Scholastic Excursion 1: Bioethics

What if you went crazy?

That wasn't the question presented by the PowerPoint at the beginning of the Bioethics class, but it was in my mind at the end. The class (BIO 370) was taught by Steve Peck, whom I had first heard in English Reading Series (ENGL 321R) last semester. He was by far the most fascinating author to speak. After he read us a few of his bizarre and thought-provoking "Mormonish" short stories, I read his Wandering Realities and was thoroughly impressed. To see what other insights he might have, I decided to attend his class.

The question actually presented that day was "What do animals feel?" and the lecture was filled with interesting thoughts on how elephants mourn, Mary the super-scientist, blind sight, LDS and Kantian views of animal suffering, and how death and life are codependent.

But the best part was at the end, when Peck shared a personal experience to highlight the definition of consciousness. To start his story, he showed this picture: 

Several years ago, Peck traveled to Vietnam for research. Months after he returned home, he started having terrible headaches. They couldn't find anything wrong, so they sent him home to get better on his own. The headaches got worse until one night, Peck noticed green and golden sparkles coming out of a lamp. Then people started coming into the room. He was afraid of them, and asked them to leave. But they just told him, "You are now under our power. You have just joined the Satan Walmart organization."

Peck woke his wife to warn her, and she called the doctors. As they left the house, Peck told his kids not to go in the orchard because of the elephants. When they got to the hospital, it was filled with giant insects. Peck thought this was genius, because it was obviously for antibiotic resistance. Throughout this ordeal, his wife constantly denied everything he saw, but the nurses just played along. At night, for instance, he told them he just couldn't fall sleep with all the insects in his bed. So they told him, "Turn on the light and they'll dissolve." To his surprise, that worked, but also brought monkeys who said they were being kept hostage by Satan Walmart.

The Satan Walmart organization had also cloned his kids and was training them as assassins. He could see them jumping on and off the hospital roof when he walked around. When he went to get an MRI, Peck listened to the technician's instructions until he explained, "and then I'm going to kill you because you deserve to die." When the technician looked the other way, Peck bolted, sneaking through the hospital until nurses found him and strapped him down to the bed.

His daughter brought him the picture displayed above. Notice the caption says they're the "Evil leaders of the Satanic/Walmart organization" and not just pictures. That's because they talked to him and tried to convince him to give them permission to clone his kid who was under 8 (Satan has rules too).

In reality, Steven Peck was dying, and the doctors didn't think they could stop it. Finally a specialist from the CDC came and recognized it as Burkholderia pseudomallei, a bacteria from Vietnam that usually affects the lungs. It's only affected 5 people the same way it was affecting Peck, and was fatal in 4 of those instances. So they put Peck on fierce antibiotics and waited.

Two days later, Peck had an appointment with his clone kids. Despite their role as assassins, he felt an ethical responsibility for them and wanted to lay down some ground rules. He waited until 8:00, the meeting time, but they didn't show up. That surprised him; even cloned assassins should obey their dad. By 8:15 he was really wondering. Did they get sent on a mission? By 8:30, he started to wonder, what if my wife is right? By 9:15, he realized that it wasn't real. None of it was real.

That was such a relief for him. For two and a half weeks, he was living in a world of terror. He thought actual demons were trying to hurt his family. His world had changed, and he couldn't understand it anymore. His beliefs had been rewritten. He mentioned that, with his normal state of mind, he would have doubted much of what he saw. But the disease had changed him so that he believed it without question. The images he saw looked as real as anything.

Fortunately, he eventually recovered. But if you've read any of his books, you can tell it left a mark.