Medicine, inventions and the quick-fix - 8 May 1998

First came the approach of a German giant to embrace, or capture, a whole family of American book publishers. Now, another German giant gobbles up – or marries or acquires, according to view of whether this is a happy event or a disaster – an American automobile giant. And the same day, astronomers announce a titanic explosion in the outer reaches of the cosmos. The biggest bang reported since the one that's supposed to have created the universe.

One of the leading astronomers of our world, Dr John Bahcall of Princeton responded in shock, "I'm a very troubled theorist". Only several paragraphs later do we discover that this unprecedented whamp or boom occurred 12 billion years ago which must somewhat relieve the anxiety of most of us. At any rate, Dr Bahcall has some time left to get used to the knowledge of the second Big Bang.

As for the other two gobblings or acquisitions, they're so new, so unexpected that even the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the reigning wizard in all such riddles, said the other day that "the globalisation of everything is not the expansion of a trend we've been watching but a change in the fundamental structure of the financial system which we're now, only now, beginning to understand". He told an audience of international bankers that the recent economic crisis in several Asian countries is "not a mechanical failure in a process we thoroughly understand but a failure of our understanding how the system works". Well, if the people who handle our money, the debts of nations and the savings of you and me are only just beginning to understand "the structure" – Mr Greenspan's favourite word – they're working in, we'd better leave them to their lessons and descend to the smaller things we live by.

So mostly, while we're waiting for President Clinton to tell us what went on between him and that 21-year-old intern, mostly I notice that more and more in this country we seem to be seeking in the haystack of our suffocating civilisation the needle of the quick fix. I used the phrase the other week and a correspondent wonders what I meant by it. I was referring then to California's reputation for spawning new religions that will banish the blues, cure your depression and put you right with both the world and its creator in no time at all.

Today, what strikes me as happening everywhere is an urge for instant cures. Quick ways of beating death. The late, great Lewis Thomas, one of the most distinguished doctors of our time, once said that a true medical breakthrough occurs about once every twenty years, the discovery of a principle or a new theory of the way something in the body works, so that a whole range of new treatments or drugs or actions is made possible. But one of our television networks – one of our three main television networks – has a medical breakthrough about five nights a week. Why? Because news, especially visual news of a cure for anything, is great news for everybody. Because rumour of a breakthrough satisfies the deep and nagging yearning for a quick-fix solution.

I suppose the most simple example of this absurdity is news, almost any news, about vitamins. It was established, years and years ago, that you can't store up vitamins, that you need on an average, say 60mg of vitamin C, ascorbic acid, a day, which you're going to get from a host of foods. From a cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, lettuce, celery, apples, oranges or their juice, peaches, radishes, onions... and on and on. So the only people who need a supplemental pill are the extremely rare birds who touch none of these foods. "So", we used to ask, "what happens to the guy who adds a pill, a daily dose of 500mg?" And the answer use to be "nothing". He uses up his 60mg and, shall we say, flushes away the other 440. Well, no longer true! A study coming from England, a clinical study from, I believe, the University of Leicester, now warns us that an excess of vitamin C can do damage to the genes. And if that's as distant a threat to most of us as that Big Bang 12 billion years ago, there's the supplementary research done in this country which shows that, more than your normal 60mg, an excess of vitamin C can greatly help to produce kidney stones. This was a blow to the pill sellers. But not for long. They have a permanent clientele of simpletons who will always believe that, with vitamins, more is better.

So tomorrow was another day. And what did we see? The extraordinary words flashed across the screen – and this was on a reputable network – "Cancer cure?". Since there are over a hundred forms of cancer, who could possibly have discovered a cure for any of them? Well, it appeared that the drug, given in massive doses to rats, had killed a certain type of tumour. The authors of this brief, astonishing, item quickly hedged their bet by fetching on a doctor to warn us that what may work with rats may not work with humans. However, enough people must have seen this flash to have acted before any warning came in. Next morning, the price of that drug's shares on the market went up 425%. Twenty-four hours later, the warning – what worked for rats not only doesn't work for humans, but actually can hurt humans – that went out and the stock has been dropping ever since.

And then the same week, believe me, came the impotence pill. Now before we touch on that shall I say exciting subject, I ought to correct the first sentence to read "an" impotence pill because almost before you could read the news of one there was a bulletin on the ticker about another, a variation. And that brings up a truth that is the curse of all inventors.

Whether it's a new drug or a new golf club, the process seems to go as follows. Somebody gets a new idea, or two scientists working together – and remember, they can now work together every minute, even if one is in Chicago and the other in Stockholm. They eventually announce a find. Dr James Black, for instance, now Sir James Black. He eventually, 10 years ago, got the Nobel Prize for his discovery, or compounding of, the first drug said to prevent the production of stomach acid.

"Prevent", instead of doing what medicine had been doing since Hippocrates pounded aluminium and magnesium and soaked them in water, which was to counter or alkalise the acid you couldn't help producing (by the way the same prescription today for most anti-acid pills). But the new drug was called Cimetidine. Not for long! It acquired one trade name in Britain and another in the United States. In both countries it was strictly a prescription drug. Until, as usual, somebody thought of taking the original, tickling a few molecules, adding a touch of, I don't know, grenadine, chocolate syrup, whatever, and calling it something else. By which time, it's time for the original to reduce the dosage greatly and sell it over the counter.

This process is called, in sports, the art of the knock-off. Along came, very memorably only a dozen years or so ago, a gentleman whose name I cannot, I'm sorry, tell you because he's been an incomparable benefactor of the human race but to mention him would amount to an endorsement, a public act I swore decades ago never to perform. Anyway, this genius invented a metal wood for golf. How's that again? Well, the driver or number one wood we'd all used for a century or more was made of – the head of the club – persimmon. And now this man appears and says, "Try a metal head!" A metal wood? What an outrage! Every pure golfer protested. The purist one I know went on saying this till last year and now thinks that the sound of wood hitting a golf ball is a very odd sound indeed.

Well, it didn't take years for several other gents to appear and, on the basis of the original, use their kind of metal. Or a different shape. Or one with a bubble inside. Wow - this process of swiping an invention and, by the addition of this and that, making practically impossible the patenting of a true original in anything. The suits went on for years and years about who really invented electric light.

So, no sooner had the so-called developed world heard about the development of the impotence pill, the next week, next day, men were saying, "Yes! But there's a better one!" I don't know about your country but here within 24 hours of the announcement that the pill existed, doctors were writing 30,000 prescriptions a day. It didn't take long for many of them to say, "Hey, wait a minute! What's this about?" And sure enough, men, very anxious men, were rushing to the doctor who were really looking for an aphrodisiac. Well, in no time, states and cities were passing laws to require a medical declaration of positive impotence before a prescription could be filled, which amounted to advertising that you were a disabled man.

Then the word of mouth took over with the uncomfortable news that some men, maybe many men, who'd tried it had suffered apart from thundering headaches other unpleasant side effects. So, as suddenly as it flared up, the excitement about the so-called impotence pill seems to have died down.

Once the naiveté of many, perhaps most, men, had been disclosed who'd gone rushing off for the pill looking, as they had been doing for millennia, for a sure aphrodisiac, we were really back in school whispering about Spanish fly. And pretty soon we were back to the sad, age-old knowledge that there are only two genuine aphrodisiacs: youth and boredom.