Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
7
Visions and Re-visions: Life and the
Accident of Birth
Richard M. Zaner
In the late 1950s, the great English sci-fi writer James Blish wrote a
charming little novel suggestively titled
The Seedling Stars and Galactic
Cluster
.
1
It had a simple premise, as inventive as it was remarkable for
its prescience. Habitable planets for human beings had become premium,
for straightforward reasons. Interstellar travel had become routine even
as the population had long since burgeoned beyond Earth's and other
planets' resources. Most of the planets that were discovered, however,
turned out to be fiercely uninhabitable. Making them habitable required
immensely complicated, expensive, and only rarely effective labor, by
means of a process Blish called “terra-forming.” To make a place human-
friendly, in these terms, required either transforming that environment
and its atmosphere, or protecting people from its hazards by special shel-
ters, breathing apparatuses, and the like.
The science of biology, Blish also postulated, had undergone a sweep-
ing revolution—the beginnings of which were already apparent when his
novel appeared, and, as we have since become acutely aware, it is a rev-
olution matching if not surpassing the earlier one in physics. In the novel,
biological manipulations are routinely developed and designed for pop-
ulation projects using the most elementary reproductive life processes,
including cloning and other types of genetic engineering.
Blish's tale is delightful. In his imaginative hands, the deliberate, literal
redesigning of human individuals by other human individuals is an
accomplished fact. Changes are brought about that need neither cen-
turies of evolutionary change nor spontaneous mutation, only the inge-
nuity and sportive inventiveness of highly powerful biomedical scientists
possessing “the secret of life,” now avidly in pursuit of ever-new ways
to design people. Much of the same aim was overtly advocated in the
