APOCALYPSE! NOW: ANYONE KNOW HOW TO GET ME SOME OF THAT ELEPHANT-MAN SHIT?

… because the Commonwealth Games is making me seriously consider my options. Although, if you do know where to score some, I’d like, you know, just maybe a half.

Rejoice and get your freak on! It’s one of those weeks that being a NewsJunkie is all about. There is no business like show business, so they say, and no show like a freak show.

The animal equivalent of Jake the Peg

God alone knows what the Belgians have made of their six-legged lamb. Some vile variant of casseolet that can only be cooked once every six hundred years, I imagine – from a recipe carved by Flemish druids on the inside of the great hall of the European Parliament. (“Attendez-vous, quand le mouton du Diablo anormale arrives! Premier, prenez les six pattes du une seul mouton … Servez flambé. Pour six”.)

A kindly vet has offered to amputate two of its extra limbs so it can live a normal life, but only “if it survives a week” - which makes me think that whatever you might dig about their Trappist beers and oompa-loomba bands and the chocolate and everything you have to admit it: Deep down below, in the realm of the sub-conscious, the Belgians have some seriously cold-blooded shit going on. Or at least their vets do.

The news reports do not relate what “a normal life” might comprise for a formerly world-famous six-legged quadruped, although it may be just as well. Let’s face it, when it comes to famous sheep, role models are not thick on the ground. Dolly, previously undisputed titlest in the “World’s Most Famous Sheep” stakes, is famous for three things. First, for being a clone. Second, for being a sheep. Third, for being dead, only months after being cloned (which is kind of odd considering that my detailed research – or at least, my detailed research based on Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones – suggests that the laboratory process should be easy and safe).

Which brings us naturally to the other interesting story this week – TG1412. Need I say more?

What? You don’t instantly recognise the reference? Let me have another go. I mean the scandal at Northwick Park Hosptial that causes people to have to reassess some fundamental questions of bioethics recently? Still drawing a blank?

OK, OK. I’m talking about the “weird f**ked up thing where some guy’s head swelled up like the Elephant Man and put him in a coma in a drug trial gone wrong” incident.

 Oh yeah – that one.

As with most NewsJunkie-worthy stories, the facts are simple. The joke runs something like this: Six blokes walk into a lab. They get injected with some weird-looking oily green luminescent gunk in exchange for an envelope full of money. Blokes’ heads damn near explode, people go into comas, girlfriend arrives and makes her now famous Elephant-Man comment, forms are filled out, somebody calls the news, blah, blah, blah. (Google for details. AOL keyword: “FREAKY HEAD EXPLODING DRUG”)

Turns out that an experimental drug (which the authorities describe, seemingly without irony, as an “anti-inflammatory”) was administered to six volunteers, each of whom was paid £2,000 to participate in the trial. Two other men were given a placebo, thus completely missing out on probably their one and only chance to be world-famous (although they did, as a small consolation, later receive, “I was in the room when That Elephant Man Head Drug Thing Happened And All I Got Was A Placebo (And This Lousy T-Shirt)” t-shirts).

The room turned into what one later described - in an evocative if somewhat confused and strangely Victorian description – as a “vomiting bath”.  People were screaming, fainting, trying to tear their own swollen heads off, staff were panicking, handing out bin bags to vomit into and notifying next of kin. It was probably at about this point that it began to dawn on our heros that this was not the kind of ‘volunteer’ work that gets listed on a CV with a view to getting into a good college.

At least two, including our latter-day Merrick, a hapless UK resident named Mohammed Abdullah, aged 28, are still in a coma. Talking the press afterwards, his girlfriend, Myfanwy Marshall, said he had taken part in the trial because he “needed to pay some bills.” And also because he “wanted to help cure leukemia”. (Personally, I think he should have settled for sorting out the bills, but then again my teachers always felt I lacked ambition).

There’s a moral in there somewhere, but I’m afraid you’ll have to work it out for yourself. All you’re getting from me is a bit of a sense of the pointless horror of it all, and the mental image of me with my sandwich board: THE END IS NIGH.

But first let’s meet some of the other characters in our little vignette, shall we?

The trial was carried out by a US-based firm called Paraxel, who insisted that the correct procedures had been followed. In a statement on the company's website, Dr Herman Scholtz, head of Paraxel, said: “An initial review at the site has shown that best practices were followed … The experiment was a complete success. We believe that this is the blockbuster drug that can finally end the horrors of anapachydermacephalitis, or “My-Head-Is-Not-The-Size-Of-The-Elephant-Man’s Disease”. Around the world, people who could be living fulfilling lives with huge swollen distended head-like monstrosities atop their necks have finally lifted their tiny, pin-like normal-sized heads to the horizon and dared to dream.”

The German firm that developed the drug, TeGenero, apologized to the victims' families (luckily, someone from the company cracked a few jokes to lighten the mood, because it could have turned into quite an awkward moment, I can tell you!). The company's chief scientific officer, Thomas Hanke, said the drug was tested on rabbits and monkeys with no “drug-related adverse events”.

It could be that TeGenero’s spin-meisters have moved a teensy-weensy bit too quickly on this one. Just a tad. Reports are mixed, but accounts are now starting to surface – unconfirmed reports, obviously - that previously, graduate student lab assistants might – just might, you understand – have had some early warning signs. (Like the fact they’d been using the drug to pass the time on slow lab days by making monkey’s heads swell up until they totally, like, exploded and stuff. If that’s relevant, although they’re not convinced that it is. So, just, forget about it, really).

They were adamant that, of course, none of this could have given anyone any sense whatsoever about what might have happened when a real live human being was given the drug.

Happily, human nature demonstrated itself to be a resilient and fertile source of sensible and normal behaviour in the face of tragedy, with the UK’s Times reporting that:

“Bizarrely, medical groups are reporting a huge surge in the number of volunteers keen to take part in drug trials. Private companies who carry out clinical trials of drugs said they were experiencing a sharp rise in the number of calls from would-be volunteers. The Medical Research Council had been concerned that the plight of the six men would put off potential volunteers. Instead, it appears as if the four-figure payments on offer to willing guinea pigs has attracted hundreds of people prepared to take the risk.”

After all, who wouldn’t risk it all for a four-figure pay-out?

(So people get grinched in medical experiments – and a hefty proportion of people look up from their ironing and think: “Oh, man – I have got to get me some of that action. Medical experiments, here I come!”

That’s us – human beings – in action. We do some funny things, don’t we?)

So I’m back to the cellar to board up the door and wait from the end. I’m afraid to report that the Wikipedia’s section on the Book of Revelations is pretty clear about what it means when you get six-legged lambs, the stock market passes 5000 and people’s heads swell up like the Elephant Man.

Larry is just the beginning. I predict a riot.

Every teenager knows what to do when your friends’ head swells up like the goddamn Elephant Man, right?

Yeah – only do a half.