11 February 1998, 1431 words
Sir Michael Atiyah, an eminent British mathematician who last month delivered a lecture titled "Science and Society in the next Millennium" at the UWI St Augustine campus, says that it is virtually impossible to predict how science will change the world in the 21st century.
This is a view shared by most scientists, not only because scientists, according to Atiyah, embrace "logic, humility and are cautious in making predictions" but because science does not always progress in a linear fashion. Even 100 years ago, very few people, if any, could have predicted the kind of world we now live in: 600 million motor vehicles, a military capacity to destroy all life on the planet, over three billion TV viewers, almost instantaneous mail service, and the Internet.
It took human beings two million years of evolution to reach our present level of civilization. Yet this actual stage we live in now was achieved in about 2,000 years (if you mark the beginning of Western science from the ancient Greeks) or a little over four centuries (if you mark it from the mathematical theories of Sir Isaac Newton) or a mere 50 years (if you mark it from the invention of the first all-purpose, all-electronic digital computer, ENIAC - Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator.) If the timeline of evolution of life on Earth is marked, let us say, by the height of the Eiffel Tower, human beings are the skin of the paint at the top of the tower. That means that indoor plumbing is an electron in a molecule in the paint at the top of the tower.
According to Atiyah, the world will face three major challenges in the 21st century. The first will be preventing a nuclear war; the second will be population control; and the third will be reducing economic inequity. In all this, science will play a key part. But, because science has also helped exacerbate these problems, there are people who feel that scientific research should be politically controlled (indeed, some people feel scientific research should be stopped altogether.)
This age-old debate - between the exclusive pursuit of knowledge and the supposed bliss of ignorance - has gained even more momentum in the past year with the birth of "Dolly", the cloned sheep. Atiyah suggests that the two major scientific advances in the next century will be in biotechnology and in information technology. The former area raises serious ethical issues while the latter one raises a political hornets' nest. Several developed countries have already passed laws outlawing human cloning, while software has already been developed so that parents can control what their children access on the Internet.
Recent developments suggest that Atiyah's speculations are on the right track. Take information. Two separate research groups - one led by Anton Zielinger at Innsbruck University, and the other by Francesco de Martini at La Sapienza University in Rome - recently managed to teleport a single particle of light (a photon.) Now this doesn't mean that transporters of the type used on the starship Enterprise will become a reality soon or, indeed, ever. But it does bring scientists one step closer to building a quantum computer i.e. a computer which would calculate not by using ones and zeros like normal computers do, but computers which actually have bits existing on both states at the same time. Such computers would have far more calculating speed and memory capacity than even the largest supercomputers today (and would probably fit on your desktop.) The consequences of such a drastic leap in computer power are unpredictable. At the very least, computers could begin designing and building more advanced versions of themselves (because they would be able to do complex mathematical calculations than humans even with today's computers cannot do) and at the very most, computers may even attain self-awareness.
Yet, extraordinary as this may be, it pales before the possibilities of advanced biotechnology. It is in biotechnology that the advances which may entirely change human existence are occurring. Consider what has already happened in cloning. At the Juntendo University in Japan, a team led by Dr. Yushinoro Kuwabara has perfected an artificial womb in which premature goat foetuses have been successfully brought to term. This means that a woman could eventually have a child without ever experiencing either sex or pregnancy. And, at the Bath University in England, Dr. Jonathan Slack has created headless frog embryos, which means that a person can create a headless clone of himself in order to have a "bank" of perfectly-matched spare organs or limbs in the case of injury.
But it is an American physicist named Richard Seed who has outraged many, including the editors of the Trinidad Guardian, by announcing plans to set up a chain of human cloning centres around the world. "Seed's plan to interfere with, indeed derail, the natural process of human procreation laid down by the Creator must be frightening to many as it appears to fly in the face of God Himself," declared the Guardian in its editorial of January 14. Of course, what the Trinidad Guardian says isn't going to make a whit of difference to anyone who matters, but the irrational tone of the editorial is a precise indicator of the ignorant opposition which all the new sciences will face (and have always faced from religious authorities over the past centuries.) If cloning is unethical, its opponents will have to give good reasons why - and invoking God is not a good reason. After all, one could argue that if God objected to cloning He would have ensured that the secrets of DNA would never have been unraveled. If the reply to that is that God gave us free will, then that must mean we are free to interfere with creation as we choose. (If we are not, then we don't have free will, thus returning us to the argument's starting-point.)
But, oddly, there has been a recent biotechnological discovery which has far more potential than cloning to change the world, yet which has received almost no attention. This has to do with the secret of aging. It was only a few years ago that biologists found that DNA strands called telemores shorten each time a cell divides. It is this rate of shortening which apparently determines the rate at which one ages. (For instance, tennis star Jimmy Connors who, in a game where many retire by 27, remained top-ranked up to 39 - probably has telemores which shorten very slowly.) The researchers at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research in the UK. have discovered an enzyme called telomerase which helps telemores strands to regrow. Moreover - and this is where it gets really interesting - scientists have recently found the enzyme which lets cancer cells multiply indefinitely. There is one word which means indefinite cell multiplication: "immortality."
Cancer cells become tumours because they do not die. Only now are scientists beginning to understand how. More significantly, the researchers were able to use the cancer cells' enzyme to multiply healthy cells. If this process could be reproduced in the living human body, it would mean the perfect healing of injuries, regrowing of damaged or diseased tissue and organs and, eventually, immortality. And there is nothing which is more certain to completely transform the world as we know it.
Although it is now possible to clone a physically identical copy of oneself, such a clone will by no means be a duplicate. It will be younger and have a different mind and personality. But an immortal person is...immortal. Even as you are reading this, the possibility exists that the most powerful and wealthy persons alive today - Bill Gates or the Sultan of Brunei or Oprah Winfrey, say - may be still alive and physically unaged 100 years from now. All it requires is for the fountain of youth enzyme to be perfected while these persons are still alive. And, if that happens, all previous divisions which so many human beings embrace - differences of race, ethnicity, class and creed - all these will pale in comparison to the difference between those of us who are mortal and those who are not.
Science, you see, is essentially about mastery: gaining control over our environment and over ourselves. Because of science, millions of human beings have choices today which even our most fortunate ancestors did not: choices about where to live, what to eat, where to travel, who to talk to, who to marry. And immortality offers the ultimate choice: to die or not to die.
Which would you choose?
Copyright ©1998, Kevin Baldeosingh