THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS
modifying us to eat lower down on the food chain? Should webiologically alter workers to fit job requirements—for example, creating pilots with faster reaction times or assembly-line workers neurologically designed to do our monotonous work for us? Should we attempt to eliminate “inferior” people and breed a “super-race”? (Hitler tried this, but without the genetic weaponry that may soon issue from our laboratories.) Should we clone soldiers to do dur fighting? Should we use genetic forecasting to pre-eliminate “unfit” babies? Should wegrow reserve organs for ourselves—each of us having, as it were, a “savings bank” full of spare kidneys, livers, or lungs?
Wild as these notions may sound, every one has its advocates (and adversaries) in the scientific community as well as its striking commercial applications. As two critics of genetic engineering, Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard, state in their book Who Should Play God?, “Broad scale genetic engineering will probably be introduced to America much the same way as assembly lines, automobiles, vaccines, computers and all the other technologies. As each new genetic advance becomes commercially practical, a new consumer need . . . will be exploited and a market for the new technology will be created.” The potential applications are myriad.
The new biology, for example, could potentially help solve the energy problem. Scientists are now studying the idea of utilizing bacteria capable of converting sunlight into electrochemical energy. They speak of “biological solar cells.” Could we breed life forms to replace nuclear power plants? And if so, might we substitute the danger of a bioactive release for the danger of radioactive release?
In the field of health, many diseases now untreatable will no doubt be cured or prevented—and new ones, perhaps worse, introduced through inadvertence or even malice. (Think what a profit-hungry company could do if it developed and secretly spread some new disease for which it alone had the cure. Even a mild, coldlike ailment could create a massive market for the appropriate, monopolistically controlled cure.)
According to the president of Cetus, a California company to which many world-famous geneticists are commercially linked, “biology will replace chemistry in importance” in the next thirty years. And in Moscow an official policy statement urges “the wider use of micro-organisms in the national economy… “
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