First, God bless Frank Booth, a University of Missouri at Columbia expert on the science of inactivity, for blowing the whistle on research  close to finding a pill to replace exercise. At least someone still has an appreciation of the aesthetic of being human with all its ups and downs, successes and failures.

Reseachers at the Salk Institute published a study in the journal Cell about its developing a pill that gave the benefits of exercise while you’d sit on the sofa watching America Idol. It’s announcement of the discover began:

“Trying to reap the health benefits of exercise? Forget treadmills and spin classes, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies may have found a way around the sweat and pain.”

Fortunately, research is still at the level where some heroic mice gave their lives for our refusal to get a life.

In a rare move among scientsts, the U of M scientist pre-empted the euphoric pronouncements by warning that this pill won’t come close to being a substitute for physical activity. While the pill did a lot of things to help muscles and endurance, it did very little for health as would real exercise: head off certain cancers, reverse type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis or risk of stroke. Booth listed a litany of things that tests on the new medicine didn’t address, from improving the immune system to regulation of cholesterol and so on into the benefits.

It’s no secret why researchers are looking for remedies to take the work out of being healthy. In the Frankensteinian laboratories of pharmaceutical companies, researchers look for pills to remove fat, make you smarter, make your kids smarter before they’re born, make your kids more attractive before they’re born, stop aging, make you taller, increase the sizes of your body parts to make you more attractive, even a pill to make you smarter just before you take an exam (which, actually, already exists) … It’s more sad than frightening.

Nothing I write will stop the juggernaut of public demand for artificial accomplishment. But, still, I lament the impending loss of being wholly human. Life is a miracle of cause-and-effect mechanisms so intertwined that even today, researchers know less about the body than they know. But what is known is to make everything work at its best, you need to be in charge. The great challenge today is to best use what mom and dad gave you, to play  the cards you were dealt, in order to have a good quality of life.
When you get that from a pill, you gain nothing and risk losing so much, including your uniqueness. I want to know I lost weight because I turned off my TV and rode my bike more, gained weight because I chose not to resist a juicy prime rib, got smarter because I read more books and played more Sudoku, and felt like I looked better because I found a partner who thinks I’m the bomb.