The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

Of course, a true-bred science-fiction writer would have done it differently; the cancer cell’s consciousness would have been based on the latest RNA-DNA “cell-imprinting” theories, and there wouldn’t have been any flying over rooftops: perhaps an adventurous infiltration of the circulatory system instead.

The point is that the near-incredible breakthroughs in medicine and biochemistry this past decade have once again opened the whole area to unlimited speculation. Who is to say, with any certainty, that individual cells (“normal” or otherwise) do not possess “consciousness,” if they have—as they seem to—a structure for “memory”? How do we determine the “good” or “bad” nature of “drugs”, when the same products are adduced as cures for mental disorders and as causes of psychotic breakdowns? What tests can determine accurately whether the disease or the cure (or both or neither) are psychogenic, when solid evidence is produced for apparent “faith healings”? Whose testimony is more valid in the case of a drug like Krebiozen: the positive claims of those who have used it, without scientific tests or control? Or the laboratory-pure negative report of the Food and Drug Administration—negative in two senses, since it says in effect only what was not found in the product?

The FDA has become supercautious: DMSO—dimethyl sulfoxide —is still not released for any but experimental use. Many ordinary citizens have become wildly experimental (“Here, try my pills!”). The laws governing narcotics are hopelessly confused, and apparently as hopeless to enforce.

Once upon a time, common sense could distinguish between cures and quackery; but then, we used to think charlatans and miracle-makers were identical in the twentieth century.