Word: maye
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...modern world, you can even have sex and parenthood without suffering the bit in between. Some Hollywood actresses may have satisfied the urge for mothering by electing to adopt children rather than spoil their figures (as they see it) by childbearing. For people as beautiful as this, the temptation to adopt a clone (reared in a surrogate womb) could one day be irresistible...
Once cloning loses its stigma, the urge to tinker with the genes of offspring may not be far behind. As Cambridge molecular biologist Graeme Mitchison says, "We can all be beautiful--no baldness, no wimps with glasses, no knobby knees." Olivia Judson, author of a forthcoming book called Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice for All Creation, begs to differ: "If there is such hostility to genetically modified soya, it doesn't bode well for genetically modified people...
...undo evolution, and we haven't found a way to fool Mother Nature--yet. But before the 21st century is half over, with the body's fat-centric metabolism laid bare and the ability to manipulate genes part of medicine's standard tool kit, the trend may finally stop. Chubbiness may not disappear, but it could become optional. A future without Richard Simmons' commercials would be a wonderful future indeed...
These concerns may seem counterintuitive. We evolved as hunter-gatherers and ate meat for a hundred millenniums before modern times. It's natural for us to eat meat, one might say. But today's factory-raised, transgenic, chemical-laden livestock are a far cry from the wild animals our ancestors hunted. When we cleverly shifted from wildland hunting and gathering to systematic herding and farming, we changed the natural balances irrevocably. The shift enabled us to produce food surpluses, but the surpluses also allowed us to reproduce prodigiously. When we did, it became only a matter of time before...
...covering more and more of the planet with our cities, farms and waste, we have jeopardized other top predators that need space as well. Tigers and panthers are being squeezed out and may not last the coming century. We, at least, have the flexibility--the omnivorous stomach and creative brain--to adapt. We can do it by moving down the food chain: eating foods that use less water and land, and that pollute far less, than cows and pigs do. In the long run, we can lose our memory of eating animals, and we will discover the intrinsic satisfactions...