Modern Mind

Genome,
which recommended a concerted research program with a budget of $200 million a year. 73 James Watson, appropriately enough, was appointed associate director of NIH, later that year, with special responsibility for human genome research. And in April 1988, HUGO, the Human Genome Organisation, was founded. This was a consortium of international scientists to spread the load of research, and to make sure there was as little duplication as possible, the aim being to finalise the mapping as early as possible in the twenty-first century. The experience of the Human Genome Project has not been especially happy. In April 1992 James Watson resigned his position over an application by certain NIH scientists to patent their sequences. Watson, like many others, felt that the human genome should belong to everyone. 74
    The genome project came on stream in 1988–89. This was precisely the time that communism was collapsing in the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall was dismantled. A new era was beginning politically, but so too in the intellectual field. For HUGO was not the only major innovation introduced in 1988. That year also saw the birth of the Internet.
    Whereas James Watson took a leading role in the genome project, his former colleague and co-discoverer of the double helix, Francis Crick, took a similar position in what is perhaps the hottest topic in biology as we enter the twenty-first century: consciousness studies. In 1994 Crick published
The AstonishingHypothesis,
which advocated a research assault on this final mystery/problem. 75 Consciousness studies naturally overlap with neurological studies, where there have been many advances in identifying different structures of the brain, such as language centres, and where MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, can show which areas are being used when people are merely thinking about the meaning of words. But the study of consciousness itself is still as much a matter for philosophers as biologists. As John Maddox put it in his 1998 book,
What Remains to be Discovered,
‘No amount of introspection can enable a person to discover just which set of neurons in which part of his or her head is executing some thought-process. Such information seems to be hidden from the human user. ‘ 76
    It should be said that some people think there is nothing to explain as regards consciousness. They believe it is an ‘emergent property’ that automatically arises when you put a ‘bag of neurons’ together. Others think this view absurd. A good explanation of emergent property is given by John Searle, Mills Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, regarding the liquidity of water. The behaviour of the H 2 0 molecules explains liquidity, but the individual molecules are not liquid. At the moment, the problem with consciousness is that our understanding is so rudimentary that we don’t even know how to talk about it – even after the ‘Decade of the Brain,’ which was adopted by the U.S. Congress on 1 January 1990. 77 This inaugurated many innovations and meetings that underlined the new fashion for consciousness studies. For example, the first international symposium on the science of consciousness was held at the University of Arizona at Tucson in April 1994, attended by no fewer than a thousand delegates. 78 In that same year the first issue of the
Journal of Consciousness Studies
was published, with a bibliography of more than 1,000 recent articles. At the same time a whole raft of books about consciousness appeared, of which the most important were:
Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection,
by Gerald Edelman (1987),
The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness,
by Edelman (1989),
The Emperor’s New Mind,
by Roger Penrose (1989),
The Problem of Consciousness,
by Colin McGinn (1991),
Consciousness Explained,
by Daniel Dennett (1991),
The Rediscovery of the Mind,
by John Searle (1992),
Bright Air, Brilliant Fire,
by Edelman (1992),
The Astonishing Hypothesis,
by Francis Crick (1994),
Shallows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness,
by Roger Penrose (1994), and
The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory,
by David Chalmers (1996). Other journals on consciousness were also started, and there were two international symposia on the subject at Jesus College, Cambridge, published as
Nature’s Imagination
(1994) and
Consciousness and Human Identity
(1998), both edited by John Cornwell.
    Thus