Silver’s Remaking Eden and the Silver Screen Essay -- Lee M. Silver

faciles Remaking Eden and the Silver riddleIn Remaking Eden, Lee M. Silver asks three central questions Who controls life? Whatcounts as life? And what will human life look like in the future? The question Silver does not ask iswhether or not human life as we now know and define it will change. Silver sees the advance of contractable engineering as inevitable, due to consumer demand for it as a technology and the unrelentingcuriosity of scientists. Power resides in science, according to Silver, and that tycoon is enormous.In the closing chapter to Remaking Eden, entitled Tomorrows Children, he recounts how a singleeccentric scientist named Kary Mullis obliterated all preconceived notions of scientificlimitations with his origination of the Polymerase Chain Reaction or PCR (240). As Silver describesitMore than any other technique invented during the twentieth century, PCR has changedthe course of the biological and medical sciences. In step-up to the enormous powerthat it added t o gene discovery and analysis . . . PCR has made it possible to obtain rapidgenetic profiles not only on humans and other animals and plants as well, with anenormous impact on both agriculture and environmental science. PCR has also had anenormous impact on forensics with its power to provide genetic profiles on even singlehairs left behind at the scene of a crime. And PCR has provided us with the ability tolook back into the past, to demonstrate that skeletons found bury in an isolatedSiberian town really did belong to the last Russian Czar and his family, and much furtherback to derive genetic profiles on insects and plants that have been extinct for millionsof years emphases added. (241)For all his sc... ...st 2005.Kakmi, Dmetri. The Mystery of Being in Gattaca. Australian Screen Education 35 (2004) 88-90.Communications and Mass Media Complete. EBSCO Databases DuBois Library, UMassAmherst. 12 marvelous 2005.Lemonick, Michael D. Cloning Classics. Time 8 Nov. 1993 70. Expanded Academic ASAP. InfoTrac.DuBois Library, UMass Amherst. 12 August 2005 .Silver, Lee M. Remaking Eden How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will modify the AmericanFamily. 1997. New York Perennial-Harper, 2002.Vergano, Dan, and Susan Wloszczyna. Genetics Take Starring Role on Silver Screen. USA Today17 June 2002. 12 August 2005 genetics-movies.htm.