Word: atomize
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Building a missile shield is a challenge on a par with building the atom bomb and putting a man on the moon. But those challenges were forged amid World War II and the cold war, when the White House, Congress and the public saw their achievement as high national priorities. There is no such consensus on national missile defense. Democrats are balking. Even the CIA's latest threat analysis says the most likely threats are not incoming missiles but rather such portable weapons of mass destruction as truck and suitcase bombs...
...November, Science ran a special issue on the present reality and the possibilities of nanotechnology, the building of complex structures atom by atom. Possible applications include quantum cryptography, exotic new materials and, of course, miniature computers...
...opponents of cloning aren't feeling particularly calm - the Roman Catholic Church joined in a somewhat unlikely alliance with biomedical researchers and medical ethicists in voicing fierce aversion to the scientists' plans. "Those who made the atom bomb went ahead in spite of knowing about its terrible destruction," Bishop Elio Sgreccia, head of the John Paul II Institute for Bioethics, told Reuters Friday. "But this doesn't mean that it was the best choice for humanity...
...what a shame this hypocrisy is, especially in this particular circumstance. We have harnessed the atom and mapped the genome, but public figures do not talk of our shared ancestry, or the hard and lucky road that we have drunkenly walked down to become sentient. We cannot refer to the rich history of our species, because the concept of that history is not by any means shared. How can we have a vision of the future of humanity without a coherent, rational concept of its past? But the real danger in this half-commitment, this milking of science without purchase...
...when Francis Collins became the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Craig Venter had not yet brazened his way onto center stage. At that point, what loomed before Collins was the challenge of pulling off a technological tour de force that many ranked alongside splitting the atom and landing men on the moon. "There is only one human genome project, and it will happen only once," Collins said at the time. "The chance to stand at the helm of that project and put my own personal stamp on it is more than I could imagine...