The Penguin History of the World

More dramatically, by the end of the 1980s there was underway a worldwide collaborative investigation, the Human Genome Project. Its almost unimaginably ambitious aim was the mapping of the human genetic apparatus. The position, structure and function of every human gene – of which there were said to be from 30,000 to 50,000 in every cell, each gene having up to 30,000 pairs of the four basic chemical units that form the genetic code – were to be identified. As the century closed, it was announced that the project had been completed. (Shortly afterwards, the sobering discovery was made that human beings possessed only about twice the number of genes as the fruit fly – substantially fewer than had been expected.) The door had been opened to a great future for manipulation of nature at a new level – and what that might mean was already visible in a Scottish laboratory in the form of the first successfully ‘cloned’ sheep. Already, too, the screening for the presence of defective genes is a reality and the replacement of some of them is possible. The social and medical implications are tremendous, as are the implications for history. Some of what has been discussed in the early chapters of this book could not have been known without DNA evidence.

By the dawn of the new century it was becoming clear that genetic engineering would shape a substantial part of our future, in spite of the controversy created by many research programmes in this field. The ‘new’ micro-organisms created by geneticists are now patentable and therefore commercially available in many parts of the world. Likewise, genetically modified crops are used to increase yields through the creation of more resistant and more productive strains, thereby giving some regions their first ever opportunity to become self-sufficient in staple foods. But while providing obvious benefits, biotechnology has also come under scrutiny for delivering food products that may not be safe and for the increasing dominance of large multi-national corporations in both research and production worldwide. Such concerns have, for obvious reasons, become particularly strong when genetic research on human material has been involved, such as in work on stem cells from embryos. Many scientists fail to realize how the matters they are dealing with raise immense concerns among the public, mostly because of warnings from the history of the twentieth century.

Progress in these matters has owed much of its startling rapidity to the availability of new computer power, another instance of the acceleration of scientific advance so as both to provide faster applications of new knowledge and to challenge more quickly the world of settled assumptions and landmarks with new ideas that must be taken into account by laymen. Yet it remains as hard as ever to see what such challenges imply or may mean. For all the huge recent advances in the life sciences, it is doubtful that even their approximate importance is sensed by more than tiny minorities, especially when they deal with the ultimate human questions that have been with us since the beginning of history: the creation of life and the avoidance of death.

For a brief period in the middle of the twentieth century the focus on the power of science shifted from the earth to the heavens. The exploration of space may well turn out one day to dwarf in significance other historical processes (discussed at greater length in this book) but as yet shows no sign of doing so. Yet it suggests that the capacity of human culture to meet unprecedented challenges is as great as ever and it has provided what is so far the most spectacular example of human domination of nature. For most people, the space age began in October 1957 when an unmanned Soviet satellite called Sputnik I was launched by rocket and could soon be discerned in orbit around the earth, emitting radio signals. Its political impact was vast: it shattered the belief that Soviet technology lagged significantly behind American. The full importance of the event, though, was still obscured because superpower rivalries swamped other considerations for most observers. In fact, it ended the era when the possibility of human travel in space could still be doubted. Thus, almost incidentally, it marked a break in historical continuity as important as the European discovery of the Americas, or the Industrial Revolution.