But it's also worth remembering that the trope in fiction of $REALLY_GOOD_THING turning out to be $BAD_THING in disguise is just that, dramatically convenient fiction. There's no natural "game balance" to the universe. Yet popular entertainment is very small-c conservative about human improvement; if vaccines were still the stuff of fiction rather than daily life, a TV drama would show that universal prevention of smallpox has some terrible side effect that turns out to be worse than just letting people get infected and die. Fortunately we know that to be false but it won't stop dramatists and those shaped by them for immediately looking at newer biomedical advances with the most crushing cynicism.
(Not really directed at you, since I take it you're joking a bit, but this was the comment that prompted my thoughts...)
What about the contrapositive... How many substances fail in mouse studies (and are discarded), yet would have been viable in humans? Any known examples of this?
Not sure if it applies though because it being severly harmful to rodents hasn't prevented us from looking into this substance closely. Quite the opposite.
from your wikipedia link
After an incident in 1951, where a US Army inductee unsuccessfully attempted suicide with multiple doses of warfarin in rodenticide and recovered fully after presenting to a hospital, and being treated with vitamin K (by then known as a specific antidote),[70] studies began in the use of warfarin as a therapeutic anticoagulant. It was found to be generally superior to dicoumarol, and in 1954 was approved for medical use in humans. An early recipient of warfarin was US president Dwight Eisenhower, who was prescribed the drug after having a heart attack in 1955.[70]
My understanding is that the only problem we have with antibiotics is that they breed antibiotic resistant diseases; but that is not really worse than us not having antibiotics at all.
But, at any rate, the Charlie character starts off as mentally very simple and enjoys life, then after attaining intelligence quickly achieves many things most people wont in their whole lifetimes, though isn't super happy while doing these and insults those he feels are less intelligent, though eventually grows emotionally through them, then he returns to being simple and happy.
Really this is just everyones' life, starting as a baby and returning to dementia as an adult, for Charlie it's just flat and then a sudden spike rather than a gradual curve. Curious why you think it wont end well. I mean in the end everyone dies so it's true if you're very much against that, nothing ends well.
The real point of the book I thought was we shouldn't view the super intelligent or super simple as better or worse because we are all both better and worse cosmically. So ultimately everyone should stop being condescending generally.
Kidding aside though, anytime the question of, "Does this thing in mice do this other thing in humans?" the answer is always, "Who the hell knows until after the study is complete?!"
Just the same set-up: new drug that can heal a person's damaged brain, turns him into a super-intelligent psycho.
Although it's important to point out that he wasn't psycho, and his preferences don't seem directly shaped by the treatment..
At that point, we will indeed be able to create artificial molecules or genes that make brains more efficient at using oxygen and sugar to produce rational organized thoughts. But I have no illusions that anything groundshaking will happen in my lifetime.
Unfortunately, the fastest way we have to advance is to tinker and learn from our mistakes. I will leave it to other people to volunteer for that process.
There is a compelling argument against any simple way to enhance people. It's that if a simple change even the addition of a single molecule could make people significantly better, evolution would have found that change already. With nature we are stuck with much more incremental change. So I agree that science may eventually find some nice enhancements but they will require more than a single molecule or gene change.
Well even for "simple" things like the addition of a single new element, or a single new molecule, or a single new protein, the details are complicated, and any mutation that depends on a prior mutation to be beneficial has to wait until the prior mutation is close to fixation and is common among the species. Evolution is slow and only cares about reproductive fitness, and can easily get trapped in local maxima and a species can even evolve to extinction. Because of that, it can miss obvious (to human intelligence) low hanging fruit. So I don't think that "evolution would have found it already" argument is very compelling. Evolution is dumb, it's amazing it works at all.
FYI Iodine is concentrated by the breasts so as to provide it to babies via milk for exactly this reason. Iodine is critical to a lot of things. What you overlook is that as an element (atom) there is no way for the body to "make" iodine. The only way to get it is through what you eat and drink. In my opinion, the thyroid hormones are mostly a way for the body to store iodine - they are numbered T1, T2, T3, and T4 based on the number of iodine atoms in the molecule. The thyroid gland also concentrates iodine for use in making these hormones, but ultimately the only way to get iodine is to consume it - which I highly recommend.
As I recall (and it's been years, so please forgive me if I'm mistaken), Charlie's increased intelligence lead directly to increased unhappiness. While literature obviously does not constitute any sort of conclusive evidence, I think that the point is well-taken: for all the merits of human intelligence, it also fucks us up pretty good.