The flip side of the steroid scandal in baseball is last week's announcement of the first cloned dog. Ballplayers are punished for using pharmaceutical technologies to improve their physical abilities, while scientists are rewarded for pushing toward a similar goal — in the words of artificial intelligence techno-visionary Ray Kurzweil, "reverse engineering our biology and then reprogramming it."

Biological engineering is not just about curing disease anymore. The incentives and profits are moving toward drugs, gene therapies and other technologies to enhance human performance — memory, creativity, concentration, strength, endurance, longevity. Asking athletes not to partake of these advances is not just hypocritical, it's likely to be increasingly futile.

Recently, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America recently gave its imprimatur to a new buzzword: Generation Rx. Its annual report on what Americans think of controlled substances showed that for the first time, more teenagers are abusing prescription painkillers than are using a variety of common illicit drugs.

What are these prescription drugs being used for? Some of them mimic the effects of street drugs. For instance, the pain reliever Oxycontin, when stripped of its coating, can produce a heroinlike high. The consequences of this kind of abuse are familiar. Antidrug advocates have warned for decades that drugs impair not only users' health but also their work. Drug-induced torpor even earned its own name: amotivational syndrome. Timothy Leary's flameout on the Harvard fast track probably frightened more middle-class parents than the warnings of J. Edgar Hoover.

But there is an aspect of prescription drug abuse mentioned only briefly in the report: ingesting to excel, not rebel. There's now a hypermotivational syndrome, use of prescription drugs not to escape the commanding heights of education and the economy but to attain them.

A new class of drug may increase alertness without any of the jitteriness of over-stimulation, suggest the results of a small clinical trial released this week.

A compound dubbed CX717, a member of the new class called ampakines, significantly improved performance on tests of memory, attention, alertness, reaction time and problem solving in healthy men deprived of sleep.

The study was carried out by Julia Boyle at the Sleep Research Centre at the University of Surrey, UK, and her colleagues on behalf of Cortex Pharmaceuticals Inc., based in Irvine, California, US.

It would be hard to imagine improving on the intelligence of computer engineer Bjoern Stenger, a doctoral candidate at Cambridge University. Yet for several hours, a pill seemed to make him even brainier.

Participating in a research project, Stenger downed a green gelatin cap containing a drug called modafinil. Within an hour, his attention sharpened. So did his memory. He aced a series of mental-agility tests. If his brainpower would normally rate a 10, the drug raised it to 15, he said.

"I was quite focused," said Stenger. "It was also kind of fun."

The age of smart drugs is dawning. Modafinil is just one in an array of brain-boosting medications — some already on pharmacy shelves and others in development — that promise an era of sharper thinking through chemistry.

These drugs may change the way we think. And by doing so, they may change who we are.

Long-haul truckers and Air Force pilots have long popped amphetamines to ward off drowsiness. Generations of college students have swallowed over-the-counter caffeine tablets to get through all-nighters. But such stimulants provide only a temporary edge, and their effect is broad and blunt — they boost the brain by juicing the entire nervous system.

The new mind-enhancing drugs, in contrast, hold the potential for more powerful, more targeted and more lasting improvements in mental acuity. Some of the most promising have reached the stage of testing in human subjects and could become available in the next decade, brain scientists say.

Thirty years from now, the uproar surrounding Barry Bonds' alleged steroid use might seem quaint by comparison to the human enhancement technologies that could be available then.

In the next few decades, futurists say, athletes and soldiers will call on artificial muscles to lift heavier loads and run faster. Bionic eyes will let them see distant targets, while "nanobots" enhance their cognitive abilities and genetic-engineering techniques boost their performance under pressure.

"The use of anabolic steroids, in retrospect, will seem almost prehistoric — as well as stupid," said Jerome C. Glenn, executive director of the American Council for the United Nations University (Washington) and co-author of the book 2004: State of the Future. "In the future, we'll be able to enhance ourselves in other ways that won't be so dangerous."

Sending a weak electrical impulse through the front of a person's head can boost verbal skills by as much as 20 percent, according to a new study by the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

In the study, researchers at the institute asked 103 volunteers to recall as many words that begin with a particular letter as possible. The researchers then passed a 2-milliamp current -- one-tenth of what is needed to power a small LED (light-emitting diode) light -- through electrodes attached to the surfaces of the volunteers' foreheads. When the volunteers were quizzed again while the current was still on, this time with a different letter, they were able to come up with 20 percent more words on average.

Levels of a particular hormone may influence a person's ability to cope with stress, suggests a study of soldiers put through a prisoner of war camp simulation.

Soldiers enduring punishing stints in military survival school performed better and felt more attuned to their environments when they had higher levels of a hormone called dehydroepiandrosterone-S (DHEA-S), report US scientists. The ratio of DHEA-S against levels of another stress hormone, called cortisol, was important in coping with stress, they suggest.

The researchers say DHEA-S could one day be given to people before stressful experiences to help them cope better during traumatic events.

DHEA-S is secreted by the outer portion of the adrenal gland in response to stress. People aged 20 to 25 have the highest levels of DHEA-S, which then drops by a factor of five by age 80.

Previous studies have shown the hormone enhances memory and reduces depression and aggression in mice. It turns up in low levels in people suffering from depression and anxiety, although its role in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been unclear.

Now, researchers led by Charles Morgan, a psychiatrist at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in West Haven, Connecticut, have tested a theory that the hormone kicks in to act as a "buffer against the negative impact of stress".

Millions of people rely on strong coffee every morning to really wake up. All-night truck drivers sometimes take amphetamines to stay conscious on the road, and for centuries South American peoples have chewed coca leaves to stay alert and increase physical endurance. Yet none of these compounds are specific “consciousness” drugs. They stimulate waking along with many side effects. A novel pharmaceutical, modafinil (provigil), may be the most specific consciousness-promoting drug yet.

The Model of Hierarchical Complexity presents a framework for scoring reasoning stages in any domain as well as in any cross cultural setting. The scoring is based not upon the content or the subject material, but instead on the mathematical complexity of hierarchical organization of information. The subject’s performance on a task of a given complexity represents the stage of developmental complexity.

(DANNY HILLIS:) I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.

Of course no one today knows all that is known, in the sense that Aristotle did. Now there is far too much knowledge for that to be possible. The scientific revolution, and the technological revolution that followed it, led to a self-reinforcing explosion of knowledge. The explosion continues. Today not even the most highly trained scientist, the most scholarly historian, or the most competent engineer can hope to have more than a general overview of what is known. Only specialists understand most of the new discoveries in science, and even the specialists have trouble keeping up.

This problem isn't new. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an essay for Atlantic Monthly about out the problem of too much knowledge. He wrote,

In the popular imagination, the technologically altered human being is a cross between RoboCop and the Borg.

The hardware that would make such a mating of humans, silicon chips and assorted weaponry a reality is, unfortunately, still on back order.

Many people, however, have already made a different kind of leap into the posthuman future.

Their jump is biochemical, mediated by proton-pump inhibitors, serotonin boosters and other drugs that have become permanent additives to many human bloodstreams.

Over the past half century, health-conscious, well-insured, educated people in the United States and in other wealthy countries have come to take being medicated for granted.

Treatment with carbenoxolone is associated with improved verbal fluency and verbal memory in elderly men, according to a report by UK researchers in an online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published on March 29th.

What new tools to improve human performance will emerge from the convergence of nanotech, biotech, infotech and cognitive science?

This was topic of discussion at the recent NBIC conference in New York, where several hundred scientists, ethicists, government officials and business executives gathered.

Like nanotechnology 10 years ago, speculating about potential NBIC applications is easy. Developing novel tools that solve real world problems remains hard. Always keeping this in mind, Mike Roco, conference co-chair and architect of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, performs the difficult task of distinguishing practical applications from mere conjecture, while cultivating an environment that encourages exploratory discussions. My goal was to explore the political and economic issues that might arise as these converging technologies make possible neurotechnology -- tools that can influence the brain.

Recent advances in the instrumentation technology of sensory substitution have presented new opportunities to develop systems for compensation of sensory loss. In sensory substitution (e.g. of sight or vestibular function), information from an artificial receptor is coupled to the brain via a human–machine interface. The brain is able to use this information in place of that usually transmitted from an intact sense organ. Both auditory and tactile systems show promise for practical sensory substitution interface sites. This research provides experimental tools for examining brain plasticity and has implications for perceptual and cognition studies more generally.

In a recent paper, Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier show that playing an action video game markedly improved subject performance on a range of visual skills related to detecting objects in briefly flashed displays. This is noteworthy as previous studies on perceptual learning, which have commonly focused on well-controlled and rather abstract tasks, found little transfer of learning to novel stimuli, let alone to different tasks. The data suggest that video game playing modifies visual processing on different levels: some effects are compatible with increased attentional resources, whereas others point to changes in preattentive processing.