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Science as Culture
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Hormone Moralities
Lynda Birke
Published online: 25 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Lynda Birke (2002) Hormone Moralities, Science as Culture, 11:1,
131-136, DOI: 10.1080/09505430120115789

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 Science as Culture, Volume 11, Number 1, 2002

HORMONE MORALITIES
LYNDA BIRKE

Libidan, by P.J. Goddard, Aylesbury, Bucks: Hilltop Publishing,

2001

Here is a book that advertises itself as ‘the érst black comedy of the
biotechnological age’. It centres, we are told by the back cover, on
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the ‘deéning ethical question of the genomic revolution. When

scientists can turn on and off the body’s every genetic and bio-
chemical switch, what will human life become?’
Those are, indeed, fundamentally important questions. Whatever
the promises of biotechnology, it also presents us with huge ethical
dilemmas, which have concerned scholars and novelists alike. What
will life—and not just human, but all life—become once (if) scientists
develop the means to switch biochemical processes at will?

j HAPPY END
Libidan tells the story of Bill Kennedy, a biochemist working for
Asper Pharmaceuticals. Kennedy is bored with his work with hor-
mone fragments, and is disturbed by the presence of the attractive
woman assistant, Angela Marks. One day, Bill returns despondently
to his lab after learning of a potential breakthrough by his arch rival.
There, he begins work on a hormone fragment that has just arrived
from suppliers. But he is in for a shock: as the fragment heats up, it
drives Angela into a frenzy of lust. They spend the rest of the
afternoon copulating in various positions and places.
Unfortunately for Bill, the whole episode has been watched via
the surveillance cameras recently installed by the company: not
surprisingly, he is sacked from his job. But as he sits, horriéed,
watching the video record, he begins to realize that something may
have escaped from the fume cupboard—a something which
speciécally triggers female sexual responses.

Address correspondence to: Lynda Birke, Talygarth Ucha, Glyn Ceiriog, Llangollen, Clwyd LL20 7AB,
UK; E-mail: ghv37@dial.pipex.com

0950-5431 print/1470-1189 online/02/010131–06 Ó 2002 Process Press

DOI: 10.1080/09505430120115789
 132 SCIENCE AS CULTURE

The rest of the story revolves around Bill’s attempts to synthesize,

test, and market this substance, which, he believes, could be a great
commercial success as the answer to low libido in menopausal
women. He begins to have doubts, however, when he sprays some of
the substance (which he has now named Libidan) onto his sister’s
best friend, Louise, who is visiting his house. When she leaves the
following morning (after the predictable night of sex), she looks
crestfallen and tragic. Too late, Bill realizes with horror that Libidan
could also be a rape drug.
Despite that, Louise—who works in marketing—helps Bill to
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develop the drug and to market it by means of the Internet. It is an

instant success, but eventually they have to close it down when credit
facilities are withdrawn. Meanwhile, there are other subplots, people
wanting to get even with Bill for what they see as his misdeeds: Una,
the animal rights’ activist who believes Bill and Louise were practic-
ing bestiality with the guinea pigs he used for testing Libidan; Snod,
the drug pusher whose tabletting machine was used to press some
trial pills of Libidan.
But it’s a happy ending, énally. Although Snod beats him up, Bill
arrives at forgiveness when he realizes that the cause of Snod’s
terrible skin condition and ongoing health problems is the very
genetic disease on which his old arch rival worked at Asper. So, Snod
eventually gets hospital treatment. Una is also forgiven for her beliefs
about Bill, and eventually she ends up marrying the police inspector.
Bill ends by being offered a top-level management job—by Asper
Pharmaceuticals—and wanting to marry Louise.

j RECONSTRUCTING LIFE?
Libidan would seem to be a story with several points of interest to
readers of this journal; drug testing and marketing, animal use in
research, falsifying results, how science is communicated—as well as
the ethical questions underlying all these. And it is a novel which
centres on what scientists routinely do, and on the potential com-
mercial exploitation of scientiéc éndings.
One theme running throughout is surveillance: the employees at
Asper are under a high level of scrutiny, their behaviour constantly
monitored by camera—while Bill’s anxieties about new forms of
surveillance open the érst chapter. And not only is he watched
 HORMONE MORALITIES 133

remotely, but later he is observed directly, as Una tries to catch him

in further acts of animal abuse. Later, Bill learns that his efforts at
developing and marketing Libidan have been observed closely by
none other than the boss of his former company, Asper, who
constantly monitors the video screens of the workplace. In some
ways, then, the novel explores the ways in which, in some Orwellian
drama, we are all increasingly subject to scrutiny—whether or not
technology plays a part.
As the advertising blurb points out, the novel raises issues that are
becoming increasingly important to us as scientiéc developments
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generate ever more ethical dilemmas. And the novel is entertaining,

with a continuously moving plot. That said, I énd the novel irritat-
ing. According to the advertising copy, the book is about the
‘deéning ethical question of the genomic revolution’, involving Bill’s
‘journey into the emergent sciences of the the new millennium,
where synthetic designer drugs meet genetic engineering … A
journey that eventually leads to the one man with the power to
disassemble and reconstruct human life itself’.
Certainly, that would be a chilling tale. But it is not what this
novel is about. The cover of my advance copy bears the strings of
letters ACGT—denoting the bases comprising DNA—yet there is
nothing in the story that directly addresses genetics or genetic
engineering. What Bill isolates is a hormone fragment, a neuro-
peptide: he does not work directly on genes, nor does he use the
techniques by which DNA is analysed or recombined.
Rather, what happens is that Bill isolates the fragment; in a
dream redolent of Kekulé’s insight about the structure of the ben-
zene ring, he suddenly realizes that it has a circular structure. He
then tracks it down in a catalogue, and thereby identiées it as a
known neuropeptide, which affects sexual response. None of these
are new techniques, nor do they involve genetics. Bill’s chemical may
have the power to trigger sexual responses—but that is hardly the
power to ‘disassemble’ or ‘reconstruct’ human life. Even with the
mapping of the human genome, we still do not have the power to do
that.
Perhaps my failure to see the advertised connection between
genetic engineering and the pheromonal effects of a peptide reèects
a failure of my imagination. Yet I have no such lack when I read
science éction novels; so many of these are fantasies, fantastic
 134 SCIENCE AS CULTURE

weavings of current scientiéc knowledge with what might be

possible in some far distant future. Libidan is not set in the future,
but leaves us to imagine a possible present. Indeed, in that sense
it is not science éction at all in the way I usually understand that
genre.
Whereas my imagination can handle the presently-impossible
scientiéc fantasies of much science éction, I struggle with details in
this novel which don’t ét with current science. The most glaring
example comes when Snod attacks Bill, who is left barely able to
speak: ‘His left-hand side, which had taken the brunt of the attack
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was screaming in pain—he guessed one of the blows might have

ruptured his liver’ (p. 156). Have I missed something in the genetic
revolution, and genetic engineers have competely reorganized human
anatomy recently? If not, then I rather hope that, in the event of my
suffering liver damage, the doctors would examine my right hand
side.
Scepticism also followed when I read about Bill testing the
drug on guinea-pigs in his own house. Since doing so would be
illegal in Britain, I was hoping he would be arrested and the guinea
pigs duly liberated by Una’s animal rights group. No such luck.
Instead, he tested the drug on neutered guinea pigs, and found that
it was highly effective in low doses: ‘point one of a milligram, even
for a guinea pig, was a microscopically small dosage’, pondered Bill
(p. 114). Odd—I would have thought that a dosage of a peptide
measurable in milligrams was actually a high dose for a small guinea
pig.
Quibbles about dosage aside, the notion that a peptide might
have arisen in mammalian evolution which affected the brain only of
females is rather hard to believe, even in éctional guise (it’s pretty
hard to think of traits that are unique to one sex, apart from sperm
or egg production). Libidan is a handy chemical in the story: it
makes women completely rampant (that is, heterosexually rampant)
but has no effect on men. In that sense, it reminded me of so many
feminist critiques of medicine (especially reproductive medicine),
which point to the ways in which drugs and other medical practices
can be used speciécally to control women’s behaviour. In the case of
the éctional Libidan, it is a drug that disinhibits, that can make
women become the whores of pornographic fantasy. No wonder that
I felt uncomfortable with the story.
 HORMONE MORALITIES 135

j INTENTIONAL PARODY?
There are many novels which have explored the ethical issues raised
by modern science. This one certainly prompts many questions
about ethics—in what we do with living organisms, in what drugs
might be ethically permissible, in what practices are commercially
acceptable. But the morals of the story seem clichéd. In the end, ‘Sex
Kills’ (as the énal section is titled); Bill sees the error of his ways and
abandons production of Libidan. Good conquers evil in the end.
Marriage and forgiveness are also central tropes of the end of the
novel, as Una plans to marry the police inspector and Bill dreams of
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marrying Louise, once he has forgiven those who have wronged him.
There is more than a hint of a religious morality here. The Christ-
like image of Bill in the énal scene reinforces the hint: the weather
changes abruptly, almost miraculously, and Bill begins to dream of
playing in a football match: to meet the ball, he would have to
èy to the very heavens … And so he began to rise. To rise
upwards in a leap of such magniécence and athleticism that
every man, woman and child in the crowd would remember
the sight until their dying day … he held himself in suspension
above the earth—a man defying nature, a man made more
than human by the strength of his will and the power of his
mind (p. 285).
In part, the novel is a parody. Perhaps this énal image of
renaissance is intended to be parodic or excessive. The characters,
too, are exaggerated, larger-than-life. Una is one example, given her
preoccupations with Bill and Louise’s sex acts and whether these
involved a guinea pig. And the story itself is jokey, implausible. As
such, perhaps the ending is also a joke, and my problems with details
do not matter: éction can, after all, break boundaries.
But not all literary transgressions of boundaries work well, and
this novel did not work for me as a parody; neither I nor my partner
found it particularly funny. Nor did we énd it taking us into a
‘journey of … chilling new moralities’, as the advertising copy put it.
The new moralities that I worry about have to do with transgenesis,
the creation of new kinds of organisms, and the patenting of life. On
the other hand, the problems of creating or discovering biologically
active compounds (and their moral consequences) have been with us
for a long time.
 136 SCIENCE AS CULTURE

If you want a novel that runs along with good pace, and reads a
little like a detective story built around a plot centred on science,
then you can enjoy this book. And perhaps some readers will indeed
énd its excesses to their taste in humour. But if you want to read
novels with scientiéc themes that challenge your beliefs and world
views, then you will probably have to look further.
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