Read Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome for Free Online Page B

and function of the brain so much that there was literally no useful analogue in the natural world for it. If you wanted to see how the networks worked in a Haden brain, you needed an actual Haden brain.
    Naturally, this created a moral and ethical issue. These first neural networks were both highly experimental and highly invasive—the work papers Chang and his crew published described how the filaments of the network would need to penetrate and migrate through the brain matter, essentially turning the brain into a massive pincushion, without any guarantee that the invasion of this artificial neural network wouldn’t kill or debilitate these Haden’s patients even more than they were.
    When I wrote up the stories on the work papers the families of Haden’s patients nearly rioted. They felt like their family members were about to be victimized a second time. President Haden had to cut short a trip to Indonesia to come back and deal with it. He was not happy about it, or with me. [
New York Times
Publisher] Bitsy Lapine called me into her office to let me know that the President had called and yelled at her about me for twenty minutes. Bitsy, bless her, eventually recited the First Amendment at him and hung up.
    Heng Chang:
    The media response to our initial set of work papers highlighted the problem that the public had in understanding how efficiently we could model the human brain, and the network’s interaction with it. We were very comfortable that the networks could be installed safely in nearly all cases. But there was always that tiny bit of risk that you can never get rid of, and so the press and the families focused on that. There was really no way we’d be able to get volunteers from the general Haden population after that.
    Irving Bennett:
    This is where the near-universal nature of Haden’s Syndrome came to the rescue. The first guinea pigs for the networks were eventually recruited from three distinct groups. The first was the very elderly—people who from an actuarial point of view only had a couple years of life in them even before they got sick with Haden’s. The second group was people with terminal illnesses who also got Haden’s—stage four cancer patients and patients with other advanced illnesses. These two groups had almost literally nothing to lose by volunteering to test these networks.
    The third group—well. In one sense the people in it didn’t have much to lose either. But they were still problematic, to say the least.
    Chris Clarke, inmate, Nebraska State Penitentiary:
    I was in prison because a couple of teenagers got into the drug lab me and my step-father Bill had in a tool shed on our property. I think they heard from someone who bought from us that we kept our inventory there. We didn’t—once we cooked it, we moved it. But they broke in, started looking around and we think accidentally started a fire. The shed went up, taking them with it. Me and Bill were charged with two counts of manslaughter and a whole bunch of drug-related charges, and were found guilty. Bill died of a heart attack before he could be sentenced, and I think the judge took it out on me. I got a total of eighty-five years, and I would have to serve fifty before I could get parole. I was twenty-two when I went in. It was life sentence on the sly.
    You would think it would have been hard for Haden’s to get into a prison, but no, we got it just like everyone else. We joked that someone brought it in after a conjugal visit, but it’s obviously more likely that a couple of the guards brought it in from the outside world. Within a couple of weeks it seemed like half the house was sick with it. The prison only has one doctor on staff, and then some PAs and nurses. They were swamped immediately and not a lot of help was coming in. The rest of the world had it too, and helping a bunch of murderers and rapists was low on the list of everyone else’s priorities.
    I think I was one of about a dozen inmates who