552
PARTISAN REVIEW
has been theoretically examined. The amount of matter and energy you
need for communications and computations is not quite zero, but we
have more than enough material on Earth to keep these trends going
well through the twenty-first century.
Human life expectancy is another one of these exponential trends. In
the eighteenth century, we added a few days to the human life
expectancy every year. In the nineteenth century, we added a few weeks
every year. Now we're adding over a hundred days per year to human
life expectancy, due to the revolutions in rational drug design, thera–
peutic cloning of cells and tissues, and genomics and proteomics, which
are in their early stages. The next ten years is going to be a real golden
age of biotechnology. Nanotechnology and some of these other things
will hit their stride later on. Many observers, including myself, believe
that within ten years we will be adding more than a year-every year–
to human life expectancy. So as you go forward a year, human life
expectancy will move away from us.
If
you can hang in there for
another ten years, you may actually experience the remarkable century
ahead.
More information is available at
. including an
essay called "The Law of Accelerating Returns." There are about five
hundred essays by seventy thinkers on different aspects of these issues .
Gerald Weissmann: The
title of my talk is "The Year of the Genome: No
Ideas But in Things."
Since the Renaissance there have been no complete breaks in the
continuity of the sciences comparable to those sterile periods which
have, from time to time, interrupted the progress of the arts.
-Hans Zinsser,
As I Remember Him
(194I).
In the last half century science has landed on the moon, sampled
Mars, and cracked the human genome. Meanwhile, progress in the
arts-to echo Zinsser-has been interrupted by the age of Jacques Der–
rida and Jeff Koons . Looking back, I wonder how many would now
agree that a symposium called "Our Country and Our Culture" was the
seminal intellectual event of
1952.
A better contender might be the
three-dimensional model of DNA. The double helix was the brainchild
of a raw, Midwestern post-doc and a renegade physicist in the capital of
crystallography, Cambridge. After Maurice Wilkins gave a long peek at
Rosalind Franklin's X-ray data in
1952,
James Watson and Francis
Crick came up with a model for DNA which correctly placed the phos-
