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Natalie Angier and Jonathan Weiner

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Spare the Drug, Spoil the Child?

By Jonathan Weiner
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2000, at 5:04 PM ET

Natalie,

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What an amazing letter. I'm enjoying our correspondence, dark as it is at the moment.

Why do we keep--what's the word--medicalizing our kids like this? I had that experience myself in first grade and I remember how weird it felt. I hardly talked in class that year, because I hated my teacher, and at the end of the year she sent me to the school psychologist because she thought I might be retarded and should be held back. Fortunately the psychologist was a sensible guy. "Jonnie," he asked, "why were you so quiet all year?"

I said, "I was thinking."

"What were you thinking about?"

"Zorro."

So today, how many kids with awful teachers are getting dumped into drugland? Judging by the JAMA story, quite a few. I know a lawyer who represents our local school district. She sees more and more petitions and suits from parents who have their kids in treatment for Tourette's, ADD, or other syndromes, and she thinks many of these diagnoses are bogus. Maybe she's right. Besides being dreamy, I was Lilliputian. When the first growth-hormone stories came out, my mother took me to see a researcher at Columbia. He assured my mother and me that I would probably catch up on my own--which I did, more or less. Again, how many kids are getting those treatments today who don't need them?

The problem's going to get even worse for our kids' kids. By then the medical options will have widened from Ritalin, Prozac, growth hormones, etc., to include, for parents who can afford them, private eugenical manipulations in the petri dish. There may be all kinds of social pressure to pick the right GATAACA baby, etc. We'll be medicalizing kids before they're out of the womb. Before they're in the womb.

What's weird for me now as a science writer is that these issues color many advances in basic biology that I would otherwise want to cheer. Talk about the loss of innocence. Take that story about Sir2 in yesterday's "Science Times" section. Sir2 is a gene that seems to play some role in aging. Well, we all want to know more about aging at the level of the genes. Keep going! Find out faster! But at the same time I wonder when our first little store of knowledge about genes and aging will become a dangerous thing.

So what did the Ritalin do for you, or to you, if you don't mind my asking?

Jonathan