Word: wilmut
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Dates: during 1997-1997
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...doesn't expect Dr. Frankenstein to show up in wool sweater, baggy parka, soft British accent and the face of a bank clerk. But there in all banal benignity he was: Dr. Ian Wilmut, the first man to create fully formed life from adult body parts since Mary Shelley's mad scientist...
...creator wore chinos. Wilmut may not look the part, but he plays it. He took a cell nucleus from a six-year-old ewe, fashioned from it a perfect twin--adding the nice Frankenstein touch of passing an electric charge through the composite cell to get it growing--and called it Dolly...
...what hath Wilmut wrought? A fully formed, perfectly healthy mammal--a mammal!--born from a single adult cell. Not since God took Adam's rib and fashioned a helpmate for him has anything so fantastic occurred...
...still decades away from the prospect of creating human beings by injecting the DNA of a living person into an unfertilized egg. The challenges overcome by Dr. Wilmut pale in comparison to the obstacles presented by primates and people. Even optimistic scientists concede that creating Albert Einstein II is still a distant prospect (Never mind that Einstein is dead and cloning dead people will be even harder that duplicating their live counterparts...
...Wilmut's success is thrust upon all of us. Whether or not we approve of tampering with the fundamentals of life, there are people doing just that. Dolly triggers, perhaps irrationally, our fears that powerful ideas will make out future something we don't want it to be. Scientific discoveries have always done that, but this one comes with a sense of immediacy and at a time of growing concern that individual communities will be lost in a global economy...