{"id":71679,"date":"2012-06-26T21:58:56","date_gmt":"2012-06-27T05:58:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=17055"},"modified":"2012-06-26T21:58:56","modified_gmt":"2012-06-27T05:58:56","slug":"technology-that-brought-down-civilization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/06\/26\/technology-that-brought-down-civilization\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology that brought down civilization"},"content":{"rendered":"

The IVF Panic: ‘All Hell Will Break Loose, Politically and Morally, All Over the World’<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

For many, IVF smacked of a moral overstep — or at least of a potential one. In\u00a0a 1974 article<\/a>\u00a0headlined “The Embryo Sweepstakes,”\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0considered the ethical implications of what it called “the brave new baby”: the child “conceived in a test tube and then planted in a womb.” (The scare phrase in that being not “test tube” so much as “a womb” and its menacingly indefinite article.) And no less a luminary than James Watson — yes,\u00a0that<\/em><\/a>\u00a0James Watson –\u00a0publicly decried the procedure<\/a>, telling a Congressional committee in 1974 that a successful embryo transplant would lead to “all sorts of bad scenarios.”<\/p>\n

Specifically, he predicted: “All hell will break loose, politically and morally, all over the world.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The past is not always prologue, but it’s very instructive to look at newspapers from a given time period and see what the public mood was. Fear is a natural human reaction to new technology. My general bias is that technology itself usually isn’t as disruptive as social innovation<\/a>. That being said, when<\/i><\/b> technology is genuinely revolutionary it can have a much bigger impact<\/a> than …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The IVF Panic: ‘All Hell Will Break Loose, Politically and Morally, All Over the World’:
\nFor many, IVF smacked of a moral overstep — or at least of a potential one. In\u00a0a 1974 article\u00a0headlined “The Embryo Sweepstakes,”\u00a0…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71679"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71721,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71679\/revisions\/71721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}