The Accelerating Race to Find Drugs to Enhance the Brain

In The Body Builders, Adam Piore takes us on a spellbinding journey into the field of bioengineering—which can be used to reverse engineer, rebuild, and augment human beings—and paints a vivid portrait of the people at its center. In the excerpt below, he looks at the race to create “Viagra for the brain,” i.e., a drug that could endow humans with photographic memory. This excerpted chapter has been abbreviated from the version that appears in the book.