we are told, insisting on a short and intense rest period in the afternoon that recharged their batteries and invigorated their minds. I once sat on a train with Pierre-Yves Gerbeau, the French businessman who had been asked by Tony Blair to rescue the Millennium Dome project. As the Eurostar sped through the Pas-de-Calais, his aides informed me that PY would now take a nap. With that, M. Gerbeau closed his eyes and sat trance-like in his seat. After precisely ten minutes he opened his eyes once more and continued the conversation, apparently refreshed. It was hard not to be impressed.
The French have had quite an influence on our thinking about sleep. The geophysicist Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan was the first to discover circadian rhythms in 1729. In the 1950s and 60s, the neurobiologist Michel Jouvet led the way on sleep research, organising the first international symposium on the subject in France in 1963. He is likely to be remembered, though, for events twenty-five years later when he was the director of a laboratory at the pharmaceutical firm Group Lafon. There he made a breakthrough hailed as a great French discovery, a drug that promised to give us greater mastery over sleep than ever before.
Professor Jouvet had adapted an anti-depressant to make a pill, he said, which did away with the need for rest. He took it himself to test its properties and claimed it made him super-productive without any apparent side effects. His baccalaureate students also tried the new drug and were said to have seen a marked improvement in their capacity for revision, able to stay awake for sixty hours at a stretch with little or no decline in their cognitive performance. What made Modafinil such an advance on previous stimulants, though, was that it caused virtually no noticeable rebound. Users didn’t need to make up for lost sleep.
The potential of the drug was quickly recognised, not least by the military. At an international defence meeting in Paris, Professor Jouvet told generals that Modafinil could keep an army on its feet and fighting for three days and nights with no major side effects. The Pentagon was all ears. A $3 billion programme to develop a ‘Metabolically Dominant Soldier’ was already investigating how to keep US troops in combat for long periods without sleep. It had, for instance, been researching how dolphins manage to send half of their brain to sleep at a time with the hope, presumably, that soldiers might learn to do the same. Now, it was suggested, the answer wasn’t in Flipper. It was in France.
British forces were equally intrigued. The Ministry of Defence paid the military technology company Qinetiq to investigate the potential of Modafinil, sold in the UK under the name Provigil. Large orders were placed for tablets just before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2002. The MoD denied the drugs were being tested on soldiers, but Qinetiq scientist Dr Anna Casey told a committee of MPs in 2005 that ‘one is always looking for something that would give military personnel an extra edge.’ Modafinil, she confirmed, had been ‘shown to enhance physical and mental performance’.
The official line from British defence chiefs was that the pills were purchased for legitimate clinical reasons, prescribed to soldiers suffering from narcolepsy or sleep apnoea, but word was spreading that scientists had come up with a wonder drug. High-powered city traders were among the first to bring supplies to the UK, eager to exploit a product that meant they could operate at full throttle on just a couple of hours’ sleep a night.
Students too were quick to spot the potential benefits. The University of York student website ran interviews with Modafinil users in 2009. ‘In a typical Modafinil-fuelled night, I take the drug with dinner, go to the pub with my friends and maybe watch a film, before getting in at around 1am and working for another eight hours. It’s a productive way of living; it lets me be sociable and academic at the same time,’ said Tim. Charles explained the effects. ‘People talk about the Modafinil buzz, but there’s no high in the traditional sense. I was able to concentrate more easily, like my memory was improved. I could stay awake all night and do nothing but work without getting bored. I wasn’t “high” so much as “enhanced”.’
There were side effects, of course: fever, sore throat and nausea. A few users developed potentially fatal skin diseases and the manufacturers were obliged to update the label to include warnings of the possibility of developing Stevens-Johnson Syndrome or toxic epidermal necrolysis. No one could yet know the long-term effects of use. But it did appear that science had stumbled upon a relatively safe answer to an ancient puzzle. Modafinil, though, also posed a new question: how will humanity use its power over sleep?
My guess is that, in this country at least, a sleepless world would sound too much like a restless world — a relentless environment in which ‘Metabolically Dominant Citizens’ forget the guilty pleasure of a quiet doze in a deckchair or forty winks while pretending to watch the cricket. Britain may worry about being seen to have too much or too little of the stuff, but we have got enough to keep us awake at night without taking on the responsibilities of the great god Hypnos. And so to bed. Zzzz.
FURTHER READING
A is for Alcohol
1. C. MacAndrew and R. B. Edgerton,
2. R. Martinez and L. Martin, ‘Patrones de consume de alcohol en la comunidad de Madrid’,
3. Social Issues Research Group,
4. G. A. Marlatt, B. Demming and J. B. Reid, ‘Loss of control drinking in alcoholics: an experimental analogue’
5. M. Hough,
6. D. B. Heath, ‘Flawed policies from flawed premises: pseudo-science about alcohol and drugs’, in R. C. Engs (ed.),
B is for Bobbies
1. History of the Metropolitan Police, www.met.police.uk
2. R. V. G. Clarke and M. Hough,
3. M. Davis, ‘Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space’ in M. Sorkin (ed.),
4. G. Kelling, A. Pate, D. Dieckman and C. Brown,
C is for Cheese
1. M. Thatcher, Speech at Franco-British Council Dinner, 16 May 1982, www.margaretthatcher.org
2. D. B. Grigg,
3. Anthony Woodward, ‘Design Dinosaurs: 11: Lymeswold’,
4. Sir Stephen Roberts obituary,
5.
