how BIOTECHNOLOGY is transforming WHAT we believe and how we LIVE.

To most people, it doesn't make much sense to compare religion and technology. Each seems to pertain to its own separate sphere. And whenever a connection is noticed, it usually amounts to a recognition that religion uses technology to more effectively propagate its ideas.

Few will deny, however--when pondering these two separately--that each has shown itself capable of affecting the way people think and act. Religion, by its very nature, is intent on the inculcation of specific systems of belief and behavior. But technology--while rarely created with conscious philosophical, psychological, or sociological aims--manages nonetheless to critically impact these areas. A glance at a few recent technological developments and the revolution in values and life-styles each has generated will suffice to make the point.

In the early 1960s, the birth control pill became widely available. This brought increased attention to and acceptance of contraception and family planning, giving women more control over their bodies. It also reduced the risk of pregnancy for those wishing to enjoy sex outside marriage. Soon afterward, we saw family size in the developed nations shrink, sexual freedom expand, and the women's rights movement rise to social prominence. Today, all over the world, values about sex, the family, population growth control, and gender roles are changing or are already dramatically different from what they were prior to that tumultuous decade.

Subsequent to the introduction of the pill, there have been other reproductive technologies: safer abortion procedures, ultrasonography, amniocentesis, sperm and egg banks, in vitro fertilization, surrogate parenting, fertility drugs, and, soon, advance selection of the gender of one's offspring. Such developments continue to force a host of additional moral and legal issues upon us--requiring further changes or modifications in our ethical standards, social norms, and laws.

Looking at the broader category of medical technology, we can see that an even greater number of unanticipated moral dilemmas have come up--some of which affect areas so foundational that professionals can disagree on when a person comes into existence and when a person actually dies. Does "human personhood" begin at conception, at the appearance of brain waves, at birth, or possibly at some time after? What we conclude affects our views concerning the freezing of embryos, the rights of such embryos, fetal adoption, a mother's prenatal care obligation, abortion, the atmosphere in the birthing room, and selective nontreatment of severely disabled newborns. Does human life end with the death of the heart, the death of the brain, or the loss of "significant life"? What we determine affects our views on hospice, living wills, withdrawal of life support, suicide, and physician-assisted dying. Soon it may even force us to decide whether or not it is acceptable to use comatose individuals as "living" organ banks.

On a different front, global satellite communication has made the world smaller and has increased public awareness of certain international developments. We can now watch a war or a democratic revolution as it happens, and from both sides. And we can see more directly how actions taken in one place affect the environment or politics in another. This can't help but to advance globalism.

Through the video cassette recorder and cable and satellite television, individual choice in information gathering has been enhanced. As a consequence, people find it easier to get their ethics, aesthetics, and politics from something other than the usual common sources. And in so doing, they come to have a greater vested interest in the preservation of individual liberty, freedom of choice, and minority rights.

Computers expand the range of choice even further. The Internet makes individual information gathering, communication, and idea sharing much easier, even bringing the world to one's home or office. And through desktop publishing or the establishment of a presence on the World Wide Web, any computer owner can become an idea or information disseminator. Virtual communities on the Internet give further support to meeting the needs and upholding the rights of minorities.

Meanwhile, space travel, which has provided humanity with a consciousness-raising view of the Earth from the moon, will eventually do much more. Our species won't be limited only to this planet for its pursuits and interests. Colonies in space will--as have distant colonies throughout human history--bring into existence alternative societies and novel ideas, causing different visions of life's purpose to emerge and be shared.

Clearly, then, technology changes society and values. And it often does so in ways that confront old beliefs head on, bringing about significant societal anxiety. As Alvin Toffler explains in his 1980 best seller The Third Wave:

   It is precisely the collapse of the industrial era mind-structure, its
   growing irrelevance in the face of new technological, social, and political
   realities, that gives rise to today's facile search for old answers, and to
   the continual stream of pseudo-intellectual fads that pop up, flash, and
   consume themselves at high speed.

These, he argued, are the death spasms of an old order in the process of being supplanted by a new.

A few people in the future, as always, will stand by their traditional verities and life-styles, entrenched in their spectra ways of living in their separate communities, much as the Amish do today. But the majority of us will think and live very differently tomorrow because of the technologies assimilated into our culture today. As Toffler says, "Powerful forces are streaming together to alter social character, to elicit certain traits, to suppress others, and in the process to transform us all."

Among the transformed will be institutions such as me church, which, in order to survive, will eventually need to accommodate these changes (its divines likely proclaiming that the new ideas had really been those of the church all along). Indeed, the necessary debates among the faithful are already in progress.

Technology, then--along with the scientific discoveries that make it possible--not only affects the way people think and act, as religion does, but often forces religion itself to evolve. Back in 1877, Robert Ingersoll put it this way:

   Where once burned and blazed the bivouac fires of the army of progress, now
   glow the altars of the church. The religionists of our time are occupying
   about the same ground occupied by heretics and infidels of one hundred
   years ago. The church has advanced in spite, as it were, of itself. It has
   followed the army of progress protesting and denouncing, and had to keep
   within protesting and denouncing distance.

Today's technology also works rapidly. While at one time a vigorous new religion could transfigure a continent in a few centuries, a vigorous new technology can now do the same to the entire world in a matter of decades. Specifically, it took hundreds of years for ideas attributed to a man called Jesus (and others in his camp) to change the face of Europe. But the entire globe was altered in a mere twenty years by the technological innovations of a man named Bill Gates (and others in his field).

Now, as we enter the twenty-first century, it is becoming clear that the next scientific development ready to metamorphose our ideas and lives is biotechnology. A simple review of developments already in place will make this plain.

As the history of the biotech revolution is now tracked, it is generally said to have gotten underway in 1971 when Ananda Chakrabarty, a microbiologist from India, applied for a U.S. patent on a microorganism he had genetically engineered to eat ocean oil spills. When the patent office rejected his application on the grounds that living things aren't patentable, Chakrabarty appealed. In a close decision, the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals supported his patent request, declaring that, although his microorganism has life, this is "without legal significance" because Chakrabarty's invention is "more akin to inanimate chemical compositions such as reactants, reagents, and catalysts, than to horses and honeybees or raspberries and roses."

In response, the patent office appealed, and the case was eventually heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. In its five-to-four decision in 1980, the High Court granted the patent, arguing that "the relevant distinction was not between living and inanimate things" but whether a "human-made invention" was or wasn't involved. This ruling provided the legal groundwork for all life-form patents since.

And it set off a business frenzy. Later that year Genentech, a genetic engineering firm without a single product on the market, went public, selling shares on Wall Street for $35 apiece. The value rose to $89 per share in the first twenty minutes of trading and Genentech ended the day $36 million richer.

Seven years later, the U.S. patent office issued a ruling that even animals are potentially patentable. A year after that, in 1988, the first mammal was patented: the "onco-mouse," genetically engineered with human genes to predispose it to developing cancer. It is sold as a research model for use in cancer studies. This was soon followed by "AIDS mouse," a research animal that expresses the virus in every cell of its body and passes the virus on to subsequent generations. Now, as Jeremy Rifkin notes in his 1998 book The Biotech Century, "Nearly two hundred genetically modified animals, including pigs, cows, and sheep, are awaiting patent approval in the U.S."

But let's go back a step. Chakrabarty's oil-eating microorganism is a relatively simple affair. The real scientific breakthrough occurred in 1973 when biologists Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer stitched together pieces of DNA from two unrelated organisms. This launched the field of recombinant DNA surgery, also know as gene splicing. So far, this process is the most dramatic instrument in the growing biotech toolbox.

With these developments came an explosion of activity, the most dramatic of which was the creation of trans-species hybrids--two unrelated life forms genetically blended into chimeras, original species that can't breed or evolve naturally. In 1983, "super mice" were developed by Ralph Brinster of the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary School by inserting human growth hormone genes into mouse embryos. This whole new species of mouse grows twice as fast and almost twice as large as other mice, and the human growth hormone is passed naturally to its offspring. Generations have now come and gone and this unique animal is still thriving.

Early in 1984, British scientists fused embryo cells from a sheep and a goat, then implanted the novel embryo into a surrogate animal. A chimeric sheep-goat was born. And later, in 1986, the ultimate trans-species hybrid was created: a life form made from an animal and a plant. Believe it or not, the gene that produces light in the firefly was inserted into the genetic code of a tobacco plant, resulting in tobacco leaves that glow in the dark!

Another significant development was the first government-approved release into the open environment of a genetically engineered organism. This occurred in 1983 with the test release of a bacterium that, when sprayed on crops, prevents frost damage. The mining industry at this time also entered the biotech era. While extracting ores from rock has been a difficult task--involving miners, machines, and long periods of toil--that approach may be coming to an end. Tests have been conducted with bacteria that produce enzymes that eat away the impurities in certain low-grade ores, leaving the pure ore behind. This "bioleaching" could provide a cheap way to extract and process precious metals.

A medicine-related biotechnological development was that of xenotransplants--the transplanting of organs from one species into another. This came to the public's attention in 1984 with the case of Baby Faye, a fifteen-day-old infant who received a baboon heart to replace her own. Though she died twenty days later, a thirty-five-year-old man received a baboon liver in 1992 and lived for two and a half months. The goal of all this is to create a large supply of genetically modified animal organs that won't be rejected by the human body, thus reducing the wait for and expense of human organs in transplant surgery.

On the international political scene, the biological arms race can be said to have come into its own in the fall of 1984. Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger reported to Congress "new evidence that the Soviet Union has maintained its offensive biological warfare programs and that it is exploring genetic engineering to expand its program's scope." In response, the United States launched an effort to close the "gene gap," greatly expanding the Pentagon's budget for "defensive" biological warfare research. In 1981 that budget had been a mere $15.1 million; by 1986 it was up to $90 million. And in that year, the U.S. Department of Defense issued a report stating that genetic engineering, particularly recombinant DNA gene splicing, was making biological warfare practical. Not only were genetic engineers cloning massive quantities of "traditional" pathogens but they were inventing new "designer agents." Just as "designer drugs" were on the market, so were these new biowarfare weapons. They could be created quickly and cheaply, yet antidotes to each might take decades to develop.

In 1995, the Central Intelligence Agency reported its suspicions that seventeen countries besides the United States --Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Laos, Libya, North Korea, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Syria, Taiwan, and Vietnam--were researching or stockpiling germ warfare weapons. More recently, a February 1998 report in the Baltimore Sun discusses the April 2, 1979, accidental release of anthrax from a Soviet laboratory in Sverdlovsk, Russia. The significant issue in this incident is that the airborne anthrax germs in question may have been specifically bred by the Soviet military to be resistant to antibiotics and specially engineered to attack adult males. Antibiotics failed to prevent the deaths of over 1,000 civilians, but three times as many men died as women and not a single child fatality occurred.

After the watershed innovations of the 1970s and 1980s, a plethora of new applications and secondary developments followed immediately. For example, the U.S. Human Genome Project, an effort to spell out the entire genetic code of Homo sapiens, began its first phase in 1990. Though the project initially progressed slowly, with a projected completion date of 2005, biologist Craig Venter began in 1991 to use a new process of his own that dramatically accelerated results. As a consequence, newly discovered human gene sequences are being posted on the Internet daily.

Looking ahead, philosopher of science Philip Kitcher has noted how health insurance companies will want to be able to set insurance rates--or deny insurance altogether--based on what genetic predispositions are discovered in the genetic codes of individual people. And this level of unacceptable discrimination, he optimistically suggests, could force a national health insurance plan to come into existence in the United States.

Meanwhile, Venter has been mapping other organisms. In May 1995 he surprised the scientific world with news that he had deciphered the first complete script of a living organism: the genome of the human pathogen Haemophilus influenzae. Since then, his lab has gone on to map the complete genomes of a number of other organisms. He projects that, in just a few years, we will know fifty to 100 genomes in nature.

In May 1992 Baby Cloe was born in London. Cystic fibrosis ran in the family but the use of abortion for genetic selection had been bypassed through the use of pre-implantation genetic testing. That is, several eggs had been removed from the mother's womb and fertilized in vitro with her husband's sperm. The fertilized eggs were then allowed to develop through the eighth cell division. After that, they were tested for cystic fibrosis. Two of the embryos were without the disease so they were implanted in the mother. One developed and was born. Today pre-implantation genetic screening is used regarding a number of genetic diseases, including sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs.

Besides this neo-eugenic approach to genetic diseases, biotech cures that don't affect heredity have also been developed. One is the genetic engineering of a human growth hormone. Originally intended to help the thousands of U.S. children born with dwarfism, it was patented in the 1980s. Today, however, its wider use among nonaffected children has resulted in $500 million in sales.

And this introduces an ethical concern. Family doctors and pediatricians are increasingly designating children as abnormal who fall in the bottom 3 percent of the height scale for their age group. This common shortness, being defined now as an "illness," results in the growth hormone being more frequently prescribed. It also results in a change in our notions of "normal." Robin Marantz Henig, writing in the May 1998 Discover magazine, notes that this is "a common theme in medical history"--a treatment developed to resolve an abnormality is eventually used to enhance or standardize normality.

It was, in fact, this very question that induced the National Institutes of Health to bring researchers and ethicists together in September 1997 for the first Gene Therapy Policy Conference. This was followed two weeks later by an American Association for the Advancement of Science-sponsored colloquium on gene alterations directed at the eggs, sperm, and zygotes--interventions that could, if developed, change an individual's heredity and hence the genetic endowment of future generations. Many speakers at these gatherings expressed concern that the use of such technology could result in a "biological reinforcement" of socioeconomic and class distinctions. After all, gene therapy would most often benefit those most able to pay for it. Furthermore, people seem to desire such choices. As Henig reports:

   More than 40 percent of Americans, according to a March of Dimes survey,
   think it would be okay to use gene therapy to make their children either
   more attractive or more intelligent than they were otherwise destined to
   be. A Gallup poll of British parents found many of them also willing to
   consider such genetic "enhancement," and for some surprising and rather
   disconcerting reasons: 18 percent to change a child's aggression level or
   remove a predisposition to alcoholism, 10 percent to keep a child from
   becoming homosexual, and 5 percent to make a child more physically
   attractive.

As if to show how close such developments might be to reality, researchers at Case Western Reserve University Medical School in Cleveland, Ohio, in April 1997 created the first artificial human chromosome. This could eventually be instrumental in the customized design of genetic traits in embryos or even in sex cells before conception. Artificial chromosomes could then become genetic "cassettes" that would alter people's genetic inheritance, wiping out genetic diseases in family lines but also doing many other things.

Some suggest that this could have negative fallout regarding society's tolerance for disability. To see this, we need only look back at the year 1975, when Paul and Shirley Berman sued two New Jersey doctors for "wrongful life." The Bermans argued that their daughter, who was born with Down's syndrome, would have been aborted had their doctors advised the amniocentesis that would have detected the condition. They thus charged that the doctors had been negligent and had contributed to a "wrongful birth." Although the Bermans lost the substance of their suit, the New Jersey Supreme Court did award them "emotional damages" for their suffering. Since then, many states have recognized a child's right to bring "wrongful life" lawsuits on his or her own behalf.

Of course, while some people wish they were never born, an awful lot of people want never to die. That's why the announcement by scientists in California and Texas in March 1998 is so interesting. Through direct genetic manipulation of a human DNA molecule, these molecular biologists were able to extend cell growth and postpone cell death to a point nearly twice what is normal. With further research and development, this process could allow humans to almost double their lifespans--raising a host of cultural, economic, ethical, political, and religious problems. Not the least of these would be the need to dramatically slow the birthrate. On a more mundane level, retirement plans and the Social Security system would have to be overhauled. (And with copyrights now extending to the lifetime of the author plus seventy years, this article might not enter the public domain until around 2150!)

If such neo-eugenic and Fountain of Youth issues still have a ring of science fiction to them, this cannot be said for the entrenched place biotechnology has already established for itself in medicine. In 1995, over 280 new genetically engineered medicines were tested--a 20 percent increase over the previous year. Now millions of people use gene-spliced drugs and medications to treat AIDS, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, strokes, and the like. The new medicines have, in some cases, replaced the old. For instance, genetically engineered human insulin, used in treating diabetes, has all but replaced that derived directly from animals.

In May 1997, U.S. scientists isolated a gene that regulates muscle growth in mice. It was then learned that, with this gene removed, mice can grow stronger and develop bulging muscles, huge shoulders, and broad hips. The new breed of muscular rodent was dubbed "Mighty Mouse" and will soon be used to develop new treatments for muscle-related diseases such as muscular dystrophy. (Of course, as soon as it is used for that, someone will develop an application to enhance the performance of healthy athletes.)

Currently at the Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine in Massachusetts, pigs genetically altered with human genes are being bred in the hope of producing a universal organ donor for human beings--a donor that can be raised in large supply on special farms. This could also increase the supply and lower the cost of transplant organs. Of course, cross-species organ donation brings with it the risk of cross-species infection. This is why the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been drawing up guidelines.

On a parallel track is the creation of new bio-synthetics. Artificial skin is a prime example. Cultured and grown in laboratories, it is now used to treat burn victims. In 1996 a patient with severe burns over 60 percent of his body was treated in San Diego, California, with artificial skin. He was able to be released from the hospital only forty-seven days later.

The goal of those developing this latter technology is to make organs rather than transplant them. Research is now underway to fabricate heart valves, ears, noses, breasts, wombs, and other body parts. Robert Pool, in the May 1998 Discover, notes that Joseph Vacanti, chief of organ transplantation at Children's Hospital in Boston and a developer of synthetic organs, believes that someday "we will have cell banks with cells that have been genetically engineered to be invisible to the human immune system. To create a liver or kidney or heart, a tissue engineer would withdraw correct cells from the cell bank, seed them into an organ framework, and grow the organ."

But again, what starts out as a solution to a disability appearing at birth, during maturation, or after injury is quickly enlisted in the service of those able-bodied individuals who desire some healthful improvement or cosmetic enhancement. And to the extent that such technology becomes relatively cheap and widely available, people will cease to place a premium value on their "natural" attributes over those which have been acquired synthetically. Consider fashion modeling. Many still discuss whether this or that individual is "real" or "plastic." Over time, however, it's quite possible that such a distinction will cease to have any interest or even meaning.

Besides affecting what we are, biotechnology is affecting what we eat--so much so that in 1992, when the FDA announced that it wouldn't require the special labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods, there was an outcry from critics concerned about the possible transfer of allergens through the gene-splicing process. A 1996 study then proceeded to confirm that this had, in fact, already happened. So the FDA altered its position, requiring the labeling of all GM foods that use the genetic code of known allergenic organisms.

Since then the FDA has approved numerous GM crops for sale in the United States--and they're being used. GM corn was grown in 1997 on over 3.5 million acres and soy on more than eight million acres. The majority of U.S. farmland could be converted to this type of agriculture in less than five years.

Such development, however, has caused opposition in Europe and Asia. For example, in recent months, a number of large European grocery chains have vowed to go "GM free," making long-term contracts with growers to provide GM-free produce. Meanwhile, in India, as activists set fire to suspected fields of GM crops, the Indian Supreme Court has upheld a ban on GM crop testing. Under all this pressure, a number of large multinational corporations--including Cadbury-Schweppes, Gerber, Nestle, and Unilever--have suddenly joined the GM-free consortium. The social controversy over "Frankenfood" is well underway.

Besides enhancing food quality and crop yields, another important aspect of agricultural biotechnology is the creation of pest- and virus-resistant--as well as herbicide-tolerant--plants. But natural plant plasticity poses a special danger here. Pollen from crops engineered to be resistant to weed killer have been known to fertilize related weeds, creating superweed hybrids that are also resistant to weed killer.

Crops are also being aided by the use of special defensive strategies against insects. A predator mite was the first genetically engineered insect to be released. It was let loose in Florida in 1996 in the hope it would eat other mites that damage crops. In California, a lethal gene has been inserted into the crop-damaging pink bollworm. The genetically altered caterpillars, when released into the general population, become moths and then mate. The resulting offspring are expected to experience a massive die-off, allowing cotton crops to grow in an environment more benign. Meanwhile, scientists continue to work on the creation of harmless disease-bearing insects.

Down on the farm these days, not only are the plants more productive but so are the animals. Australian scientists have engineered a breed of pigs that is 30 percent more efficient and can be brought to market seven weeks earlier than ordinary pigs. They have also made sheep that grow 30 percent faster and will soon make their wool grow faster as well. In the United States, a new breed of turkey hen has been created that lays more eggs because it no longer engages in "non-productive" mothering activity over them.

Besides being designed in the laboratory, useful plants and animals continue, as always, to be discovered or rediscovered in nature, the critical genes being extracted for various purposes. Toward this end, over 400,000 seeds from all over the world have been collected in the U.S. National Seed Storage Laboratory. This is literally a gene bank--as are many others the world over, some of which store rare microorganisms and animal embryos. In related work, there is the Human Genome Diversity Project--an effort to secure blood samples from the world's 5,000 linguistically distinct human populations in the hopes of isolating desirable genes that can be useful in future designer gene projects, especially in medicine.

Also for medical purposes, nonhuman animals are being used as living laboratories. This is called pharmaceutical farming or pharming. Whole herds and flocks can produce medicines and nutrients. For example, in April 1996 Grace was born, a transgenic goat with a gene that produces an anti-cancer drug now being tested. Then in February 1997 Rosie was born, a transgenic calf that produces milk containing the necessary nutrients for premature infants who cannot nurse. Now transgenic pigs produce human hemoglobin.

In order to be effective and guarantee quality control, pharming will require cloning the new ideal animal once it is perfected. That's where the February 1997 birth of Dolly comes in. Dolly was reported as the first cloned mammal, a sheep. Shortly after Dolly came Polly, a cloned sheep that features a customized human gene in its biological code. Then in January 1998 came Charlie, George, and Albert, three cloned calves produced at Advanced Cell Technology, a Massachusetts biotech firm. Since then, goats and mice have been cloned. Now the National Institutes of Health has funded two projects to done rhesus monkeys. The result of all this is that we will soon mass produce customized animals for a variety of purposes.

Such large-scale creation, use, and manipulation of the flora and fauna of Earth cannot help but have a profound effect on the way we regard all life forms not ourselves. More than ever before, we will be able to evolve whatever we want--or simply manufacture it directly. This is where we will see the most immediate and profound sociological, psychological, and ethical effects of cloning and other biotechnological developments.

Human cloning isn't likely to be the next big issue, then; such a clone, if fully developed, will probably be seen as an identical twin born later--a view unlikely to have much immediate impact on basic human rights. But the animal rights movement is in a wholly different situation. As nonhuman animals come to be regarded as mere bundles of genetic information to be switched, traded, and modified at will--the results therefrom being mass produced and harvested--they will lose much of their status as distinct species, each with a special integrity worth preserving and protecting. This will effectively "desacralize" animals in ways that will influence how people in the future will view them.

The environmental movement will also be affected by this as talk turns from preserving nature in some past "pristine" state to consciously creating exactly the sort of "nature" we want. (Most of the November/December 1993 Humanist was devoted to exploring just this concern.) Debate over the relative merits of preservation ecology, restoration ecology, and inventionist ecology will then become part of common public discourse.

As should be obvious at this point, it isn't farfetched to predict a host of transformations in the way we live and think emerging out of biotechnology. We are already at a time when parents have more and more control over the genetic makeup of their children, designer animals are being created for a variety of technological purposes, designer foods and medicines are being engineered for our physical and mental health, and synthetic human tissues are being developed for restorative as well as cosmetic purposes. We also face new forms of biological pollution, newly engineered pests, and the growing dangers of biochemical war and terrorism. Perhaps sooner than we expect, genetic screening will accompany intelligence testing. And biochemical (or nanotechnological) computers and toys may replace some of those now made of metal and plastic.

Regarding this latter prediction, the handwriting is clearly on the wall. In 1994, Dr. Leonard Adelman at the University of Southern California got a strain of DNA to solve a simple mathematical puzzle. Shortly thereafter, Richard Lipton at Princeton got DNA to perform more complex functions.

But before molecular and "meat" machines dominate the market, there will still be plenty made of plastic, even if petroleum were to become scarce. Chris Sommerville at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., saw to that in 1993 when he invented a special type of vegetation. Inserting a plastic-making gene into a mustard plant, he converted it into a living plastics factory. Monsanto hopes to have it on the market by 2003. Meanwhile, ICI, a British firm, has engineered bacteria that can produce biodegradable plastics with varying degrees of elasticity and other characteristics.

Overall, we are becoming the remanufacturers of life and materials on Earth and, in time, will be able to spread our "New Genesis" to Venus and Mars, changing the atmosphere on those planets and terraforming the landscape to suit our own desires.

But this shows that even humanists may face a philosophical crisis in the next century.

In the past, people found meaning in nature by observing its cycles: the changes in seasons and the changing requirements that came with them. People found meaning in human life by meeting the needs of family and community. Later, humanist thinkers came to the conclusion that an increased understanding of human nature could provide an important basis for human values. By learning who we are and how we evolved, it would be possible to get a better idea of what is good for us and what we can reasonably expect from ourselves.

But now, with the capacity to massively change the external world of animals and plants to suit our desires, we relinquish another level of our ties to the land and external nature. With the capacity to reshape ourselves, our family genetic heritage, and our communities, we divorce ourselves from many of the familial duties and social connections that once formed the basis of our behavior. And with the capacity to determine the course of our evolution--not to mention the evolution of other species--we potentially lose some of the evolutionary rationale we may have had for our ethics.

Relevant to this latter point is Edward O. Wilson's 1998 book Consilience, in which he argues for an empirical basis for ethics. Within our biology, Wilson sees a human nature that will provide a general basis to work from. This isn't any sort of absolute ethical truth, of course, but it is something a little more solid than social relativism or the shifting sands of consequential and situational ethics. This is also where he develops his view of the genetic basis for those ethical inclinations that Adam Smith termed moral sentiments.

We have, however, been creatively interacting with human nature throughout our prehistory and history by the various selective ways that different cultures have bred, have practiced genocide on other cultures, and the like. How much this process has already modified our nature would be interesting to measure. In any case, it is clear that we have never shied away from exercising our influence--to whatever degree possible--on our genetic heritage, on our growth and development, and on our external environment. As a result, our ethical inclinations--rather than belonging exclusively to some relatively fixed system dating from the Old Stone Age--may be a partially ongoing product of our evolving values since humankind first emerged in Africa.

Whatever the case, with the biotech revolution we find ourselves in the ironic situation of becoming empowered to alter our genetics--and eventually these ethical inclinations--more swiftly and more dramatically than ever before, acquiring this power just as we are beginning to understand the genetic roots and original survival advantages of those same ethical inclinations. Thus we gain a capability to change that which we don't yet fully understand and run the risk of doing what we have mistakenly done in the past: upset the balance of nature, suffer the consequences, then scramble to fix our errors.

In this regard, we might well ask: will we go about this in the ways common to us, letting those people with the most power and money or those who control religious belief decide for all of us?

Clearly, the challenge of tomorrow is a momentous one. It is also an adventure into the unknown. We can embrace this adventure or fear it. Chances are, however, the future will belong to those who embrace it. For it is the embracers who most easily become the shapers.

Perhaps for this reason Humanist Manifesto II sets forth an optimistic view of technology, declaring:

   Using technology wisely, we can control our environment, conquer poverty,
   markedly reduce disease, extend our life-span, significantly modify our
   behavior, alter the course of human evolution and cultural development,
   unlock vast new powers, and provide humankind with unparalleled opportunity
   for achieving an abundant and meaningful life.

But it still follows with a warning:

   The future is, however, filled with dangers. In learning to apply the
   scientific method to nature and life, we have opened the door to ecological
   damage, overpopulation, dehumanizing institutions, totalitarian repression,
   and nuclear and biochemical disaster.

The matter warrants our concern and involvement. But if our involvement is to be productive, it needs to be informed. That requires keeping up to date on the revolutions in science and technology that surround us, particularly those in the field of biology. It means looking past the hype--whether of the "gee whiz" or the alarmist variety. It means following the money trail to see where reside the concentrations of power that determine what technologies are used, how they are used, who benefits, and who loses. And it means recognizing that all these factors will directly affect ourselves and our progeny.

For they are doing so already.

Fred Edwords is editor of the Humanist and executive director of the American Humanist Association. This article is based on lectures he has given at the 1998 AHA National Conference in San Diego, California, and the 1999 International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress in Mumbai, India.3