According to bioindustry analysts, by 2025, some 70 per cent of the industrial economy will have, at its base, some form of biotechnology. The Ethics of Engineering Life. Herbert Boyer, a researcher at the University of California, and Stanley Cohen, at Stanford University, succeeded in ferrying a recombinant DNA molecule containing DNA sequences from a toad and a bacterium into a living bacterial cell. There, to almost everyone's astonishment, the foreign toad DNA was copied and biologically expressed in protein. For the first time, scientists had choreographed genes from the cells of an evolutionarily advanced species.
Nothing seems impossible.
Civilisation, finally, will be able to control its biological destiny. By escaping from their genetic straitjackets and the constraints of nature, people will find a new kind of freedom - a freedom to overcome disease and hunger, to have an improved standard of health, to ecologically restore the planet and, of course, to live longer. This is because of the enormity of the ethical dilemmas and inherent dangers of reconstructing nature through remoulding living substance. For others, profound ethical dilemmas of genetic engineering are posed by H.G.Wells ' novel The Island of Dr Moreau, with the extraordinary exploits of Moreau's vivisection of animals to remake them human-like. And for those concerned about efforts to recapture the evolutionary past, Jurassic Park provokes images of unbounded nightmare.