As a caveat, I should mention that I don't think that all events for all time are shaped by advances in knowledge. I don't think this model necessarily extrapolates to the 22nd century. I think it works for the 20th and 21st centuries and make no claims beyond that. The more general model, however, I believe does work across centuries. The more general model is to determine the majors shaping forces for a given period of time and see how those forces mutate (practically and philosophically) from one century to the next. O.K. Enough said about methodology, for now.
There are several reasons for believing that biological sciences are moving to the foreground. Recent health care legislation initiatives are a reaction to skyrocketing medical costs. But the abundant money that has been pouring into the medical industry has also funded many impressive achievements in medical science and technology. From government funding of medical research to private funding of pharmaceutical companies, money has been pouring into research in the biological sciences. We have already learned a great deal. We know vastly more about diet and health. We know how to cure or combat most diseases that would have been deadly in the 19th century. In just the last decade our understanding of the chemistry of mental illness has grown enormously. Even though these things have occurred, their impacts have not yet been absorbed by society. But the most startling and influential advances haven't happened but will shortly. The human genome project is mapping the human DNA molecule. The ability to represent this extraordinarily complex molecule in a computer has enormous implications for research. Instead of doing experiments, simulations can be run. If a researcher wants to find the cause of a disease a search of the molecule can be made for likely candidates. If we can sort out the functions of the various components of the molecule it may be possible to overcome birth defects or regenerate lost or faulty body parts. Another area of research that will have incomprehensible impact is research in the aging process. Already researchers believe that they have some insight into how the process actually works. Clearly being able to slow down and even halt the aging process has implications unprecedented in history. If you go to the graveyard at Harper's Ferry and look at the headstones you'll see that most people at that time died by age thirty five or forty. If you could have told them that just two hundred years into the future people would be routinely living into their nineties they probably would scoff. Yet, the average person today, who makes it to fifty, has a good chance of making it to ninety. Those improvements are largely due to improved diet and health care. When aging research is added, it is quite possible that the average life span will extent to one hundred and fifty or even two hundred years. Some speculate that immortality is possible once the mechanism is fully understood. But without getting to speculative it is quite likely that I may be around in the year 2099 to justify these predictions.
Another important vein of research in the biological sciences is in genetic engineering. This covers a range of topics from cloning, to the creation of genetically engineering food sources. While most people marveled at the special effects in the movie Jurassic Park, the focus of the book, as noted by Crichton in the introduction, was to explore the ethics of biotechnology. The ethical issues we must face as a result of advances in biotechnology dwarf current issues in computer ethics. Do we keep on repairing the people we have or do we make new ones? Can we make people for spare parts? What happens to our sense of identity and individuality when we can have multiple copies of each person. There are also significant social implications. In a democracy, does each copy of a clone base get a vote or should their be just one vote per set? If life spans extend, most of our lives will be spent in post-hormonal years. Is this good since their will be less aggression or is it bad because their will be less drive? The social and ethical issues that arise will be of an entirely different kind, than the social and ethical issues of the twentieth century and these questions will shape the prevailing philosophy of the twenty first century. That prevailing philosophy will in turn determine the character of the next century.
