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Ape and Essence Depression Can Have Many Causes COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS companies quickly followed with their own SSRIs. It seemed to be the revolution psychiatrists had been waiting for. But it IN RETROSPECT soon emerged that only a modest subset of patients benefited (estimates based on trials vary widely). That is unsurprising in retrospect, with the new appreciation that Ape and Essence depression can have many causes. Bull- more holds that the emergence of SSRIs Richard Rhodes finds resonance with today’s uneasy bypassed scientific logic. The serotonin theory, he writes, is as “unsatisfactory as nuclear age in Aldous Huxley’s satirical dystopia. the Freudian theory of unquantifiable libido or the Hippocratic theory of non- existent black bile”. He notes that, after he atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Ape and Essence The prolific novelist SSRIs failed to live up to the hype, time Nagasaki in August 1945 shocked the ALDOUS HUXLEY and essayist had once again stood still for psychiatry. world. More than 70 years on, these Harper & Brothers been formulating his (1948) Bullmore recalls a tele conference in Tevents have not been repeated — evidence thoughts on the bomb 2010, when he was working part-time that it was the United States’ temporary since the end of the with British nuclear monopoly that made them possible. war. In 1947, Huxley published the extended pharmaceutical “After SSRIs Yet few observers in the immediate postwar essay ‘Science, Liberty, and Peace’, a prelude giant Glaxo- failed to live up years foresaw the development of an uneasy to the novel. There, he wrote that the power- SmithKline. to the hype, time nuclear truce, enforced by the certainty of hungry and nationalistic “boy-gangster” in During the call, mutual destruction. Fears of an arms race us all would easily prevail over the reason- the company stood still for culminating in nuclear war were widespread. able adult, exulting: “Press a few buttons and announced it psychiatry.” Such fears have now re-emerged, with North bang! the war to end war will be over, and I was pulling out Korea’s burgeoning arsenal and the United shall be the boss of the whole planet.” Huxley of psychiatry research because no new States’ abrogation of its agreement with Iran. knew better. If more than one nation had ideas were emerging. In the following J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the such weaponry, he believed, the outcome of years, almost all of ‘big pharma’ aban- development of the first bombs, was among “the war to end war” would be world-scale doned mental health. those who feared nuclear conflict, and worked destruction. And because that would be a Then a window seemed to open — one for international control after the Second kind of singularity, it seemed to him that that shed a different light on the plight of World War. Physicist Richard Feynman almost anything might follow. Mrs P. Some of the textbook certainty that (whom I interviewed for my 1987 book The Ape and Essence is Huxley’s imagining of a Bullmore had learnt by rote at medical Making of the Atomic Bomb) recalled sitting post-nuclear world. The title is from William school started to look distinctly uncertain. in a bar in New York in 1946, watching the Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: Isabella In particular, the blood–brain barrier crowd passing outside and thinking: “You speaks of the proud man’s “glassy essence, turned out to be less impenetrable than poor fools, you have no idea that in a few like an angry ape”, which “plays such fantas- assumed. A range of research showed that more years you’ll all be dead.” Aldous Huxley tic tricks before high heaven/As make the proteins in the body could reach the brain. seems to have leapt to the same conclusion in angels weep.” The angels have flown in Hux- These included inflammatory proteins his hybrid novel and film scenario Ape and ley’s novel, set in what remains of Los Angeles, called cytokines that were churned out in Essence, published 70 years ago. California, in 2108 — a century after a third times of infection by immune cells called world war, which would have taken place macrophages. Bullmore pulls together around now, in Huxley’s fictional timeline. evidence that this echo of inflammation In one of the book’s set pieces, intelligent in the brain can be linked to depression. baboons fight this twenty-first-century war, That, he argues, should inspire pharma- with scientific luminaries (Michael Faraday ceutical companies to return to psychiatry. and two opposing Albert Einsteins) as leashed It seems unfair that someone struck mascots. So much for scientists, Huxley FOTOSTOCK/ALAMY AGE down by infection should have depression insinuates — “good, well-meaning men, for too. Is there a feasible evolutionary expla- the most part. But ... they ceased to be human nation? Bullmore hazards that depression beings and became specialists.” Of the two would discourage ill individuals from opposing cultures described by scientist and socializing and spreading an infection that novelist C. P. Snow in 1959, Huxley was clearly might otherwise wipe out a tribe. on the side of the humanities, as if locked in Other brain disorders might turn out to debate with his distinguished scientific kin — be prompted or promoted by inflamma- his biologist brother Julian, physiologist half- tion. An exciting link with neurodegen- brother Andrew and zoologist grandfather erative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Thomas Henry, known as Darwin’s bulldog. is also being studied (see Nature 556, Having introduced the baboons, Huxley 426–428; 2018). But we need to learn kills them off: it’s a second false start to the from the rollercoaster history of brain novel’s stuttering story, a metafictional con- research, and keep expectations in check. coction as multilayered as an onion. The first Beneath his bombastic enthusiasm, Bull- storyline sees two screenwriters tracking more acknowledges this, too. ■ down a legendary colleague, only to find him dead. The deceased’s abandoned screenplay Alison Abbott is Nature’s senior (I suspect one of Huxley’s own unsold efforts, European correspondent. Aldous Huxley in the 1950s. repackaged) is the book’s centrepiece. It is 634 | NATURE | VOL 557 | 31 MAY© 20182018 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. ©2018 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT here that the baboons rise and fall. The script then moves on to an improbable love story set in the world of an irradiated rump of humans Books in brief who survived the war but have forgotten how to make things. They live by scavenging left- The X Club overs from the pre-war days, burning books Ruth Barton UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS (2018) for heat and assigning crews to rob old graves For decades in the late 1800s, nine scientific luminaries of suits and jewellery. Eunuch priests of the (among them biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and botanist devil-figure Belial squat at the top of the caste Joseph Dalton Hooker) dined together as members of the ‘X Club’. system in this stunted world, dominating a This socio-economically diverse group, formed in part to promote society of near-slaves. Charles Darwin’s achievements, is a telling case study in the Ape and Essence parallels Huxley’s 1932 dynamics of Victorian class and science. Historian Ruth Barton’s Brave New World (see P. Ball Nature 503, 338– magisterial chronicle traces the careers of the “X-men” and their 339; 2013), yet offers an even darker vision. A agile promotion of science; Huxley, in particular, emerges vividly as young botanist, Alfred Poole, has arrived by wily, belligerent, and obstructive to women entering science. ship from New Zealand, which survived the atomic war and is now exploring what’s left of the world. So, as with Brave New World’s Sav- Fallout age, a Candide-like hero appears from outside Fred Pearce BEACON (2018) society and finds himself appalled. And what Science writer Fred Pearce casts a cool and measured eye on an appals both heroes is the indiscriminate sex- explosive legacy: the atomic age. Launched by Winston Churchill’s uality that the society’s leaders encourage to nuclear ambitions (realized by the US Manhattan Project), this replace family and human love. era lingers on in plutonium stockpiles, arsenals and ageing power The twist this time, as Huxley wrote to his plants. Pearce roams with intent from Sellafield, “Britain’s brooding fellow screenwriter Anita Loos, is that “the nuclear nightmare”, to radioactive steppes in Kazakhstan, blighted chief effect of the gamma radiations [has] by 619 atomic tests in the 1950s. His nuanced conclusion is that, been to produce a race of men and women together, alarmist protestors and a secretive nuclear industry create a who don’t make love all the year round, but different sort of fallout: the spread of disinformation and fear. have a brief mating season”. This manifests as mass gropings; any progeny deemed too monstrous, the result of radiation-damaged Randomistas genes, are then slaughtered on Belial Eve. Andrew Leigh YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS (2018) (Huxley probably knew that Hermann Muller Randomized testing, economist Andrew Leigh reminds us, has had received a Nobel prize in 1946 for the dis- vanquished scurvy, improved wildfire response — and proved key to covery that X-rays can cause mutations.) The better feedback loops in medicine and crime prevention. The trove of ceremony, called the Purification of the Race, case studies in his insightful study includes the 1960s Perry Preschool mimics the blood sacrifices of the Aztecs. It Project, which exposed the long-term positive impact of early also alludes to eugenics, the British–Ameri- education among African American children living in poverty.
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