Has Anyone Else Read Crichton's "Terminal Man?"

Trying brain pacemakers to zap psychiatric disease

WASHINGTON – Call them brain pacemakers, tiny implants that hold promise for fighting tough psychiatric diseases — if scientists can figure out just where in all that gray matter to put them.

Deep brain stimulation, or DBS, has proved a powerful way to block the tremors of Parkinson's disease. Blocking mental illness isn't nearly as easy a task.

But a push is on to expand research into how well these brain stimulators tackle the most severe cases of depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette's syndrome — to know best how to use them before too many doctors and patients clamor to try.

Michael Crichton was a visionary science fiction author whose message was "be careful what you mess with."

I am not in any way saying this research is dangerous, but I am pretty impressed by the man's vision in a book written decades ago.

Then again, there is a team in Russia working on cloning a Woolly Mammoth. Maybe not from DNA extracted from a mosquito, but still...

We live in interesting times where we can catch up with science fiction in our lifetimes.