Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

Existing animal species, however, are by no means all we have to work with. A number of writers have suggested that new animal forms be bred for specialized purposes. Sir George Thomson notes that "with advancing knowledge of genetics very large modifications in the wild species can no doubt be made." Arthur Clarke has written about the possibility that we can "increase the intelligence of our domestic animals, or evolve wholly new ones with much higher I.Q.'s than any existing now." We are also developing the capacity to control animal behavior by remote control. Dr. Jose M. R. Delgado, in a series of experiments terrifying in their human potential, implanted electrodes in the skull of a bull. Waving a red cape, Delgado provoked the animal to charge. Then, with a signal emitted from a tiny hand-held radio transmitter, he made the beast turn aside in mid-lunge and trot docilely away.

Whether we grow specialized animals to serve us or develop household robots depends in part on the uneven race between the life sciences and the physical sciences. It may be cheaper to make machines for our purposes, than to raise and train animals. Yet the biological sciences are developing so rapidly that the balance may well tip within our lifetimes. Indeed, the day may even come when we begin to grow our machines.

Raising and training animals may be expensive, but what happens when we go down the evolutionary scale to the level of bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms? Here we can harness life in its primitive forms just as we once harnessed the horse. Today a new science based on this principle is rapidly emerging and it promises to change the very nature of industry as we know it.

"Our ancestors domesticated various plant and animal species in the prehistoric past," says biochemist Marvin J. Johnson of the University of Wisconsin. But "microorganisms were not domesticated until very recently, primarily because man did not know of their existence." Today he does, and they are already used in the large-scale production of vitamins, enzymes, antibiotics, citric acid and other useful compounds. By the year 2000, if the pressure for food continues to intensify, biologists will be growing microorganisms for use as animal feed and, eventually, human food.

At Uppsala University in Sweden, I had the opportunity to discuss this with Arne Tiselius, the Nobel prizewinning biochemist who is now president of the Nobel Foundation itself. "Is it conceivable," I asked, "that one day we shall create, in effect, biological machines – systems that can be used for productive purposes and will be composed not of plastic or metal parts, but of living organisms?" His answer was roundabout, but unequivocal: "We are already there. The great future of industry will come from biology. In fact, one of the most striking things about the tremendous technological development of Japan since the war has been not only its shipbuilding, but its microbiology. Japan is now the greatest power in the world in industry based on microbiology ... Much of their food and food industry is based on processes in which bacteria are used. Now they produce all sorts of useful things – amino acids, for example. In Sweden everybody now talks about the need to strengthen our position in microbiology.

"You see, one need not think in terms of bacteria and viruses alone ... The industrial processes, in general, are based on man-made processes. You make steel by a reduction of iron ore with coal. Think of the plastic industries, artificial products made originally from petroleum. Yet it is remarkable that even today, with the tremendous development of chemistry and chemical technology, there is no single foodstuff produced industrially which can compete with what the farmers grow.

"In this field, and in a great many fields, nature is far superior to man, even to the most advanced chemical engineers and researchers. Now what is the consequence of that? When we gradually get to know how nature makes these things, and when we can imitate nature, we will have processes of an entirely new kind. These will form the basis for industries of a new kind – a sort of bio-technical factory, a biological technology.

"The green plants make starch with the aid of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the sun. This is an extremely efficient machine ... The green leaf is a marvelous machine. We know a great deal more about it today than two or three years ago. But not enough to imitate it yet. There are many such 'machines' in nature." Such processes, Tiselius continued, will be put to work. Rather than trying to synthesize products chemically, we will, in effect, grow them to specification.

One might even conceive of biological components in machines – in computers, for example. "It is quite obvious," Tiselius continued, "that computers so far are just bad imitations of our brains. Once we learn more about how the brain acts, I would be surprised if we could not construct a sort of biological computer ... Such a computer might have electronic components modeled after biological components in the real brain. And at some distant point in the future it is conceivable that biological elements themselves might be parts of the machine." Precisely such ideas have led Jean Fourastié, the French economist and planner, to state flatly: "Man is on the path toward integrating living tissue in the processes of physical mechanisms ... We shall have in the near future machines constituted at one and the same time of metal and of living substances ..." In the light of this, he says, "The human body itself takes on new meaning."

Like the geography of the planet, the human body has until now represented a fixed point in human experience, a "given." Today we are fast approaching the day when the body can no longer be regarded as fixed. Man will be able, within a reasonably short period, to redesign not merely individual bodies, but the entire human race.

In 1962 Drs. J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick received the Nobel prize for describing the DNA molecule. Since then advances in genetics have come tripping over one another at a rapid pace. Molecular biology is now about to explode from the laboratories. New genetic knowledge will permit us to tinker with human heredity and manipulate the genes to create altogether new versions of man.

One of the more fantastic possibilities is that man will be able to make biological carbon copies of himself. Through a process known as "cloning" it will be possible to grow from the nucleus of an adult cell a new organism that has the same genetic characteristics of the person contributing the cell nucleus. The resultant human "copy" would start life with a genetic endowment identical to that of the donor, although cultural differences might thereafter alter the personality or physical development of the clone.

Cloning would make it possible for people to see themselves born anew, to fill the world with twins of themselves. Cloning would, among other things, provide us with solid empirical evidence to help us resolve, once and for all, the ancient controversy over "nature vs. nurture" or "heredity vs. environment." The solution of this problem, through the determination of the role played by each, would be one of the great milestones of human intellectual development. Whole libraries of philosophical speculation could, by a single stroke, be rendered irrelevant. An answer to this question would open the way for speedy, qualitative advances in psychology, moral philosophy and a dozen other fields.

But cloning could also create undreamed of complications for the race. There is a certain charm to the idea of Albert Einstein bequeathing copies of himself to posterity. But what of Adolf Hitler? Should there be laws to regulate cloning? Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg, a scientist who takes his social responsibility very seriously, believes it conceivable that those most likely to replicate themselves will be those who are most narcissistic, and that the clones they produce will also be narcissists.