Doug Henwood:
> Really? Sense of the sacred? Endowments from our Creator? Hw sounds
> like a cross between Jerry Mander and Vaclav Havel, only he's from a
> family that once claimed a special connection to the Divine.
>
> Onward and upward with genetic technology!
One might perhaps find the Prince's disquiet more respectably materialistic if one translated him some. For instance, instead of God, etc., he might have referred to whole systems and suggested that scientists weren't paying enough attention to what are called externalities in other fields; things that are too small or too weak or too far away to matter to heavy hitters in the top of the ninth, where they seem to be most of the time. "Freude, schoene Goetterfunken..."
As leftists, I think one of our jobs is to say with the Sage, "Nothing is small."
And now, as a reward for putting up with this so far, a story I wrote several years ago:
-- Repute --
The repute of a science depends on two things: how much money you can make off it, and how many people you can kill with it.
Ever since an entire city full of human beings disappeared in the blink of an eye, leaving those who had not been turned into vapor, dust, and shadow burned and choking in a poisonous fog, physics has had no peer; the mere glance of its invention has caused the world to tremble for fifty years, and many enjoy trembling because others tremble more.
Chemistry, toiling behind, has made an effort, and filled our air, water, ground, and food with blowing plastic and obscure toxins. Much, much money has been made, and many have died, but Chemistry is too _earnest_. It doesn't have that flash -- to use a particularly apt word.
Biology, of course, was long regarded as hopeless. Counting amboebas and chasing frogs, biologists were long despised and the field even opened to women. A few diseases were hopefully offered to the generals, but they were not much appreciated. Why give your enemy influenza and two weeks to die, when you can incinerate him in a second?
Lately, though, there has been a whisper of hope. The name of the hope is gene-splicing. Mouse genes can be transferred to pigs, and pig genes to mice; even tree genes can be transferred to humans, and human genes into potatoes. (If the splicers are careful where they take their material, they may come up with a potato that can spell its name!)
The possibilities for both profit and mass murder are clearly endless. We have opened the laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein, and it is with a twinkle in his eye that our young molecular guy dusts off the old equipment, directs the workmen bringing the computers in, and sets the vessels of antique unspeakable things in the morning sunlight.
-- Gordon