Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody

resembling man-monster demographic either. Se-Jin Lee, one of the professors at Johns Hopkins University responsible for this discovery, states that every major pharmaceutical company is working on a myostatin blocker for treatment of diseases like muscular dystrophy.

If it’s already being tested medicinally, the demands of the free market (read: anybody who wants totally kickin’ abs for doing absolutely nothing, which, by last count, is everybody) dictate that it will soon be available for more casual usage as well, within just a few years by some estimates.

Sure, zombie drugs may be disturbing, but consider the side effects of some already available pharmaceuticals:

• Sleep sex (Ambien)

• Impulse gambling (Mirapex)

• Necrotic flesh (Provigil)

• Old-guy boners (Cialis)

If strength doesn’t appeal to you, what about stamina? There are biotech endurance enhancements in the works as well: Scientists at Case Western Reserve University genetically altered mouse embryos to limit the muscle response for burst-style energy. The effect of this was the lessened potential for energy spurts, but massively increased endurance. Some other little side effects were seen, like insatiable hunger, tripled life span, and a tremendously increased libido, along with a “very, very aggressive nature.” In other words, these are furious, untiring, and horny-as-hell mice… possessing a ravenous, unnatural hunger. The researchers, as they did with VEGF, EPO, and MK-667, freely admit that there is also the potential for abuse of this as a performance enhancer in humans, but they do strongly warn that these same potential side effects might affect humans the same as they do mice. So maybe take a rain check on that workout in a pill for now—side effects may be nausea, headache, stiff joints, endless rage, consuming lust, insatiable hunger, and other such general fucking zombification.

So there are zombie pills! Wonderful! But surely you didn’t think that was all?!

No! There’s even more! Science is clinically retarded for deals!

You’ve heard the phrase “in the zone”? The mental, spiritual, and physical state where you feel you can simply do no wrong—from shooting a fine game of pool to breaking world records—being in the zone is the common moniker for what scientists refer to as a “flow state,” a feeling resulting from a dopamine surge accompanied by a few neurochemicals, such as serotonin and norepinephrine, which generally serves to decrease reaction time, and even alter our perception of time itself.

That’s in a pill, too: You’ll be able to be “in the zone” within the decade just by popping some anandamide analogues. Anandamide, first identified back in 2004 by Georgia Tech neuroscientist Arne Dietrich, is the chemical responsible for triggering these flow-state highs and, as you’ve probably learned by now, pretty much any naturally occurring response in the human body can and will be manipulated by science like preteen girls by the Disney Corporation. Picture it: A generation of entirely average people doping up on “in the zone” prescriptions—flipping channels with the mental acuity of a crack athlete, every click executed so perfectly it’s like they’ve stolen God’s fingers. That’s… probably the most that will happen, actually, because human nature doesn’t change. Just taking this drug doesn’t mean you’ll automatically assume an active lifestyle. Why limit the feeling to the athletically gifted, when everybody wants to feel like they’re the best at something—even if that “something” is just the Hundred-Ounce Pee Break or the Triple-Digit Channel Change?

So we’ve established that there are real projects already under way with proven results that give humans everything from effort-free workouts to improved mental faculties. With kickin’ abs, endless stamina, mental acuity, and nigh-spiritual flow states available in pill form in under a decade, it’s not a matter of if you introduce biotech to your system, but how much you can afford and how awesome you want to be that day.

When you consider that we’re the generation that bought the Thighmaster and the Ab Cruncher, it’s safe to say we’ll probably make some room in the budget for buff-untiring-genius-time-manipulator-in-a-pill. And that’s how it starts; the massive incentive for biotech makes it a household name. Soon you won’t think anything of modifying your genetics on the fly, and biotech will be everywhere.

16. BIOTECH CONTAGION

AH, BUT NOW COMES the downside: The contagion period. For nearly every experiment with beneficial discoveries, there’s one with horrific, lethal mistakes. These advances aren’t coming out of thin air; they’re developed in lab animals—mice, for the most part. The beneficial drugs are tested, tweaked, and refined in lab animals, and then, if approved, eventually synthesized for humans. Supposedly, this method ensures that there’s no danger of something unintended crossing over to us from the labs, because the mice and other animals used for experiments are somewhat genetically isolated from us. Even if we do accidentally unleash a plague in the pursuit of the betterment of man, it’ll just wipe out some lab rats with nary a vegan to even shed a tear. But for any failed experiments to actually pose any danger to humanity there would have to be more common genetic markers between the lab animals used in these early testing stages and the common man. Like, say, if mice could shoot human ejaculate or something equally horrifying.

Oh wait, they already do exactly that. Surprise! Science hates you.

If Science Doesn’t Hate You, Explain:

• Styrofoam

• The atom bomb

• Roughly 70 percent of this book

This, shall we say, sticky situation (and we probably shouldn’t) all started with researchers at the universities of Pennsylvania and California, who initially just managed to provoke mice into growing viable monkey sperm. While “provoking mice into growing monkey sperm” brings to mind some rather disturbing images of furious primates and sexually antagonized mice, it was all pretty innocent. Perhaps they just wanted to give the internet even more bizarre pornography, or perhaps they were just out to instill some confusing urges in horny rodents for the sake of comedy, but most likely the scientists were hoping to help endangered species by synthesizing sperm on a large scale. That’s what their proposal states is the ultimate goal, anyway, and why lie about something that embarrassing? If it wasn’t true, a more flattering lie than “Professional Rat Molester” should have been easy to come by. So while the researchers in Pennsylvania may have started all of this, it was Canadian researchers hot on their tails (which takes on a rather gross subtext in this instance) who took the concept even further, instilling the ability to produce human proteins in mouse sperm. The Canadian mice now ejaculate human growth hormone—a fact that cannot be doing the tourism industry any favors.

Great Suggestions for New Canadian Mottos

• “Come to Canada, where politeness is a prerequisite!”

• “Visit Canada, we have the Internet now!”

• “Vacation in Canada, our mice cum like people!”

To create this monstrous hybrid of mad science and pornography, the researchers first started by targeting a DNA sequence present only in male sex glands. Once the gene responsible for sperm production was identified, they just spliced in a sequence responsible for human growth hormone… and that was it! Apparently nature’s pretty flexible about this shit. You want mice to come like people?

No problem, says nature!