"Bruce Sterling - Our Neural Chernobyl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

provide the mammalian brain with its staggering webbed
complexity. It was theorized at the time that DG factor
might be the key to vastly higher states of human
intelligence. It is to be presumed that both Berenbaum
and Ravetch had dosed themselves with it. As many
modern victims of the neural chernobyl can testify, it
does have an effect. Not precisely the one that the
CoCoGenCo zealots envisioned, however.
While under the temporary maddening elation of
dendritic "branch-effect," Berenbaum made his
unfortunate breakthrough. He succeeded in providing his
model RNA transcriptase with a trigger, but a trigger that
made the transcriptase itself far more virulent than the
original AIDS virus itself. The stage was set for disaster.
It was at this point that one must remember the social
attitudes that bred the soul-threatening isolation of the
period's scientific workers. Dr. Hotton is quite pitiless in
his psychoanalysis of the mental mind-set of his
predecessors. The supposedly "objective worldview" of
the sciences is now quite properly seen as a form of
mental brainwashing, deliberately stripping the victim of
the full spectrum of human emotional response. Under
such conditions, Berenbaum's reckless act becomes
almost pitiable; it was a convulsive overcompensation for
years of emotional starvation. Without consulting his
superiors, who might have shown more discretion,
Berenbaum began offering free samples of his new
wetwares to anyone willing to inject them.
There was a sudden brief plague of eccentric genius
in Raleigh, before the now-well-known symptoms of
"dendritic crash" took over, and plunged the
experimenters into vision-riddled, poetic insanity.
Berenbaum himself committed suicide well before the
full effects were known. And the full effects, of course,
were to go far beyond even this lamentable human
tragedy.
Chapter 4 becomes an enthralling detective story as
the evidence slowly mounts.
Even today the term "Raleigh collie" has a special
ring for dog fanciers, many of whom have forgotten its
original derivation. These likable, companionable, and
disquietingly intelligent pets were soon transported all
over the nation by eager buyers and breeders. Once it had
made the jump from human host to canine, Berenbaurn's
transcriptase derivative, like the AIDS virus itself, was
passed on through the canine maternal womb. It was also
transmitted through canine sexual intercourse and, via
saliva, through biting and licking.
No dendritically enriched "Raleigh collie" would
think of biting a human being. On the contrary, these