Word: atomics
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...this was no ordinary dinner, no ordinary time. The date was Jan. 24, 1998, three days after an atom bomb named Monica was dropped on the capital. The hosts were Al and Tipper Gore; House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt and his wife Jane were their guests. Washington was radioactive--the press was on a round-the-clock Clinton death watch--and there was private tension as well. A month before, Gephardt had delivered a scathing speech at Harvard, attacking Democrats who practice "the politics of small ideas" and replace compassion with "momentary calculation." Everyone knew whom he was talking about...
...when 01-01-00 rolls around. Whether we'll be glad we were panicked into action or we'll disown the doomsayers depends on how diligently the programmers do their job in the next 50 weeks. One thing is already clear. In a century in which man split the atom, spliced genes and turned silicon into data, the tale of Y2K--how we ignored it for 40 years, then flew into a tizzy--will not be remembered as our finest hour...
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...
Important as it was, the job would take some time. Unlike the atom bomb or the space race, there was no Hitler or Khrushchev who threatened to get there first. Without such external dangers forcing them to pull out all the stops, federally funded genome-project scientists figured they could move at their own pace; they would finish up in 2005 or thereabouts...
...world of genetics. In 1948, biology was an all too descriptive discipline near the bottom of science's totem pole, with physics at its top. By then Einstein's turn-of-the-century ideas about the interconversion of matter and energy had been transformed into the powers of the atom. If not held in check, the weapons they made possible might well destroy the very fabric of civilized human life. So physicists of the late 1940s were simultaneously revered for making atoms relevant to society and feared for what their toys could do if they were to fall into...