The Great Awakening

With a Pill Called Modafinil, You Can Go 40 Hours Without Sleep -- and See Into the Future

By Joel Garreau

What it does is shut off your urge to sleep.

"It's a standing joke among sleep doctors that nobody sleeps in New York or Washington," says Helene Emsellem, director of the Center for Sleep and Wake Disorders in Chevy Chase. "Except in New York they do it for pleasure, while in Washington they do it to work."

In trials on healthy people like Army helicopter pilots, modafinil has allowed humans to stay up safely for almost two days while remaining practically as focused, alert, and capable of dealing with complex problems as the well-rested. Then, after a good eight hours' sleep, they can get up and do it again -- for another 40 hours, before finally catching up on their sleep.

Originally aimed at narcoleptics, who fall asleep frequently and uncontrollably, modafinil works without the jitter, buzz, euphoria, crash, addictive characteristics or potential for paranoid delusion of stimulants like amphetamines or cocaine or even caffeine, researchers say. As with an increasing number of the so-called superhuman, posthuman or trans-human drugs or genetic manipulations rapidly entering our lives, modafinil thus calls into question some fundamental underpinnings of hundreds of thousands of years of thought regarding what are normal human capabilities.

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