Long before there was a science of chemistry, humans experimented with chemical substances that can influence the functioning of the human body. There has long been a chemical war going on between different organisms, so some plants make poisons that can bind to receptors in the human body. Due to the high affinity of binding between poison and receptor, small amounts of poisons can have powerful effects. Similarly, the human body has an immune system that can respond to the presence of invading organisms. Vaccines can be created that contain chemical components of bacteria and viruses or biologically crippled versions of microbes and the body's receptor-mediated responses to the vaccine will confer protection to any later exposure to the pathogenic microbe.
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cryo-electron microscopy (source)
poliovirus-receptor-membrane complex |
I first became aware of such receptor-mediated physiological effects back in the early 1960s when I witnessed a large-scale community vaccination against polio. I had no idea what was happening, but I saw many people lined up and we all drank a small amount of liquid containing an attenuated polio virus. This was an effective vaccination strategy because the non-lethal virus that we put into our bodies bound to receptors on the cells of our gastrointestinal tracts, allowing efficient virus entry and virus proliferation. Our bodies first became virus factories then our bodies made antibodies against the virus proteins. With the help of such vaccinations, polio has been
eradicated from most of the world.
Before there was a scientific understanding of drug-receptor interactions, the potent effects of some chemicals on the human body was fodder for speculative fiction story writers (
see). They were forced to depict the actions of drugs as some kind of magical mystery.
Wizardry
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Witchcraft: magical sleep-inducing chemicals.
illustration by Charles Santore |
In the early 1960s, I also saw
The Wizard of Oz on television (in black and white). For L. Frank Baum's book,
The Wizard of Oz, he imagined a potent magical effect of chemical vapors from
poppy plants. That magic could put animals (including humans) to sleep. Lucky for Dorothy, her
artificial lifeform companions were not susceptible to the chemical released from the poppies, presumably a potent opioid that can activate the
opioid receptors that are in brains.
Fictional Chemistry
I began my 2018 retro-reading with an old story about
fictional chemistry and I want to extend the exploration of that theme here in this blog post. I'm intrigued by the idea that my favorite
science fiction story tellers such as
Isaac Asimov got ideas for their fiction from the stories that they read when they were young. For example, in 1929
Science Wonder Quarterly published a story called "The Artificial Man" by
Clare Winger Harris. Asimov had gotten permission from his father to read the pulp magazines that had the word "science" on their covers because "they must be educational".
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| Edgar Hamilton at work in the chem lab. |
Asimov went on to earn a Ph.D. and become a professor of biochemistry. He is famous for his thoughtful stories about "artificial men" (
robots) that were constrained by the
Three Laws of Robotics. In "The Artificial Man" by Harris, the titular artificial man is an actual man who suffers injury and dismemberment and so he has body parts replaced by prosthetics. Sadly, this bionic man had no restraints on his behavior and he became an evil-doer.
The Diabolical Drug
Published just before "The Artificial Man" was another story by Harris, "
The Diabolical Drug" (you can download the
Amazing Stories, May 1929 issue from
here). The story provides an account of chemist Edgar Hamilton's research on
anesthetics (Harris used the British spelling "anaesthetics").
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| Deela the Scalosian |
Edgar has girl trouble. His beloved Ellen is 32 and Edgar is only 26. Because of their age difference, Ellen ignores Edgar's proclamation of his great love for her. Rejected by Ellen, Edgar spends all his time working in the lab.
Timewarp
Everything changes when Edgar makes a revolutionary discovery, which he modestly describes as "the most wonderful potion ever concocted by the hand of man". Edgar's great chemistry discovery has gone a step beyond what conventional anesthetics do. As Edgar explains triumphantly to Ellen, anesthetics weaken the signals sent along
axons, but he now has found a chemical that almost completely "decreases nervous energy expenditure" and in so doing, slows the rate of aging to a crawl. Excitedly climaxing right in front of Ellen, he explains that all they need do is inject some of his potion into Ellen. She will stop aging at a normal rate, allowing Edgar to "catch up" and then they can get hitched and live happily ever after. What could go wrong? Ellen has no skepticism and she gushes, "What a wonderful man you are to have figured out so marvelous a plan!"
As soon as Edgar injects the magic (Harris never provides anything close to a scientific justification for what happens) potion into Ellen, she stops moving normally and, in fact, is now living in slow motion. When she speaks, her voice sounds like a dull rumbling noise. And, from Ellen's perspective, everyone else in the world is now moving supper fast, like
Scalosians. So, the drug is "working", but Edgar can't stand the sight of his girl moving so slowly. It gives him the creeps.
So, of course, Edgar goes back to the lab and immediately works to concoct an antidote that will undo the damage that his first drug did to Ellen. Rather than simply find an antidote, Edgar designs a new chemical that has an effect that is the opposite of the first drug: this second drug
accelerates you like a Scalosian. Now, Edgar is not a
complete dolt, so having learned a lesson from Ellen's horrific deceleration, he cleverly tests his second drug on a cat. After being injected with the new drug, the poor cat moves so fast that it bursts into flames from friction with the air.
Undaunted by the incineration of his cat, Edgar injects himself with a tiny dose of the new drug. After having been accelerated by this new drug, from his perspective, everyone else in the world is now moving very slowly. His new plan is working: by aging quickly, he will catch up with Ellen and shorten the time that she must spend stuck in slow motion. Then bad news arrives. Ellen has come down with the measles and due to her decelerated state, the doctor believes she will have the disease for the next five years. Edgar can't stand the thought of that, so he injects himself with a walloping dose of the acceleration drug. What could go wrong?
Such a large dose of the drug has an unexpected effect on Edgar. He shrinks to the size of a sub-atomic particle. All is not lost, because at this tiny scale, there is an entire world populated by sub-atomic-scale people. Edgar has a merry adventure living among these "Lilliputians", including finding a new girl, Yana, and raising a family. This entire interlude takes place (at sub-atomic scale) somewhere on the floor of his laboratory in a place called "Luntin".
Edgar learns to speak the local language of Luntin and eventually he is able to make some of the deceleration chemical. Injecting it into his grandson and himself, they return to the normal size of humans and are again moving at the normal speed for humans.
Edgar (now an old man) injects Ellen with some of the acceleration drug and that returns her to normal speed. Happily, Ellen and Edgar's grandson are the same age and they live together in wedded bliss. Poor Edgar, after telling his tale of living in Luntin, ends up in an insane asylum.
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editorial blurb for "The Diabolical Drug" ( with no
mention of the drug) click image to enlarge |
As is typical for such "superscience stories", Edgar's great scientific breakthrough (the diabolical drug) is never mentioned again (not even by the editor) and is added to the waste heap of fictional scientific discoveries. Even though science got short shrift, Harris wrote "The Diabolical Drug" with a large number of exclamation points, just so that readers were aware of the fact that they were reading a wonderful action-packed adventure story.
In 1947, several stories by Harris (including "The Diabolical Drug") were bundled together and sold in book form as "
Away from the Here and Now". The cover of that book carried the subtitle: "Stories in Pseudo-Science".
It boggles my mind to imagine a young Isaac Asimov growing up and reading stories like "The Diabolical Drug" and "The Artificial Man". However, he went on to not only become a scientist but also to craft science fiction stories that brought an air of greater scientific plausibility to old fantasy themes such as time travel and artificial life.
I'm intrigued by old stories that explored the idea of the very small. In the
Exode Saga, I imagine very small artificial lifeforms that are composed of
hierions. For Harris to imagine a chemical that would shrink a man to the size of
femtobots is amazing.
I wonder if Isaac Asimov was influenced by "The Diabolical Drug" when he made his time travel story,
The End of Eternity. Asimov imagined a kind of space-time bubble (called "
Eternity") that existed outside of the normal flow of time. The sub-atomic scale civilization in Luntin reminds me of Asimov's Eternity as a place that people can travel to and from.
Related Viewing: Arthur Clarke speeds things up
in "
All the Time in the World".
Related Reading:
Out of the Sub-universe
One Pill Makes You Smaller
The Girl in the Golden Atom
Next: "
The Black Flame"
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