Word: 20th
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Ring farewell to the century of physics, the one in which we split the atom and turned silicon into computing power. It's time to ring in the century of biotechnology. Just as the discovery of the electron in 1897 was a seminal event for the 20th century, the seeds for the 21st century were spawned in 1953, when James Watson blurted out to Francis Crick how four nucleic acids could pair to form the self-copying code of a DNA molecule. Now we're just a few years away from one of the most important breakthroughs of all time...
...20th century medicine did little to increase the natural life-span of healthy humans. The next medical revolution will change that, because genetic engineering has the potential to conquer cancer, grow new blood vessels in the heart, block the growth of blood vessels in tumors, create new organs from stem cells and perhaps even reset the primeval genetic coding that causes cells...
...able to create artificial intelligences that think and experience consciousness in ways that are indistinguishable from a human brain. Eventually we might be able to replicate our own minds in a machine, so that we could live on without the "wetware" of a biological brain and body. The 20th century's revolution in infotechnology will thereby merge with the 21st century's revolution in biotechnology...
...colon cancer. But he's not too concerned. Thanks to the genetic revolution that swept over the pharmaceutical industry 30 years earlier, scientists have developed a variety of anticancer drugs that work far better, and with fewer side effects, than the old poison-and-burn treatments of the late 20th century...
...vast majority of his compatriots continue to revile him for causing their present woes--with the latest volume in his post-Politburo oeuvre. Titled Thoughts on the Past and the Future, the 300-page "textbook" consists of the former General Secretary's deep thoughts on his country and the 20th century as the millennium approaches. Although Columbia University Press is to publish an English-language edition in 1999, Gorby has little hope for redemption at home. The Russian-language run of Thoughts is embarrassingly small: just 10,000 copies have been printed. And although the book costs only about...