A new series on the regrets I have when looking back on my life now as it draws towards its end.
I sometimes regret that I studied chemistry and not microbiology. I spent a great deal of my life trying to make a better, kinder, more aware world. ‘Better living through the power of chemistry’, as the old Dupont advertising slogan put it. Along with the pioneering acid chemist, Tim Scully, I believed that psychedelics, especially LSD were, as he put it,
“A way of communicating by natural knowing to people the delicateness of our environment, a sense of the worth and value of other human beings, the need for being gentle both with the environment and each other.”
It seemed to me, as it did to many others at that time and since, that if we could only get enough psychedelics out there then the earthly paradise we knew this world could be would come about almost spontaneously as people were transformed from the inside. I got a fair way towards my aim, given the fact that it had to done clandestinely and that governments all over the world were devoting vast resources and spending billions trying to stop me, before the arrogance and stupidity of those I recruited to help my cause ended my project. I ended up paying a very heavy price for selflessly trying to save humanity from itself. Oh, well, as the saying goes, ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’
Having grown a lot older and more experienced (if not wiser), I now recognise the futility, the hopeless idealism and self-deception behind that sort of thinking. People are ghastly, stupid, cruel and selfish, and except for brief moments of decency, always will be. They are beyond any redemption short of a miracle, and we know they don’t exist. In fact, I came to see that humans are a ghastly plague upon the planet, which would be a much, much better place without them. As the King of Brobdingnag says to Gulliver,
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
So my thoughts turned from making and distributing the liberating, enlightening chemicals to the lethal ones. But it soon became obvious that, while synthesising enough poison to kill off the vast majority, if not all, of the population (dioxin would do it – a few kilograms is all you’d need) would be possible and not vastly more difficult than making that other very biologically potent chemical LSD, distributing it posed insuperable practical difficulties.
The solution was obvious and came after very little thought. To achieve my aim I would need to employ self-replicating agents capable of reproducing and spreading across the globe. A virus or bacterium, then. It would need to be 100% (or very nearly) lethal, extremely contagious, and have a long latency, i.e. at least a month and preferably several, between infection and symptoms should be enough to ensure that it got everywhere in this age of cheap rapid air travel. Seeing as how SARS-CoV-2 got from Wuhan to isolated tribespeople in the Amazon rainforest in only a few months, and that was by accident, then my project seems practicable. It shouldn’t cost too much, I reckon you could do it for around the cost of a top of the range Bentley or two – certainly nothing like the cost of a new jet fighter. Given the incredible advances in genetic engineering techniques, unthinkable when I was at university, I don’t think producing such a vector should pose too many technical difficulties. If only I knew then what I know now!
Alas, my problem, and hence my regret, is that I simply do not have the time (half a dozen years at least, I’d reckon) or the financial resources to undertake the necessary learning. And, quite frankly, my old brain may no longer have the intellectual wherewithal to acquire the knowledge and skills. So my regret, which I think you should share, is that I studied chemistry and not microbiology.