"Bruce Sterling - Our Neural Chernobyl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

OUR NEURAL CHERNOBYL
Bruce Sterling




The late twentieth century, and the early years of our
own millennium, form, in retrospect, a single era. This
was the Age of the Normal Accident, in which people
cheerfully accepted technological risks that today would
seem quite insane.
Chernobyls were astonishingly frequent during this
footloose, not to say criminally negligent, period. The
nineties, with their rapid spread of powerful industrial
technologies to the developing world, were a decade of
frightening enormities, including the Djakarta supertanker
spill, the Lahore meltdown, and the gradual but
devastating mass poisonings from tainted Kenyan
contraceptives.
Yet none of these prepared humankind for the
astonishing global effects of biotechnology's worst
disaster: the event that has come to be known as the
"neural chernobyl."
We should be grateful, then, that such an authority as
the Novel Prize-winning systems neurochemist Dr. Felix
Hotton should have turned his able pen to the history of
Our Neural Chernobyl (Bessemer, December 2056,
$499.95). Dr. Hotton is uniquely qualified to give us this
devastating reassessment of the past's wrongheaded
practices. For Dr. Hotton is a shining exemplar of the new
"Open-Tower Science," that social movement within the
scientific community that arose in response to the New
Luddism of the teens and twenties.
Such pioneering Hotton papers as тАЬThc Locus
Cocrulcus Efferent Network: What in Heck Is It There
For?" and "My Grand Fun Tracing Neural Connections
With Tetramethylbenzidine" established this new,
relaxed, and triumphantly subjective school of scientific
exploration.
Today's scientist is a far cry from the white-coated
sociopath of the past. Scientists today are democratized,
media-conscious, fully integrated into the mainstream of
modern culture. Today's young people, who admire
scientists with a devotion once reserved for pop stars, can
scarcely imagine the situation otherwise. But in Chapter
1, "The Social Roots of Gene-Hacking," Dr. Hotton
brings turn-of-the-cenrury attitudes into startling relief.
This was the golden age of applied biotech. Anxious
attitudes toward "genetic tampering" changed rapidly
when the terrifying AIDS pandemic was finally broken by