The century of invention: Creation and destruction

By Richard Ingham

PARIS (AFP): The 20th century has been an astonishing breeding ground for ideas, yielding inventions that have rendered life easier, healthier and longer than ever before, and given mankind the means to destroy itself.

Picture an inventor from 1900 who by some magic could catch a glimpse of life a century later.

He would recognize some machines, such as the car, the telephone or plane, that would have evolved from innovations of a century ago.

Some, such as spacecraft, lasers or deep-sea submarines, would have existed only as fanciful notions in the minds of futurists of his time.

Yet others would have inconceivable to him: the computer, the Internet, nuclear power, genetic engineering and many more.

The past 100 years began with the horse and carriage; the ink pen and ledger; knowledge that was confined to libraries and a tiny elite; and diseases, epidemics and deformities that could brutally truncate lives.

It ends with robot emissaries sent from the Earth to the farthest bounds of the solar system; e-mail and live satellite TV; the democratization of knowledge, through the Internet; and medical breakthroughs that have made the plague, smallpox and cataracts the stuff of bible stories.

And more miracles are in the pipeline, as the century of physics yields to the century of biotechnology.

Some time in the next year, molecular biologists will publish the first rough draft of the genome, the map of what, chemically, makes up a human being.

"In just a few short years, we will have moved from knowing almost nothing about our genes to knowing everything," says the science writer Matt Ridley, in an upcoming book, Genome -- The autobiography of a species in 23 chapters.

"I genuinely believe that we are living through the greatest intellectual moment in history. Bar none."

Twenty-five years from now, according to some predictions, DNA chips could analyze a patient's genetic makeup, allowing doctors to administer genetically-tailored medicine to cure types of cancer, hemophilia, heart disease and sickle-cell anemia.

A vaccination or treatment may have been found for AIDS and for complex brain disorders, such as Parkinson's, Huntington's and mad-cow disease.

Nano-robots, the size of a germ, could swim through your bloodstream, measuring your body's vital signs or scouring the arteries free of dangerous deposits.

Yet there is also a dark side.

The 20th century began promisingly, with a shining faith in science as a vehicle for human progress. As Jules Verne optimistically declared, "whatever one man is capable of conceiving, other men will be able to achieve."

But two World Wars and a Cold War harnessed many brilliant minds to the business of destruction rather than progress.

On the brink of the 21st century, the attitude towards what goes on behind laboratory walls is frequently sowed with fear and cynicism.

Two of the greatest breakthroughs in knowledge -- atomic fission and DNA -- have brought two of the greatest perils: the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the risk of human cloning.

"Science has increased man's control over nature, and might therefore be supposed likely to increase his happiness and well- being," the philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote.

"This would be the case if men were rational, but in fact they are bundles of passions and instincts."