International Horizons in the Life Sciences

AT THIS VERY MOMENT, we are living in one of the most critical and exciting periods in the history of biology, of mankind, and of life as a whole. With this opinion, which has recently been expressed by a number of biologists, I am forced to agree. In biology itself, the breaking of the DNA code is giving us a key to the nature of life. This research is establishing a standard of biological activity which is just as fundamental to our science as is the periodic table to chemistry. At the same time, biologists in many fields are reaching beyond the barriers which constrained their predecessors and are making spectacular advances by combining data from different disciplines. Taxonomists are enriching and modernizing their field with chemistry and statistics. Morphologists are supplementing their images of dead, fixed, and stained tissues with those obtained from living tissues raised under carefully controlled conditions, and by means of the electron microscope are establishing connections between overall structure and the molecular elements of which cells are composed. Physiologists are becoming increasingly aware of the importance to them not only of a more complete understanding of life processes in terms of chemistry and physics but also of the value of comparing similar processes in different organisms. As a result of such efforts, disciplines of biology which are basically synthetic, such as cell biology, morphogenesis, and evolution, are flourishing as never before. In the history of mankind our earth has entered not only the atomic age but also the age of negligible distances. With jet transportation a person can go from one part of the earth to any other so rapidly that neither mileage nor time are limiting factors. As one scientist remarked to me, modern distances should be reckoned not in miles or even hours but in dollars. (Another scientist has remarked on hearing this comment that "unless the distance in dollars is a minus quantity, I don't go.") We have also entered the age of potential freedom from drudgery for all mankind. If known inventions and technological accomplishments are exploited to their fullest extent, if the world's resources can be fully utilized and conserved, and if the growth of the human population can be controlled so as to maintain a stable, permanent equilibrium with our resources, a society can be created in which no man will need to labor for long hours in order to receive enough return to keep him barely above starvation. Men can no longer say, as did philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Tolstoy, that many of their fellow men must work for long hours with little hope of reward in order that a small group of fortunate intellectuals may be free to enrich the lives of mankind in the present by literature, music, and the arts and to make plans for improving the lot of future generations by studying history, political science, and philosophy. At the same time, this potential freedom from drudgery is accompanied by actual threats to our society more serious than any which humanity has faced in its past history. The ever present threat of wholesale atomic destruction is only one of these. Equally dangerous, but more subtle and insidious, is the unbalance being caused by the rapid increase of social and economic standards of living in many parts of the earth, particularly in temperate regions, while other regions are unable to break loose from an age-old pattern of poverty and social inequality, just as their populations are increasing in an explosive manner. This unbalance threatens to bring to the world a new inequity of social structure in which nations of economic aristocrats, mostly in temperate Europe and America, will be opposed by geographic slums covering hundreds of thousands of square miles and including millions of human beings who will be living in conditions of degradation, semistarvation, and hopelessness as severe as those which were endured by the slave classes of past empires. The natural concern over this possibility on the part of leaders and informed citizens of these less fortunate nations and their desperate attempts to avoid disaster by any means available to them are causing much of the world's present instability.