Man's Future and the "Secret of Life"

MAN'S FUTURE AND THE "SECRET OF LIFE"* BERNARD S. STRAUSSj Since I was asked to speak to you due to my "expertise," I will discuss the question ofwhether the new advances in biology are likely to significantly alter man's future. Are we on the threshold ofa utopia either now or when we have solved the technological problem of the "Secret of Life?" What would be the nature of such a utopia, and are biological changes in the nature ofman necessary for its attainment? Would it, like the utopias ofold, require the rule ofan elite and, if so, what kind ofelite and how is such a group to be educated? My title has the "secret oflife" in quotation marks. Let me briefly state what I mean by the phrase and the punctuation. The question "what is life?" seems natural to us because, in the world of nature, living things appear to be surrounded by an aura of mystery and life seems a phenomenon to be explained. But the idea oflife as extraordinary is fairly recent in the history ofideas [i]. For most ofthe time that man has thought about himself, the fact oflife was taken for granted, while death was seen as the extraordinary event which demanded explanation. The major philosophic concept ofthe natural world was that ofthe Great Chain ofBeing, which supposed a hierarchy extending from the simplest, inanimate molecule to God, the creator ofthe ladder, with no definite break between the lifeless and life [2, 3]. Some modern evolutionists still adhere to at least parts ofthis scheme. Teilhard de Chardin, for example, endows atoms and molecules with some ofthe "freedom" oflife [4]. Most ofus, however, no longer consider such views seriously.We admit a gap between living and nonliving matter. Furthermore, since interpretation ofthe fossil record shows that species died as weñ as individuals, we suppose that there is not a chain ofbeing but, rather, a state ofthe world * Delivered at the Phi Beta Kappa initiation, University ofChicago,June ii, 1969. f Department ofMicrobiology, University ofChicago. 43 at any one time [5]. Organisms on earth at any one time are the result of natural forces, acting in the first instance on inanimate matter. Thus, instead ofseeing elements oflife in all parts ofthe natural world, we think oflife asjustone aspect ofthepossible arrangement ofinanimate matter. It is in this vein that biologists speak ofthe secret oflife. On this level, the question "what is life?" is a technical one because it refers to the arrangement ofinanimatematterwhichresults ingrowth and replication, motility and metabolism, the properties we recognize as the characteristics oflife. It is in this very restricted and technical sense that I now speak of the ' secret oflife." It is in this sense that some ofmy colleagues can ask me whether any life has crawled out ofthe test tube today. It is in this sense, too, that we may not even immediately recognize the secret oflife when we discover it. It may have occurred several years ago when an RNA virus was caused to replicate outside its natural host [6] or two years ago when a DNA virus was replicated [7]. To understand the difficulty in recognizing the moment of artificial creation, it is necessary to understand the present state ofbiology and its relation to scientific thought in this century. For the first half of the twentieth century, it was the discoveries in physics that determined our changing view ofthe natural world. Our view ofNature was dominated by the concepts ofcosmology and the revelations ofnuclear physics. With the advent ofnuclear weapons, the outlook for man's future changed, and we are now in a period in whichbiology seems tohave capturedthe imagination . What has happened in biology over the past thirty years is fairly easily stated.The one unifyingprinciple inbiology is theprinciple ofevolution . It connects theliving organisms now on earthwith what haspreceded them and with what may follow. The assumption here is that we can fully understand the present only by understanding the past. Thus, unlike the physical sciences, biology is necessarily historical. Since the time of Mendel, we have known that the characteristics of organisms are transmitted from generation to generation in units, first called genes by Johannsen in 1909 [8...