effective, I presume....
Fear often prevents us from doing really stupid things. So far this worked good along evolution...
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
The two certainly do not equate.
people nowadays like to talk about fear in ideological and propagandistic terms, but fear keeps you alive. it keeps you from wandering into traffic or picking fights with random people. if this were ever applied to humans, you wouldn't have superhuman heroic fighters for the military, you'd have guys shooting themselves with their own guns and jumping off roofs... why not, when you're not afraid of anything, including death
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
this mutation would have dominated the species milions of years ago.
In a world of cats, fear is the superior evolutionary trait.
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If you put a fearless mouse in the wild, it will die like anything else that lacks a healthy sense of which dangers are worth avoiding.
Fear is an emotion that rules our lives from moment to moment. Losing fear doesn't mean losing sanity, actually is usually means the opposite.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
What you want is soldiers that are more afraid of their commanding officers than the enemy; that way they'll follow orders.
It is a bit of oversimplification. Soldiers can be motivated by things other than fear: the sense of friendship, pride, the feeling of responsibility and (misguided or not) patriotism. History is full with exapmles of people knowingly and willingly sacrificing their life for good of others, ranging from Spartans to Soviet atheists (neither of those could even hope for a decent afterlife: the void of Hades ain't much better than simple non-existance). I believe that in Iraq fights of today you could find such instances at both sides involved, too.
That said, your general argument remains valid. Humans for high command are mostly numbers, and are operated from statistical point of view. They would hate to rely solely for underlings' loyalty.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Did you see the interview with the tank drivers when they were talking about what kinds of music they were playing while on a "mission"? It was clear that whatever other motivations they had for killing enjoyment was undeniably a factor.
I think we overlook how much fun it is to kill. It does satisfy a deep urging we have as animals. It's why people hunt, It's why children enjoy ripping legs off of grasshoppers, I knew a guy who used to buy mice and hit them with a golf club. There is a tremendous fun element in killing.
evil is as evil does
That's because there is no military applications. You don't want the soldiers to become fearless, because if they do, they might say: "This war is wrong. I used to be too afraid to do anything about it, but now I suddenly feel fearless, and will get the heck away from here !" Basically, fearless soldiers will refuse to obey when given orders that they think are wrong, and cannot be forced to obey by fear of punishment.
This is so incorrect as to lead me to guess that the original poster either has not served in the armed services or had a bad experience while doing so. In a successful military, soldiers serve because they believe, not because they are forced to. This is exactly why, even in this era of recruiting problems, the US military still strongly prefers to avoid the draft. It is choice, not fear, that makes fighters effective.
Confined though we are, infinity dwells within.
This seems like a profoundly unwise idea. And unless they can reactivate the gene at decommissioning, troops who survive their fearlessness better report to the Soylent Green Division for final debriefing. (And why wouldn't they? They're fearless.)
"Genetic treatments may offer an alternative to pharmaceuticals." So a company has two options. Either a (theoretically and best case) one time genetic therapy which will raise the wrath of a public who leaned everything they know about science from bad movies. Or slightly less effective pills targeting the same mechanism, but which can be sold again and again to a person throughout their lives. I think the whole customer for life deal has a bit more appeal.
Everything will be taken away from you.
We're a big bag of complex chemical equillibria and messy neural wiring. We give names like "love" and "fear" to aspects of the subjective experience of existing this way, but they're seldom precise enough to be something you can switch on and off. You're bound to get either more than you intend or less than you intend, or both.
Fear would seem to be a good candidate for a neurobiologically switchable emotion, but even fear is more complex than it seems at first glance.
I saw a photo in some book I read on the psychology of emotions that showed a truck tipping over. The truck was loaded with maybe thirty soccer fans returning from a game, and all that rowdy weight caused the thing to overbalance. The photo was taken just as the truck was approaching 45 degrees, and the people on the top were leaping to safety. What was interesting about the photo was the peoples' faces. The people leaping to safety had no look of fear or emotion at all -- just intense concentration. The driver, however is obviously terrified.
The point is that there is arousal in response to danger, and there is fear. Arousal in the presence of danger is not fear: fear is specifically an emotional reaction to helplessness in the presence of danger. It's evolution's way of say, "If you're going to do nothing about this situation, then you'd better do it really, really unobtrusively."
There is already a method for controlling and eliminating fear in a soldier. It's called "training". You ingrain the right response in a danger situation into him so he can act automatically. He may be afraid before hand and traumatized afterward, but you want him aroused and as close to fearless as possible at the moment of truth.
Because of the imprecision of language, I suspect a pill that turns off "fear" would actually make a soldier's training less effective. The physiological and emotional response to danger which is not fear, or at least not exactly fear, curiously doesn't have a distinct name. Clearly this unnamed state is a kind of emotional state -- one in which reactions are automatic and information is extensively filtered down to that which is paradigmatically most useful for survival. Perhaps "fear" is a reasonable umbrella term for all kinds of arousal reactions to danger, but we have to distinguish between being "frightened" or "scared" on one hand and being "terrified" or "petrified".
But whatever the word is, I expect the condition of reacting to danger is on the whole more beneficial to the warrior than it is detrimental to a warrior. And, as you say, if the soldier does not react in an emotional way to danger, then the way he does react is probably unpredictable. An ideal pill from a military standpoint would narrowly block the "petrification" reflex, without altering any of the other subjective aspects of fear.
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Not necessarily. Darwinian evolution doesn't necessarily dictate that the best mutation wins out. It generally suggests that the mutation best adapted to the species' circumstances will survive, but really, anything that works well enough to allow further breeding will still continue to exist. That's why we have all sorts of absurd animals in nature right alongside the magnificent ones, and why in our own species various forms of genetic disease and handicap continue (although for the latter, our own social evolution and co-dependency has something to do with it too).
Yeah if you want to see what a fearless soldier would look like, just watch a bunch of little kids play any FPS. They just run around aimlessly and when they find someone, they run straight at them shooting. They die a lot.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
Because how do you maintain order in an Army if the soldier has totally no fear of the consequences of not obeying ?
Start a eugenics war? Control them with drugs?
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