ACCORDING to the futurist, Alvin Toffler, human history can be seen to fit patterns. This takes the shape of great advances or waves. In a book published about a decade ago, Toffler described the information age of the 20th century as The Third Wave.
Then last year another great wave hit us. This was the genomic wave that rose when the encoding of all 100,000 human genes or genomes was completely decoded.
That wave had people talking relentlessly about biotechnology. Not surprisingly, the recently revised National Science Policy too focused, among others, on this area.
There’s a proposal for the setting up of a bio-valley, a biotechnological research and development cluster akin to the Silicon Valley and Multimedia Super Corridor.
A National Institute for Genomics and Molecular Biology is also suggested. The institute is to provide initially, the platform for fundamental research and, later, incubator to develop agricultural and pharmaceutical products.
These may be some of the most appropriate efforts that we can take as we endure the fourth wave of human history.
But, the trouble with waves is that they never seem to end. Thus, as we prepare ourselves for the onslaught of the genomic wave, it is worthwhile to take a look at the one that closely follows.
The fifth wave is anticipated to be, aptly, the “brain” wave. Although much has been learned from neuroscience research thus far, the brain, however, remains a big mystery.
Mental patients are still waiting to be cured. Middle-aged people are wondering why they are beginning to lose their mind. Addicts do not have a clue as to why once they get hooked on drugs, there’s almost no way out.
The ripples that are about to yield the fifth wave were actually generated long ago, in the second century to be exact. Galen, the non-conformist Greek physician, rejected the hitherto held belief that the human mind resided in the heart.
The ancient Egyptians were the originator of the misconception that the heart was the seat of the soul and mental functions.
During the time of the Pharaohs, when a wealthy or noble person died, the lung, liver, stomach and kidneys were preserved in well-decorated, sacred jars.
These jars represent the four sons of Horus, the Egyptian mythological character responsible for looking after the sick and the injured. The heart, however, was considered too important to remove.
The brain, on the other hand, would be scooped out of the dead man’s skull through the nostrils with an iron hook and then simply discarded. Brain tissues that could not be reached would be rinsed away with chemicals.
The perceived insignificance of the brain persisted right through the Greek civilisation. Aristotle asserted that the brain simply served to cool the passions of the heart.
Only during the Roman era was the myth debunked. Galen dismissed Aristotle’s idea as a complete nonsense. He argued that God would have put the brain closer to the heart if it were really to act as a cooling organ.
Galen also explained that the heart could not be the organ of the mind because an injury to the brain and not the heart would result in a mental disease.
He, therefore, subscribed imagination, cognition and memory, which are the basic components of intellect, to the brain.
Christian priests of the fourth and fifth centuries went a step further to propose that the intellect was located in the vicinity of the three main cavities, or ventricles, of the brain.
The 11th century Muslim physician Ibn Sinna, expounded on this in his magnum opus Canon of Medicine. He was of the opinion that human soul resided in the middle ventricle of the brain.
Today, the concept of brain dead, or loss of any discernible activities of the brain, is accepted as the end of life.
Post-Renaissance scientists like Paracelsus, Versalius and Willis improved on the earlier works of Galen and Ibn Sinna by describing the functional contribution of individual brain parts.
Since the 18th century, the localisation of functions in the deep and superficial layers of the different regions of the brain has become a much-researched subject of neuroscience.
The last century saw many neuroscientists investigating how human behaviour was affected by specific neurological diseases and brain injuries in certain locations.
For example, damage to the frontal part of the brain affected thinking and reasoning. Destruction of the deep brain structure called hippocampus led to memory loss.
Another milestone of the 20th century was the discovery of the various chemicals of the brain responsible for communications between nerve cells. This finding triggered an explosion of
research and development by drug companies hoping to find the mithridates and panaceas of tomorrow.
Yet another equally dramatic change in brain research is the introduction of new technologies and probes. They range from the powerful electron microscopes to the magnificent imaging scanners.
Perhaps, the most remarkable has been the advent of non-invasive probes, such as the computed axial and positron emission tomographers, for better determining the status of the brain and shedding light on the functional properties of its circuitry.
These unprecedented successes encouraged some scientists to optimistically think that the quest for one of the most difficult issues in brain science, that is the problem of consciousness, will soon be over.
This is the problem of the self, which relates to how the brain lets us know of our existence as individuals and of the fact that each of us has a private mind that belongs to us and to no one else.
Many other exciting discoveries are expected to come out of brain research in the 21st century.
Aggressive efforts are being made to find or improve on the cure for disorders and
complications such as dyslexia, autism, bulimia, obesity, migraine, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis.
The understanding of the phenomena of pain, anger, stress, love, hatred, appreciation and addiction is also being actively sought. The secrets of “abstract” concepts such as intelligence, motivation and memory are beginning to unfold.
There is now even a notion of the subtle brain differences between the sexes. Perhaps brain research will eventually tell us why “men appear to be from Mars and women from Venus”.
In view of these tremendous developments, it is hoped that apart from devising strategies to deal with the current biotech revolution, Malaysian scientists and grant administrators would not lose sight of the impending “brain” wave.