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Many Scientists Using Performance Enhancing Drugs
docinthemachine is one of several readers to send word of a new poll published in Nature showing unprecedented levels of cognitive performance-enhancing drug abuse by top academic scientists. The poll, conducted among subscribers to Nature, surveyed 1,400 scientists from 60 nations (70% from the US). 20% reported using performance-enhancing drugs. Among the drug-using population, 62% used Ritalin, 44% used Provigil, and 15% used beta-blockers like Inderal. Frequency of use was evenly divided among those who used drugs daily, weekly, monthly, and once a year. All such use without a prescription is illegal.
It is "drug abuse" when drugs are used without the informed consent of an individual; it is simply "illegal drug use" (and very likely legislative abuse of personal liberties at the same time) when an adult makes an informed choice about drug use that doesn't comply with the current law.
People need to move away from the mindset where media pompously and wrongly attributes polar positions such as "right and wrong" and "use and abuse" to be a 100% lexical replacement for "legal and illegal." Anyone with any sense at all knows better than that. A significant number of the laws on the books in the country I live in (the USA) are inherently wrong, outright un- or anti-constitutional, or something even worse. Using them to define what is "right" leads directly to behaviors that are despicable — or worse.
One can be cynical and simply say that this is because our legislators aren't very good at their jobs. Both from the standpoint of making good law in the first place, and also in the sense that they seem to be almost incapable of admitting they made a mistake and taking bad law off the books. Personally, I think it's because they're not very good at liberty — and very good indeed at lawmaking.
There's an old saw that goes, "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence", but I think in the case of bad law, we are indeed looking at malice aforethought. It seems to me that these people have agendas that can only be construed to be "for the people" if you slept through history class and have never read any of the founding documents with any interest. Like most Americans. :(
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We prescribe these drugs to millions of kids who most likely have nothing "wrong" with them, and people have a problem when some adults do the same thing?
This isn't athletics. The point isn't fairness. The point is advancing the science. I have serious doubts that these drugs are actually helping anybody do research who didn't already have some kind of problem, but it's none of our damn business, either.
Caffeine anyone?
The blurb makes it sound as if all this use is illegal. I would imagine most isn't: most of these people will have prescriptions but are using them for off-label purposes. Which is legal.
So, will they take away your Nobel if you've been found to use science-enhancing drugs?
It isn't necessarily illegal to possess or use prescription medicine without a prescription unless it is a controlled substance or there are state or other laws that come into play. It is illegal to dispense it without a presecription.
Inderal is not a controlled substance.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Does this mean there will be mandatory drug testing at the Science Olympiad?
:^p
Just what was in Albert Einstein's pipe?
And how did Stephen Hawking really end up in that wheelchair?
My confidence is shattered.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
But then again, life's not fair.
So if life's not fair, why ban "cheating" with drugs? Cheating is part of being unfair.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I admire your romanticism, but science isn't sport. It's not about a fair fight between equals. Science is about using any method you can to explain or measure a detail of the universe that nobody else can. So long as you do it yourself (i.e. you didn't actually steal someone else's idea or result), anything goes. There is no Nobel prize for featherweight science. Either you're the best, or you're not - and your funding will reflect this.
_You_ can drink drugs are "self-defeating".. But who cares? If I used drugs to save my life, then I would say that is good. I won't even stop to think about how I have degraded myself by staying alive. I don't think any cancer survivors feel any smaller because they needed to use drugs to beat cancer..
If I use drugs to clear my head to solve an important problem, then I don't consider that problem any less solved. I'm not working on solving a problem just to see if I can do it... I want to save the world for the world's sake, not my sake.
I would say that this line of thinking is kind of "selfish" in a way. The need for people to believe sports are fair and uncompromised by drugs has skewed the way people think of performance enhancment. Enhancement is good. We like enhancement. Get over it.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
I know at my University for example that there is widespread use of Ritalin for studying purposes once it got out that you can learn entire courses inside and out pulling all-nighters when you're on Ritalin.
A friend of mine is a regular user of Ritalin, and because I knew the guy (and his marks) before he started using I can tell you with some confidence that Ritalin will add a very significant boost to your GPA.
I also have anecdotal evidence of many pre-med students using Ritalin when they study for the MCAT, prerequisite courses, etc. since competition for med school here is so fierce.
If the students are doing it because they're under pressure for higher grades, why wouldn't the professors and scientists be doing it when they're under (arguably greater) pressure to produce research results.
The poll defines "top academic scientist" as a reader of Nature. Obviously this has major issues. For one, very few serious scientists read Nature regularly, since it doesn't speak directly to a given field. In my "top academic" institution, almost all of the people I know who have gone to Nature's website recently are either science undergrads doing low level research for a simple presentation or non-scientists trying to figure out what was meant by article X which they saw referenced in an AP news story. In fact, the poll itself wouldn't be encountered by most scientists looking at Nature, since scientists are almost always entering through an external search portal directly to an article of interest. Scientists with real pressure (say, busy grad students or professors) don't browse Nature. They strategically read an occasional article in Nature, but in most cases the same research will have been published already in greater detail in a more field-specific journal.
Collectively, all of this means that Nature's pool of respondents was almost certainly not "top scientists." Instead, they were selecting undergrads, non-scientists, and generally people with a lot of extra time on their hands. Yes, we know undergrads use Ritalin to cheat on tests. We have no indication, however, that Ritalin helps one to do the deep creative thinking necessary for involved science.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Who makes that judgment? Is it the EMT responding on the scene? Is the the ambulance driver? Does the doctor decide when you are on the operating table?
You are going to ask people whose profession is to help fix people and save lives to determine who is worthy of being saved, and who isn't? This is the horribly unethical problem that is the notion of being "uninsured" in the first place. You want to compound that with subjective life style judgments?
So, a gay person with AIDS is treated by a fundamentalist doctor who believes sexuality is a lifestyle choice, and thus, AIDS treatment costs are an unnecessary burden on the tax payer. This is truly the extreme of what the US already has in place with HMOs who are constantly crunching numbers, as opposed to doing everything in their power to help people get better.
Sure, what you say is a wonderful idea. Freedom of choice, my body, and all that. But this thing is called society for a reason. If you really want to destroy yourself, do it outside the realm of society. But of course, these junkies don't hold such noble notions of personal responsibility, so you can't expect them (nor society) to act in accord with such notions.
EMTALA is an unfunded mandate that says that the nurses who work in an ER, the hospital who runs the ER, and ER physicians like me have to pay for uninsured emergency care. It takes a segment of the US economy and says we have to take responsibility for and subsidize what everyone else doesn't. That cheap McDonalds hamburger you ate today that is less expensive because McDonalds doesn't offer health insurance? I paid for a part of that.
Of course I am thankful for EMTALA every time that I use it to force a surgeon to take the appendix out of an uninsured teenager. I also feel that I am paid quite well enough even though about 30% of the ER care and 50% of the overall care I provide is uncompensated (I volunteer two days a week at a low income clinic that sees a lot of uninsured patients so that bumps the % up.) However overall I hate EMTALA precisely because its used as a crutch: I'm sure Bush slept very well at night after vetoing SCHIP because he thinks that every American gets health care since even if we are uninsured we can go to the ER (where most of the care people need - like prevention and treatment of chronic disease can't be done).