Thomas A. Shannon - Genetics: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy

Francis Fukuyama

I was born in 1952, right in the middle of the American baby boom. For any person growing up as I did in the middle decades of the 20th century, the future and its terrifying possibilities were defined by two books, George Orwells 1984 (1949) and Aldous Huxleys Brave New World (1932).

The two books were far more prescient than anyone realized at the time, because they were centered on two different technologies that would in fact emerge and define the world over the next two generations. The novel 1984 was about what we now call information technology: Central to the success of the vast, totalitarian empire that had been set up over Oceania was a device called the telescreen, a wall-sized flat-panel display that could simultaneously send and receive images from each individual household to a hovering Big Brother.

Brave New World , by contrast, was about the other big technological revolution about to take place, that of biotechnology. Bokanovskification, the hatching of people not in wombs but, as we now say, in vitro; the drug soma, which gave people instant happiness; the feelies, in which sensation was simulated by implanted electrodes; and the modification of behavior through constant subliminal repetition and, when that didnt work, through the administration of various artificial hormones.

With at least a half-century separating us from the publication of these books, we can see that, while the technological predictions they made were startlingly accurate, the political predictions of the first book, 1984 , were entirely wrong. The year 1984 came and went, with the United States still locked in a cold-war struggle with the Soviet Union. That year saw the introduction of a new model of the IBM personal computer and the beginning of what became the PC revolution. But instead of becoming an instrument of centralization and tyranny, it led to just the opposite: the democratization of access to information and the decentralization of politics. Instead of Big Brother watching everyone, people could use the PC and Internet to watch Big Brother, as governments everywhere were driven to publish more information on their own activities.

Just five years after 1984, in a series of dramatic events that would earlier have seemed like political science fiction, the Soviet Union and its empire collapsed, and the totalitarian threat that Orwell had so vividly evoked vanished. People were again quick to point out that those two eventsthe collapse of totalitarian empires and the emergence of the personal computer, as well as of other forms of inexpensive information technology, from TVs and radios to faxes and e-mailwere not unrelated.

The political prescience of the other great dystopia, Brave New World, remains to be seen. Many of the technologies that Huxley envisioned, like in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, psychotropic drugs, and genetic engineering for the manufacture of children, are already here or just over the horizon. But this revolution has only just begun.