But technicians now manipulated cells in animals to make them manufacture insulin (for diabetics) and human growth hormones and a treatment for leukemia. Doctors started using genes (usually experimentally) to revive dead heart tissue and attack cancer cells. And in labs around the world scientists were attempting to grow human vessels, valves, and muscle in their labs.
And then, specific knowledge of our genes dramatically increased. In 1990 biologists in America had begun to map our genome: all the genes in human DNA. A publicly sponsored Human Genome Project competed with a private company called Celera Genomics to be the first to map the genome. In the year 2003, much faster than expected, both of them finished. The rivals agreed that their products “complemented” each other, which laymen found a little hard to understand. In any case, now that so much was known about our genes, biotech companies suddenly discovered that there were more diseases potentially treatable with genes than they could take on all at once. They had to choose which targets they should aim at first.
Meantime what once had been the dream of crazy kings and ego-maniacs began to look dimly possible. Consider these events: 1953, artificial human insemination; 1978, a baby conceived in a test tube; 1984, a baby born from sperm that had been frozen; 1998, a U.S. scientist clones one of his own cells in a cow’s egg; 1990s, doctors test for defective genes, so that if there is a problem the mother may abort the fetus; 2001, a human embryo is cloned (for medical research) and develops to six cells before it dies. Was other human cloning on the way? Human cloning, even in the test tube, for research, was proving hard to do.
AS THE THIRD millennium began, humankind had reached the unreachable, worked the unworkable, feased the unfeasible. Among a host of other marvels we had learned to organize and make available the information gathered by six billion human beings. We had scouted in the Milky Way, learning more about the evolution of the universe, searching for the origins of elements and life, seeking possibly for other life and for some universal scheme of things. We had found the book of life, our genome, and were on the verge of using it to treat disease and lengthen life.
And what lay in our future? Wait, you say, no one knows the shape of things to come. Yes, that’s true. But the things that I will mention here are not prophecies but extrapolations. Given what has recently occurred, these things are likely to follow.
We will make computers out of molecules, yes molecules, that we turn “on” and “off.” These molecules may manage tiny robots swimming in our veins and doing chores. Computers will enable engineers to “see” the stresses in a beam and surgeons to “see” inside a brain. “Books” that you hold in your hand will contain the contents of libraries. We will fire a missile at a comet. We will fly to Mars, and some of us may even choose to live there. We’ll discover planets that look as if they could support life. We’ll learn astounding things about the universe.
Here’s more: parents won’t just take what comes; they will plan their babies, adding genes for beauty, brains, and longer life. We will live two or three times as long as we do now. We will order cells to grow new kidneys, hearts, or bones as needed, just as salamanders grow new tails. We will clone humans for medical research, and some will want to do it for other purposes.
What’s the point of making these extrapolations? I hope they help my readers to see the recent past (from World War II until today) in full. I would like you not only to see the changes in these decades as they happened — the usual perspective — but also to view them from the future by seeing what astounding outcomes they may lead to. This stereoscopic view should make this clear: in the decades after World War II our species crossed a line. Of course, as individual humans we didn’t change; we look and feel the way we did before. But as a species we achieved a previously undreamed-of mastery of life.
One sometimes hears that “Humans weren’t here at the beginning, and we won’t be here at the end.” But is that prediction true? One has to wonder: given our growing mastery, will our species ever let another species wipe us out? If any species does destroy us, it will surely be our own.
Epilogue: So Far So Good
From Labrador to Coral Sea
Our lives were stunted, bleak, unfree.
We shared our huts with rats and fleas
And lost our children to disease.
(Our holy men would sigh and nod
And tell us, “That’s the will of God.”)
But then, with steam, vaccines, and votes,
Our fortunes rose like tide-raised boats.
We’d more to eat; drew breath more years;
Dethroned (or worse) our tsars, emirs;
Sent men and mirrors as our eyes
To search the black galactic skies;
And in our cells, till then unseen,
We found our Fates, our djinns: our genes.
The world’s still cruel, that’s understood,
But once was worse. So far so good.
Recommended Reading
Chapter 1 We fill the earth.
For a general view of early human life, see Roger Lewin, In the Age of Humankind: A Smithsonian Book of Human Evolution (1988); and recent editions of John E. Pfeiffer, The Emergence of Humankind; and Bernard Campbell, ed., Humankind Emerging. The Pfeiffer and Campbell books are textbooks but never mind, they are also good reading.
Many books have illustrations of cave paintings. A good example is Mario Ruspoli’s The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographs (1987). Jean-Marie Chauvet, et al., Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave: The Oldest Known Paintings in the World (1996) is an engaging account of the finding of paintings.
Chapter 2 We gather by the rivers.
For Sumer, Samuel N. Kramer’s The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (1963) is a well-known scholar’s enthusiastic introduction. Leonard Cottrell, The Quest for Sumer (1965) tells how archaeologists rediscovered Sumer under silt and sand. The Gilgamesh epic offers a glimpse at what Sumerians believed about four thousand years ago.
For Egypt, try Leonard Cottrell, Life under the Pharaohs (1960); Zahi Hawass, The Mysteries of Abu Simbel: Ramesses II and the Temples of the Rising Sun (2000); and Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutankhamen: Life and Death of a Pharaoh (1984). And look for books with first-rate photos of Egyptian art.
Chapter 3 The wanderers settle down.
The first thing to read about ancient Israel is of course the Bible. I would read the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, through Kings 1 and 2, skipping Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and then the books of Job, Hosea, and Amos. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (1962) has helpful notes. Modern histories of ancient Israel abound. Antony Kamm, The Israelites: An Introduction (1999); and John Bright, A History of Israel (3rd ed., 1981) are good.
Chapter 4 Two ancient cities follow diverse paths.
Before looking at any books about the ancient Greeks by others, read what they wrote about themselves. Herodotus’s History and Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War (edited in translation by Richard Livingstone, 1943) are good reads, but they do have dry stretches. You may skip when bored. You won’t be tempted to skip when reading the tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripides, and especially Sophocles. You should also read at least a dialogue or two of Plato, especially Phaedo, which takes place on the last day of Socrates’s life, as he awaits his execution.
After sampling them, try one of these excellent short histories: H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (1951) — this is a gem; M. I. Finlay, The Ancient Greeks (1963); Peter D. Arnott, An Introduction to the Greek World (1967); or Peter Green, Ancient Greece: An Illustrated History (1973).
Chapter 5 China excels and endures.
Chinese history is so vast that approaching it is like trying to find the best route up a Himalayan mountain. Two historians who show nearly the whole bulk of it are John King Fairbank, in his China: A New History (1992); and Charles O. Hucker, in China’s Imperial Past: An Introduction to Chinese History and Culture (1975). Jonathan D. Spence’s many books on Chinese history are
interesting and readable. When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (1994), by Louise L. Levathes, delivers even more than the title promises.
See also the 1700s novel by Cao Xueqin called The Dream of the Red Chamber. (A translation by David Hawkes and John Minford is called The Story of the Stone.)
Chapter 6 Some attempt to rule us all.
The Persians left us almost no description of their deeds, and neither did Alexander’s army or the Mongols. The Romans, however, tell their story well. Try some of Plutarch’s Lives, Cicero’s letters and speeches, and Suetonius’s racy Lives of the first emperors.
We need a good, short book about the Persian empire. Peter Green’s Alexander the Great (1970) is short and readable, and so is W. W. Tarn’s older book (1948) of the same name. For the Mongols, Leo De Hartog, Genghis Khan: Conqueror of the World (1989) is up to date, but Michel Hoang’s first-rate Genghis Khan (trans. Ingrid Cranfield, 1990) is a better read. One of the most famous histories ever written is Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). It is very old, very fine, and six volumes long.
Chapter 7 We found the worldwide faiths.
To get to know the “book” religions one must read the books. For Hinduism, one of these is an ancient tale of feuding gods and men, the Mahabharata (mah-ha-BA-rata). William Buck’s very free version of this epic is splendid. The Dhammapada is a brief anthology of sprightly Buddhist teachings. For Christianity, you should read some of the New Testament. I suggest the Gospel of Luke and Paul’s letter to the Christian community at Rome. For Islam, read the earliest-written chapters of the Qur’an, which usually appear at the end.
These are good introductions: A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (3rd. ed., rev., 1968); Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels (1977); Edith Hamilton, Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters (1948), which is good despite its piety; Maxime Rodinson, Muhammad (trans. Anne Carter, 1971); and Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (1992).
Chapter 8 Europe prepares for its big role.
Two famous epic poems reveal medieval customs and ideas. The Song of Roland (c. 1100) tells how a fictitious rearguard of French knights gave their lives to block a Muslim army, and Dante’s Divine Comedy (c. 1310–14) is a tour of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. (Hell is best.) Machiavelli’s The Prince and More’s Utopia are short and winning. Despite its dreary title, Pursuit of Power: Venetian Ambassadors’ Reports on Spain, Turkey, and France in the Age of Philip II, 1560–1600 (1970) nicely shows how men of power saw their time. (The author of The Human Story chose the reports and translated them.)
Desmond Seward, The Hundred Years War: The English in France, 1337–1453 (1978) is brief and clear. The first half of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (1975), offers haunting glimpses of the lives of real people in a mountain village caught up in a nightmare. The mini-lives in Eileen Power’s Medieval People (1924) are more cheerful. John Man describes the invention of the printed book in Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words (2002).
Chapter 9 We find each other.
Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance (1962), by Boies Penrose, tells its story well. J. H. Parry’s The Discovery of the Sea (1974) is dryer, yet engaging. Samuel Eliot Morison fitted and sailed a ship like one of Columbus’s before writing his Admiral of the Ocean Sea (2 vols., 1941) about Columbus. It won a Pulitzer Prize. (A short abridgment is called Christopher Columbus, Mariner.)
William Manchester writes readably but not always reliably about Magellan and his times in A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance Portrait of an Age (1992). Alan Moorehead tells about Cook’s voyages in The Fatal Impact: An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific (1767–1840) (1966), and so does Alan J. Villiers in Captain James Cook (1967).
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (1983) deals not only with Columbus et al. but also with “mankind’s need to know” all kinds of things. The book is long but interesting, and its notes on other books are useful.
Chapter 10 The New World falls to the Old one.
Frances Gillmor, The King Dances in the Marketplace (1964), tells about the cruel and austere grandfather of the last Aztec emperor, who had the same name. Perhaps the best account of Cortés’s conquest was written by one of the Spanish soldiers who took part in it, Bernal Díaz del Castillo. His The Conquest of New Spain is full of blood, sweat, and wonder. For Pizarro and Peru perhaps the best thing is Birney Hoffman, Brothers of Doom: The Story of the Pizarros of Peru (1942), which is a much shorter retelling of William H. Prescott’s classic History of the Conquest of Peru (1847).
Alfred W. Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972) manages to be short and readable and also a major contribution to our understanding of world history.
Chapter 11 We suffer famine, war, and plague.
Most books on population history were written by experts for other experts, but E. A. Wrigley’s Population and History (1969) is an engaging introduction. The opening chapters of Thomas Malthus’s famous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798, but easily found) are gloomy but stimulating; they have influenced many people.
Many readable books deal with medicine, disease, and history. Disease and History happens to be the title of a short and anecdotal book by Frederick F. Cartright (1972). Hans Zinsser’s Rats, Lice and History (1934) is bright and zany. W. H. Lewis, The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV (1953), deals pungently with many things, including dirt and doctors.
Chapter 12 We learn who we are and where we live.
The Sleepwalkers (1959), by Arthur Koestler, nicely covers the whole story of the Copernican revolution, though Kepler is Koestler’s hero. (The abridged version is The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler.) Sun, Stand Thou Still (1947), by Angus Armitage, is a short life of Copernicus. Dava Sobel pictures Galileo, his findings, and his conflict with the Church in Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir, of Science, Faith, and Love (1999), using letters from Galileo’s daughter, a cloistered nun. Michael White writes simply (which isn’t easy in this case) about Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (1997.)
Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959) is among the best of many Darwin biographies. Darwin and the Beagle (1969), by the always winning historical writer Alan Moorehead, is short and nicely illustrated.
Chapter 13 Here and there, the people rule.
Robert R. Palmer’s The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, vol. I (1959) is first-rate on the French and U.S. revolutions and the launching of democracy. Despite its silly title, Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May to September 1787 (1966) is sensible and readable. A good book on slavery in the United States is John Blassingame’s well-illustrated The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1979).
Georges Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution (trans. Robert R. Palmer, 1949) is short and taut, while Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989) is long and anecdotal. Irene Nicholson’s The Liberators: a Study of Independence Movements in Spanish America (1968) concentrates on “thoughts and emotions.”
Chapter 14 We make more and live better.
For the big picture, nothing is so clear and readable as Robert L. Heilbroner’s short The Making of Economic Society (1962). The early chapters of Industry and Empire (From 1750 to the Present), by Eric J. Hobsbawm (1968), are good on England’s industrial revolution. Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons: the Great American Capitalists (1934) recounts with verve their deeds and misdeeds. The second and third volumes of Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Americans (1965, 1974) have readable chapters on economic life. James C. Davis’s Rise from Want: A Peasant Family in the Machine Age (1986) tells how industrialization changed lives in what is now northeast Italy.
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br /> Chapter 15 The richer countries grab the poorer.
Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (1974), by James Morris, is the first of three impressionistic volumes on the British Empire. The Reason Why (1953), by Cecil Woodham-Smith (a woman), is a short and perfect book about two English brothers-in-law, both of them noblemen and generals, whose stupidity led to the disastrous “charge of the Light Brigade” in a war between imperial powers.
The Scramble for Africa 1876–1912 (1991), a long book by Thomas Pakenham, tells the stories of a crowd of vivid people. In King Leopold’s Ghost (1998), Adam Hochschild tells the story of the Belgian ruler’s exploitation of the Congo. The middle third of Edwin O. Reischauer’s Japan: The Story of a Nation (4th ed., 1990) is useful on Japanese empire building, as is Ian Buruma’s brief Inventing Japan, 1853–1964 (2003).
Chapter 16 We mutiply, and shrink the earth.
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