Flowers for Algernon

  • Daniel Keyes

Harcourt, Brace & Earth: 1966.

Cliff Robertson every bit the title character in Charly, the 1968 film adaptation of Flowers for Algernon. Credit: Selmur/Picture palace Rel. Ciro./The Kobal Drove

By the time science-fiction author Daniel Keyes died in 2014 at the age of 86, he had lived through vast upheavals in biomedical science, from the discovery of the DNA double helix to the sequencing of the homo genome. But upstanding oversight did non ever keep pace. Keyes' novel Flowers for Algernon, l years old this year, highlights how oft the need for oversight is ignored or flouted.

A case in point is a 1946–53 study conducted by Harvard Academy and the Massachusetts Found of Technology, and sponsored in function by food conglomerate Quaker Oats. Dozens of boys with learning difficulties at the Walter E. Fernald State Schoolhouse in Waltham, Massachusetts, were fed cereals containing radioactive tracers to runway how they absorbed atomic number 26 and calcium. The boys were told only that they were joining a science club, and consent forms sent to their parents made no mention of radiation exposure. A US Department of Energy committee ended in 1994 that it was "extremely unlikely" that the boys had been harmed by the radiation, but the disregard for their man rights is breathtaking. Other experiments, including some sanctioned by the Usa government, were much more than egregious. Hundreds of African-American men involved in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in Alabama from 1932 to 1972 were never told that they had the disease; nor were they treated, despite the availability of penicillin from the 1940s.

The Tuskegee 'experiment' would never happen today, merely the Massachusetts written report's more subtle transgressions — in failing to fully regard the participants equally ends in themselves, rather than a means to achieve the researchers' ends — remain relevant. It is this suppression of feeling for people and laboratory animals in the pursuit of scientific knowledge that Keyes captures in Flowers for Algernon.

Keyes' novel, based on a brusk story that he published in 1959, follows 32-year-old Charlie Gordon, who agrees to have an experimental brain operation that may aid him to overcome his severe learning difficulties and increase his intelligence (he has an IQ of 68). The simply subject to have previously undergone the procedure successfully is a lab mouse named Algernon. Afterward the operation, Charlie'southward IQ rises speedily; he soaks up new languages and knowledge of the arts and sciences. His periodical entries, which make upwardly the novel, chart his growing awareness of his own sexuality and emotions, peculiarly his feelings for his former teacher at the Beekman College Eye for Retarded Adults.

More than revealing of Keyes' intent is the evolving human relationship between Charlie and Algernon. At first resentful of Algernon'due south superior intellect (the mouse easily beats him at navigating a maze), Charlie develops a strong bail with his fellow experimental field of study. At the height of his genius, Charlie begins to investigate the experiment to advance the work. Shortly realizing that it has flaws, he kidnaps Algernon to protect him. The regression that ends the book is then crushing that five publishers rejected the manuscript before it found a home. Flowers for Algernon became a best-seller (more than than 5 million copies have been sold and then far) and was adapted for the hit 1968 film Charly, starring Cliff Robertson. It all the same features in bioethics discussions.

Keyes had a degree in psychology and would afterward become a professor of artistic writing at Ohio University in Athens. In between, he edited lurid mag Marvel Science Stories and worked at Atlas Comics, the precursor to Curiosity Comics. He also briefly taught English in New York Urban center'southward public-schoolhouse system. The empathy that suffuses the novel stems from his experience of teaching children with learning difficulties. When one student returned to classes after a long absence, Keyes noted that he had forgotten how to read. "He had lost it all," Keyes said. "It was a heartbreaker." His sympathy for Algernon seems to stem in part from dissecting a female mouse at university: Keyes was shaken when his incisions revealed "a cluster of tiny fetuses" in its uterus.

What exercises Keyes is his scientists' failure to imagine Charlie equally a whole human being.

Despite his compassion for experimental subjects, man and brute, Keyes does not portray researchers as the evil geniuses of cultural cliché. Writing before modern ideas of informed consent were fully established in the late twentieth century, Keyes portrays the careerist psychologist Harold Nemur, who leads the trial, taking pains to get permission from Charlie's relatives to carry out the procedure. Neurosurgeon Jayson Strauss, who performs the operation, is concerned about Charlie's well-being throughout. What exercises Keyes is his scientists' failure to imagine Charlie as a whole human being before his intelligence-enhancing performance. Whereas Charlie'due south appreciation of Algernon's 'personhood' just grows, Nemur is unable to view Charlie as anything other than a sort of benign Frankenstein's monster.

That hubris is sometimes evident today, when researchers neglect to reverberate fully on the consequences of their work (S. Aftergood Nature 536, 271–272; 2016). A crop of findings suggests that the well-being of laboratory rodents has not been sufficiently prioritized. For instance, mice are housed at around twenty °C, cooler than their preferred temperature of 30 °C (come across Nature http://doi.org/bnh7; 2013). Many lab animals are as well overweight. As well as beingness bad for their welfare, there is evidence that such conditions may skew experimental results (Nature 464, xix; 2010).

This year, plans to make a synthetic homo genome were criticized when discussions between more than 100 scientists took identify behind closed doors and did non focus sufficiently on the proposal'southward ethical implications (Nature 534, 163; 2016). Some other controversy centred on the widely used HeLa jail cell line, derived in 1951 from the cervical tumour that killed an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks. But she had never consented to such use. In 2013, the prison cell-line genome was published — without permission from Lacks'south living relatives.

As the globe enters the era of genome editing, it is tempting for scientists to monopolize the upstanding fence over again. To avoid that temptation, researchers could exercise worse than turn to Keyes' astonishing Flowers for Algernon, a work that, tellingly, has never been out of print.