Word: promethean
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...until decades later, in the age of genetic engineering, would the Promethean power unleashed that day become vivid. But from the beginning, the Watson and Crick story had traces of hubris. As told in Watson's classic memoir, The Double Helix, it was a tale of boundless ambition, impatience with authority and disdain, if not contempt, for received opinion. ("A goodly number of scientists," Watson explained, "are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid.") Yet the Watson and Crick story is also one of sublime harmony, an example, as a colleague put it, of "that marvelous resonance...
...perhaps the greatest architect of the century: Frank Lloyd Wright. The decade's supreme collective artifact, in steel and stone, was, of course, Manhattan itself, with its immense towers--Chrysler, Empire State and the rest--rising like blasts of congealed and shining energy from the bedrock, a spectacle of Promethean ambition and daring...
...race had been won, the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures instead of dead matter created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race. The rational mind had won the most Promethean of its conquests over nature, and had put into the hands of common man the fire and force of the sun itself...
This Saturday was Homecoming for Dartmouth. The evening before, a Promethean bonfire lit the cold sky amidst shouts of "Harvard sucks" and "No mercy...
Artists in all media know that a touch of imperfection--a barely missed beat, Streisand's nose--can breathe life into a work. But perfectibility is the Promethean temptation of Hollywood's computer-graphics revolution, which is giving movies a glossy hyperreality unseen since the heyday of the studio system while distracting us from their essential soullessness. And if the computer's single greatest achievement to date has been the astonishingly life-like dinosaurs of the astonishingly lifeless Jurassic Park and The Lost World, creating digital humans of similar believability remains the industry's Holy Grail...