From Alchemy To Algeny By Peggy Lindquist Drawing by Henk Pander In 1973, American scientists, splicing pieces of DNA from two unrelated organisms, created a new form of life, “ one that had never before existed on the face of the earth,” according to futurist philosopher Jeremy Rifkin in his newest book, Algeny. This achievement, he states, heralded the ability of the biologist “ . . . to manipulate, recombine and reorganize living tissue into new forms and shapes, just as his craftmen ancestors did by firing inanimate matter.” Algeny is a chart of an unknown sea, the future, and it is easy to imagine it laid with giant whirlpools, sea monsters and perhaps the edge of the world as we know it. Rifkin believes that we are in the riptide between the past Industrial Age and the future Bio- technical Age — between alchemy and algeny. The technological changes of the last two hundred years, every artifact of modern civilization, has been bought with “ hundres of millions of years of stored sun,” and this store of fossil fuels is nearly exhausted. With the depletion of these resources comes the end of what Rifkin calls the age of pyrotechnology, in which Researchers believe that when today’s babies are old enough to have children of their own, they may be able to select from a wide range of beneficial gene traits, from manual dexterity skills to improved memory retention capability.” humans altered the materials of the earth with fire to make better use of them. “ Humankind faces two crises simultaneously. The earth is running low on its stock of burnable energy and on the stock of living resources at the same time. We are at a turning point in the history of civilization, and it is at this critical juncture that a revolutionary new approach to organizing the planet is being advanced, an approach so overwhelming in scope that it will fundamentally alter humanity’s entire relationship to the globe. “ After thousands of years of engineering the cold remains of the earth into utilities, human beings are now setting out to engineer the internal biology of living organisms in the hope of staving off the crisis at hand and laying the base for a new world epoch. We are moving from the age of pyrotechnology to the age of biotechnology. The transition is indeed staggering.” As yet, we can only contemplate what this new epoch will bring. But Rifkin quotes a government study by the Office of Technology Assessment which predicts that bioengineering “ can play a major role in 26 Clinton St. Quarterly
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