Some History Should be Repeated

"Some History Should be Repeated," by Carl B. Feldbaum, Science, Feb. 8, 2002. An excerpt appears below.

In the 1970s, a controversial new technology raised specters of Frankenstein's monster, the hatcheries of Brave New World, and eugenics. Headlines prompted congressional debate on stringent regulations, moratoriums, and even bans. The "mad science" to which I’ve alluded is not human cloning, although the same cultural bogeymen have been invoked in that debate, but the science of recombinant DNA. Then as now, critics and politicians feared science was going too far too fast, that we were only the seeming masters of technologies that would overwhelm us and our progeny.

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