Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...course of 10 years, they say, the riddles of the cord have been solved. The question now is not what the treatments for an injured spine should be, but how best to implement them. At hospitals such as the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the University of Florida, human trials are already getting under way. Studies at other hospitals are sure to follow. Says Black: "The astounding progress over the past decade dwarfs the progress of the past 5,000 years." Reeve may not stand up the day he turns 50, but the real possibility does exist that he will...
Still, computer technology can dramatically extend the physician's ability to treat diseases, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the operating room. Already, information from CAT scans is routinely used to reproduce detailed views of human anatomy in three dimensions. Soon engineers will perfect the tools that allow surgeons to simulate an operation realistically--down to the resistance of skin against scalpel...
...places like M.I.T., Princeton University and Carnegie Mellon, who are already redefining the meaning of the word miniature. The prefix nano- refers to a billionth part of a unit--the size range these visionaries are talking about. Already, nanotechnologists have built gears and rotors far thinner than a human hair and tiny molecular "motors" only 50 atoms long...
...different by then. Now here's the revolutionary (or should I say evolutionary) news: sex will seem a lot less necessary than it does today. Having sex is too much fun for us to stop, but religious convictions aside, it will be more for recreation than procreation. Many human beings, especially those who are rich, vain and ambitious, will be using test tubes--not just to get around infertility and the lack of suitable partners, but to clone themselves and tinker with their genes...
Lots of creatures already reproduce without sex: whiptail lizards, aphids, dandelions, microscopic rotifers. And, of course, human beings. Since the birth of Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, in 1978, hundreds of thousands of human beings have been conceived in laboratory glassware rather than...