THE THIRD WAVE
Biology will reduce or eliminate the need for oil in the production of plastics, fertilizer, clothes, paint, pesticides, and thousands of other products. It will sharply alter the production of wood, wool, and other “natural” goods. Companies like United States Steel, Fiat, Hitachi, ASEA, or IBM will undoubtedly have their own biology divisions as we begin to shift, over time, from manufacture to “biofacture,” giving rise to a range of products unimaginable until now. Says Theodore J. Gordon, the head of The Futures Group, “In biology, once we get started, we’ll have to think about things like . . . can you make a tissue-compatible shirt’ or a ‘mammary mattress’—created out of the same stuff as the human breast.”
Long before then, hi agriculture, genetic engineering will be employed to increase the world food supply. The much-publicized Green Revolution of the 1960’s proved, in large measure, a colossal trap for farmers hi the First Wave world because it required enormous inputs of petroleum-based fertilizer that had to be bought abroad. The next bio-agricultural revolution aims at reducing that dependence on artificial fertilizer. Genetic engineering points toward high-yielding crops, crops that grow well in sandy or salty soil, crops that fight off pests. It also seeks to create entirely new foods and fibers, along with simpler, cheaper, energy-conserving methods for storing and processing foods. As though to balance off some of its awesome peril, genetic engineering once more holds out for us the possibility of ending widespread famine.
One must remain skeptical of these glowing promises. Yet if some of the advocates of genetic farming are half right, the impact on agriculture could be tremendous, ultimately altering, among other things, relations between the poor countries and the rich. The Green Revolution made the poor more, not less, dependent on the rich. The bio-agricultural revolution could do the reverse.
It is too early to say with confidence how biotechnology will develop. But it is too late to turn back to zero. We cannot undiscover what we know. We can only fight to control its application, to prevent hasty exploitation, to transoational-ize it, and to minimize corporate, national, and interscientific rivalry in the entire field before it is too late.
One thing is immutably clear: we are no longer locked into the three-hundred-year-old electromechanical frame of traditional Second Wave technology, and can only begin to glimpse the full significance of this historic fact.
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