I know the tendency in society is to decry the current day. Everything was better years ago, and civilization is on its way to hell in a hand basket. Oh, if only we could go back in time and bask in the halcyon days of yore.
Think twice. The massive advances of the last hundred years are so staggering, it is practically impossible to imagine life without them.
Don’t believe me? Read on.
In 1909 there was no conception of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, which contains all the genetic instructions necessary for the functioning of all known living organisms. Mendelian Inheritance, the most advanced theory on the subject, had shown that traits of the parents were not irrevocably lost in their children through ‘blending’. The newly-minted Boveri–Sutton chromosome theory proposed a system for the propagation of the discrete units of information required by Mendel’s theories, but it would be decades before the actual regulating mechanism of almost all life on earth would be discovered.
This knowledge translated into a landslide of advances across almost every scientific discipline.
Syphilis, small pox, yellow fever, polio, diphtheria, measles, mumps, rubella and a mountain of other horribly debilitating and often lethal diseases flourished one hundred years ago. Vaccination as a science exploded in the 1900s, as understanding increased of how viruses and bacteria function. Untold numbers of lives had been saved.
Norman Borlaug, the agronomist and geneticist who pioneered specially-bred wheat across the third world, is credited with saving a billion humans from starving to death. Today genetically-engineered food, while still frightening to some, has massively increased crop yields and expanded the nutritional quality of several staple foods, thus supporting the 6 billion humans on the earth.
2 Comments
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